How to Organize a Collection Many collections already exist but most are poorly organized. For example there is a collect of Hugo winning science fiction on the P2P network. Very nice, but each year is packed in a .rar file (a type of file compression similar to .zip files.) On extracting the contents you find that each winner and nominee is also in a .rar file within which, you guessed it, the actual book or short story is in a .rar or .zip file. To actually be able to browse the collect requires several hours of tedious work to unpack everything. Everyone downloading the collection, then, is burdened with the task of unpacking rars within rars within rars for absolutely no reason whatsoever. Since most ebook formats are compress, there is little gain by recompressing them. As another example of poor organization, there are several very large and many smaller collections of science fiction and fantasy books on the P2P networks. No one collection includes all (or even most) of the available books. The largest collection is, unbelievably, organized by the first name of the author—all books are put in a folder by author (good), but using first name first (bad). To combine this collection with the other collections (with author folders by last name) required first renaming 1400 or so folders (several hours), then combining all available works by each author from the available collections and eliminating duplicates (many more hours). The most avid collector has uploaded 15 updates (good) totaling thousands of additional books (nice), but each are contained in one folder by first name (bad). To add the new files to his original collection requires everyone who downloads the updates to spend hours of tedious drag and drop when the collector could have easily offered the updates in such a way as to allow everyone to update their copy with a single drag and drop. Virtually all current collectors seem to give no thought to how they organize their collection or how to go about updating them. This site seeks to change this. A forum exists to discuss how-to issues. For example, to update a collection you created, make a copy of the collection, do a search for all files, sort by type, and delete all files leaving only the folders. You now have empty folders matching your original collection. As you find additions, add them to an existing folder or create a new one. If you discover one of the files is corrupt and you can't find a good copy, create a 0 byte file of the same name in the same folder. When you upload your update, all someone needs to do is drag and drop the entire update on their collection—existing files will be replaced and new files and folders added. There is a torrent for a Project Gutenberg DVD with 17,500 books on it. There are actually at least two copies of each book, so a DVD could hold 35,000 books. Unfortunately this collection, while accessible, is not browsible since every book is in a zip file and needs to be unzipped first once you manage to navigate to it. What someone needs to do is acquire all the books (one of each), name them, put them into author folders, then zip the entire collection. There is an option to create a custom .iso, but I haven't got it to fully work yet. The other 10,000 books not on the DVD version could be added and all would still easily fit on a DVD. The Gutenberg books are mostly plain text files that are fixed in format, in a fixed space Courier font, and generally painful to read. It is actually not difficult to batch convert .txt files into an ebook friendly format. One person could do it all, but several working cooperatively could get it done by sharing the pain and accomplishment. Hopefully this site will allow volunteers to connect and organize.