I love Calibre. Instead of fancy apps, we need more software like this: ugly as hell, complicated, confusing, but unbelievably powerful, customizable, and versatile. And Open Source.

Okay, maybe it doesn’t need to be ugly and confusing (Calibre has a lot of margin for improvements on this front), but the point stands: I love Calibre because I can use it for anything I can dream of. Sometimes I think, “wouldn’t be cool if Calibre could do XYZ?” only to discover that there is already a feature for that.

Curating my digital library is one of the thing that gives me more joy. But the other day I felt something was missing: my physical books.

When it is possible, I try to get the ebook version of every physical book I have. I do this for completeness, but also because it is easier to link notes to their context and, of course, I have the ability of full-text search.

Sometimes, though, there is no ebook, and this leaves a hole in my catalogue. It also messes my “reading goal” trackers (I also use Obsidian for that, but this is another story), my queries, etc.

So, some time ago, I was looking for a software to catalogue my physical books and thought that it would be cool if there was a software like Calibre.

And then the light went on: why don’t I use Calibre for physical books?

Of course, as usual, I discovered that this is a valid use case. Nothing is blocking you from creating a book in Calibre with no ebook attached.

Like many other features in Calibre, it is not easy to find. Therefore, let me explain my process for tracking physical books using Calibre.

1. Create an Empty Book

There are two options here: 1) use the “Create Empty Book” functionality, or 2) add a book via ISBN.

The ISBN route is usually the best one. Calibre will ask you to download the metadata for the book and you will get automatically a book entry with all the data (title, author, cover, and so on) just like if you imported an ebook.

If you cannot find the ISBN, or your book doesn’t have one, you can fallback to adding an empty book and fill the data yourself.

2. Add a .pbook file

At this point, the entry contains no format. After all, there is no format: it is a physical book.

However, I have a better solution. First, I create a .pbook file in a text editor (e.g., SherlockHolmes.pbook).

The file can be empty, but I take the occasion to add some extra information about the physical book. For example, my .pbook files are like this:

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[metadata]
title="Sherlock Holmes"
author="Arthur Conan Doyle"
pages=226
location="Living Room - Black Bookcase"

I used TOML syntax to add informations such as where I stored the book, the number of pages, and so on. If you decide to lend the book, you have the option to make notes about the date and the person you lent it to. It doesn’t really matter, nobody is reading this file other than you, so you can add whatever you want. I used the TOML syntax only because I may (may) make some script to collect the info in my .pbook files, but you don’t have to: you could use just plaintext.

Once you have this file, you can add it to Calibre. Open the metadata editor for your physical book and click on the “Add format to this book” button (the actual icon may change depending on your Calibre’s theme). Then, go find your .pbook file and select it.

There are three major advantages to this system. First, as I showed before, you can add extra data to your physical book. Second, you can differentiate between a book you only have as ebook and a book you have as ebook and physical format. Third, you can use the sidebar to filter all your physical books.

Conclusions

That’s it! Two easy steps that allow me to track all my physical books with my ebooks. All in the same software.

I hope you may find this idea as useful as I did!