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Ordering Game Material on the PC

Yeah, I do the folder thing too. I made a pdf adventure folder, and a pdf game resources folder. When I open the zipped file I save the unzipped file to one of these folders. Of course that means i open the zipped file right after i download it. My downloads are saved to my downloads file until i unzip them. Actually most are still there. So I have zipped and unzipped versions of most of my pdf purchases.
 

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When I purchase .pdfs I often rename them, and I tend to keep them all in one single folder. XRP0001 just doesn't do much for me in the way of names, so I give it a more proper name.
 

Estlor said:
Call me low-tech, but what I do is collect them all in the same folder until I have enough similar ones to burn on a CD. I label the CD with the names of the books on that CD, and make a simple text file that has filename - book name in it.

It would be rather simple to make a basic database in Access to hold the information. If everything has an ISBN you could use that as your linkable key number for normalization purposes. You could have a publisher table with each one having a self-assigned pubid, then a book table with ISBN as your key, the filename, the book name, and the pubid. This assumes you're going to do something else with publisher (e.g. have a table of pubids and websites if applicable), otherwise you could just put the publisher information directly in the table, skip Access, and make it a spreadsheet in Excel.

Basically, don't go the database route unless you want to add additional value to the data you're collecting. If you just want a roster of filenames and book names and where they are on your hard drive, use a spreadsheet. But if you're tracking all your RPG purchases, publisher information, designer information, and so on, take the time to make a proper database.

Your low tech approach isn't sufficient for me - even all books combined won't outrun two CD, so I would waste much CD space. The folder approach generates too much effort for my need of structure (a lot of folders) - unless I know the structure, I will end with reshuffling the files. While an excel table may be sufficient for the first time, I lkie to be abel to do some queries on the table - doing this in excel may be possible, but I'm already familiar with SQL. This is also an argument against Access (next to the criterium, that it doesn't run under Linux and I want a native database, too), because I didn't use it over two years, so I would need extra time.

Regarding your advice of structuring the table: I don't think, that the PDFs have ISBN numbers, and if I want to include pointers to other material, which isn't going to have ever a ISBN number, then I have a problem. Maybe a combined key will be sufficient for identifying - what do you think?
 



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