This is a literary treasure. This is, allowing for multiple-file volumes and duplicates, equivalent to the holdings of a decent-sized branch of a public library. This is contained, not in a large building, but in a corner of one of my hard drives. This is accessible to me from any computer in my home, and I can easily copy volumes to take with me when I'm away. This is something the scribes of Alexandria would drool over.
This is a royal bitch to manage.
There is no consistent naming system. There are at least six major file formats, some proprietary. There are few catalog numbers, either Dewey or LOC. The only really good news is that these files tend to arrive in some arbitrary organization that I can, with time and effort, translate into my own standard (non-fiction in Dewey; fiction alphabetically by author, title).
Electronic books don't take up space, but neither do they have covers or spines, which makes browsing painful. Fortunately, I can use my file server's search engine to find what I'm after, but the serendipity of scanning the stacks is lost.
I have a vision of the whole works in SQL Server BLOBs attached to metadata (extracted from the filenames and file contents by a series of clever scripts). With a nice front-end, it could be a worthy contender to a good, old-fashioned, bricks-and-mortar library...
...not that I have time to write any such thing.
One more project for the pile.
