I have too many ebooks. I want to be clear about this upfront so you understand the scale of the problem before I describe how I made it worse.

The number is not important. What is important is that I recently switched from Calibre to Booklore, and in the process of migrating my library I have spent — and I am being generous with myself here — approximately ten times more hours fiddling with metadata than actually reading any of the books the metadata describes. I have organized books I forgot I owned. I have tagged books I have never opened. I have corrected series order for trilogies I will statistically never finish. This is my love story, and it is not about books. It is about the data around books.

It started, as these things always do, with Docker.

I was already deep in the NAS rabbit hole. You know how it goes. You set up one container and suddenly you’re running fourteen services and comparing reverse proxy configurations at midnight. Somewhere in that spiral I found Booklore, and it was like finding out the library you’ve been shoving books into has a back room with a card catalog system designed by someone who actually gives a damn.

Calibre served me well. I don’t want to talk badly about Calibre. Calibre is the ex you still respect but could never go back to because you’ve seen what else is out there. Booklore is the one that makes you want to sit down and properly tag your entire romance collection by spice level, and friends, that is exactly what I did.

Spice level. I have a spice level metadata field. I sat there and thought about how spicy each book was and assigned it a number. For books I have not read yet. Based on Goodreads reviews. I am not okay and I am not sorry.

The genres alone took an entire evening. Because here’s the thing about genres — they’re lies. Every book is at least three genres and the person who tagged it on whatever metadata service you’re pulling from had a completely different understanding of what “dark romance” means than you do. So you fix it. And then you fix the next one. And then it’s 1am and you’re debating with yourself whether a book counts as “romantasy” or “fantasy romance” and the answer matters to absolutely nobody except you and your beautiful, beautiful tag cloud.

Series order is its own special hell. You would think that in the year 2026 we could agree on what order books go in. You would be wrong. Every metadata provider has a different opinion about whether the prequel novella is book 0.5 or book 0 or should be filed under a completely separate series entry. I have opinions about this now. Strong ones.

And the waiting. God, the waiting. Booklore needs to refresh metadata and I am sitting there watching it like a microwave countdown except instead of Hot Pockets it’s cover art for a cozy mystery I bought on sale three years ago. I am too impatient for this. I know it takes time. I do not care that it takes time. I want my metadata and I want it now, like a toddler who has been told dinner is in five minutes.

The covers are the worst part. Or the best part. The line is blurry. Because you’ll be scrolling through your library and there’s that one book with the wrong cover — maybe it’s the UK edition, maybe it’s a thumbnail from 2014 that looks like it was photographed with a potato — and you cannot just leave it there. You have to find the right one. The high resolution one. The one that matches the edition you actually own. Even though you own it digitally and the cover is purely decorative and nobody will ever see your library except you.

I think this is what love looks like for people whose brains work like mine. I love books. I genuinely do. I love the promise of them, the collecting of them, the organizing of them into systems that make sense to my specific brain. The reading is almost secondary. The reading will happen — probably during the next ADHD hyperfocus cycle — and when it does, my library will be ready. Every tag in place. Every series in order. Every spice level accurately assessed.

In the meantime, my metadata is immaculate. And I think that counts for something.