Calibre Booktracking Part 1: Why do this?
TL:DR - This is a navel gazing diatribe on reading and what appeals to me about book tracking (not accounting) websites as well as my gripes with said websites.
How many books do you think you could read if you truly dedicated yourself to reading? where you work to sustain a self image of being a "reader/lover of books?" 100? 500? 20,000? Reading books was something I did in the background as one of those many hobbies you enjoy like playing Call of Duty or eating dogshit pizza from 7/11. Upon getting older though, I've found myself thinking on what I've done and accomplished and how previous choices shape me. Even the smaller choices of what I've read, listened to or watched. Reading forums will have people detailing how their childhoods centered around Harry Potter shaped their eternal love of fantasy or wizards waving phallic pieces of wood at each other. The comparison inspires dread and shame when I reflect on my own brain rotted scrolling on subreddits, 4chan threads and discord side threads where autists with too much time on their hands argue about the dumbest drama you can imagine.
When the shame becomes too much to bear, pivot to something novel to lose yourself in. For me this was storygraph and goodreads as it gave me an opportunity to bring a latent part of my personality to the forefront. Just kidding, I'm just a slut for data visualizations, something freudian about the bar graph aimed towards a wide statistical distribution along a Y and X axis gets me going. I love the sight of knowing I went hard on poetry for the last month when compared to the first few months of the year when I was reading nothing but Batman comics and memoirs in graphic novel form as they're laid out in concrete numbers. Knowing what authors I tend towards helps me understand what subject matters really hits close to home and what I should be on the lookout for in bookstores or when reading book reviews of what may be my next read.
The unfortunate reality is that within me is a very fussy bitch who refuses to settle within the reasonable parameters of the services available, also that fussy bitch is a cheapskate that hates paying subscriptions but don't we all hate subscriptions? There were a million nitpicks I can list out like librarything refusing to let me set my default collection to "books I've read" rather than their pompous suggestion of "Books I own." My urban environment which forces me to move every 2-3 years does not enable that type of hoarding behavior. Or how the forced pastel design of everything on pagebound spurs within me a desire to identify as a cinder block as a form of protest. Or how the book metadata on storygraph was so janky I had to fill whole series of manga with several different translations so volumes 1-4 would be the usual english release but volumes 5-10 were the French version and the only available version of volumes 10-30 were in Portuguese for some fucking reason. No disrespect to the librarians at storygraph, I understand it's a thankless job and for what it's worth they were very receptive to corrections but the updates needed were too wide and I sat for a while with incomplete collections of series I know I read because google books or whatever database they were scraping for metadata didn't have the particular non-western manga I finished.
What's a fussy boy to do, macgyver his own nonsense of course! Calibre was already known for managing collections of ebooks by author, genre, series, language and so on presuming you had these files but a hidden function caught my eye one day. "add an empty book", some digging showed I can essentially create a placeholder for a book that retains all the metadata like the cover, author name, series title, etc.