System to manage a collection of ebooks

Question

I have lots of PDF books scattered among multiple directories. I would love to have some software that makes me able to search for a specific book. Ideally, I would have the possibility to associate to each book the authors (multiple of them), a title, a year, multiple tags, and afterwards, to search by any field (e.g. all books written by an author, or books that have a specific tags, or books written between two years, etc.)

In my case, this is for scientific books, but I'm pretty sure such a software would work great for non-scientific books too.

Notice that I'm not always dealing with, strictly speaking, published books: I may want, for example, to include in the database some notes written by a professor, which have no ISBN or such.

I am on Linux (Xubuntu 20.04), bonus points for FOSS software.

Answer 1

Check out calibre.

Calibre allows for an advanced search for (not limited to) Title, Author(s), Date, Size (MB), Tags, Series, Publisher, Published, and more.

https://calibre-ebook.com/

Answer 2

Expanding on my comment above, what I mean is you can use a search engine that can index your whole file system and then search for content.

An example of generic search engine I have used in the past is Sphinx Search. It has various plugins for different interfaces. There are others like Apache Solr, Elasticsearch, etc. They all require you to invest some time to undertsand how they work, and getting an interface e.g. a simple web page? If you are considering this route, I suggest also looking at github, as there may be new simpler search engines for Linux.

But to have a more structured search, you need a system like Calibre already suggested by others to import the pdfs...

edit: On Windows 10 for instance, you can index the whole file system by changing settings to also index file contents, under “Indexing Options”. Then you can use the “File Manager” search box to search for any text of interest. I can't remember is something similar exists on Linux, apart from using "find" and "grep" from the command-line.

Answer 3

If don't mind using a command-line tool for the searching and invoking of your program, you can try Ki:

https://github.com/kumoshk/ki

You'll have to configure Ki to open .pdf files with the program of your choice, however (use ki -p for prompts about it). The program need not be a command-line one, of course.

I mostly use Ki for creative writing on the command-line where there are lots of files within a complex directory structure (using Nano or Less to edit/read them), but you could use it for finding and opening PDFs.

There might be some bugs in the ki -u (when used to install it for the local user or system-wide); so, installing to your path manually might be better.