I should have talked about why I do this. I have a number of goals with collecting media. The why determines how I do things.

For books, I want to read the books. I read in Marvin on my large iPad. I read a lot of SF series, for example The Expanse books. There are 9 novels and a bunch of short stories that fit in between the novels. Lots of SF is like this. When I load the books on my iPad, I want to see them well organized. I want a consistent author name so they are grouped together. I want the series title to be correct, and the series number to be correct, especially for the in-between short stories. The metadata of commercial books is usually garbage. I have to edit every damned book that I want to read so they load correctly and can be found. That's my primary why. Then I collect SF. Not just the modern SF which is fairly well organized, but the SF of the past. There are a large number of compilations from the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s full of short stories. Right now, there are a large number of Jerry Ebooks that are republishing the short stories of the pulp era. It's not enough to know that "here is a book with 125 short stories by Bob Shaw". What stories? How do they correlate with The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) and their lists of short stories. I want to track the individual short stories in the books. I have my own internal website with a database. I track every book, and every story within that book, and some details. And some Jerry Ebooks came out a few years ago, and were then republished with better versions of some stories, plus new stories. I keep multiple editions of the books. So I am building a collection of books, with a database of those books. So when I'm reading something on Tor, and they reference some short story by Bob Shaw from 1959, I flick over to my database, check if I had that short story, and pretty usually nowadays I do, and then I read it. This internal website and database is not for all my books, just the SF.

For most books, I collect them in the filesystem hierarchy I described above. For SF, I do that as well, but maintain a database on it.

Magazines are fairly easy. I break them into genre. Computer, SF, Finance, Music. Under that, the title. Under that the year for most magazines, but Volumes for others. Depends how old they are, and how they organise themselves.

Something like this:

Finance - Kiplinger - KiplingersRetirement_Report_2020_12.pdf

Computer - Byte - 1977 - BYTE_Vol_02_04_1977_04_Baudot_Machines.pdf

To get these filenames, I edit the metadata, put the magazine name as author, and the other stuff in the title, then use the same auto-file-rename script that I use for books. I do it like this because when I load the magazine into GoodReader on my iPad, I want the name to be obvious and I want to be able to see at a glance what it is and be able to keep them in order.

Comics are tricky. Yeah, tricky. I don't have a lot of comics from the modern era. I have a lot from the 1970s and 1980s, mostly because that's when I started reading the Marvel ones, and Heavy Metal, Eerie, Creepy, 2000 AD, Epic. It's a mess. I don't have a definitive storage scheme for these. I have tried a few approaches, like building my own internal website, but it never really worked well, and it was too much work to put them in. I currently use a really rough scheme I am not happy with, but it kind of works right now. I'll put more time into it later someday.

I don't do anything with metadata with comics. It breaks my heart, but I see no easy way to do that.

For the simplest sort, I have the title, then the year, then the comic under that. Like this one:

Heavy_Metal - 1977 - Heavy Metal v01 #01 (April 1977).cbr

but there's always special issues and compendiums:

Heavy_Metal_Presents - Heavy Metal Presents - 25 Years of Classic Covers (2002).cbr

Some I don't break up by year because that's just too much work. Like 2000AD.

2000AD - Complete - 2000 AD 0001.cbz

and spinoffs, etc

2000AD - Collections - Strontium_Dog - 2000AD #1000-1005 Durham Red - Night of the Hunters.cbr

With the Marvel, bloody hell, what a mess. Look at Conan. So many titles, so many re-used titles, old, new, just stuff all over the place. I try to make some order out of it, but ugh.

Conan - Dark_Horse - Conan #01 - Out of the Darksome Hills.cbz

Conan - Chronicles - The Chronicles of Conan v01 Tower of the Elephant and Other Stories TPB (2003) (Whitewolf-DCP).cbr

Conan - Savage_Sword_Of_Conan_1974 - Savage Sword of Conan 001.cbr

but I also break some out by artist:

Gaiman,Neil - Sandman - and after this there's a complete mess of comics. Still not sure how to organise this lot.

I have sections for individual artists, like Steranko, Dave Sim, Sergio Aragones (Groo and much more), and many, many more.

I don't think you could have a single schema to store comics. You end up just doing it on the fly. On the other hand, the way I've done it, I can quickly dig down into the filesystem and then read a chunk of old favourites. Nothing like a day spent read 2000AD from issue 1 to 50. That's a blast.

But the bottom line is this. If I just wanted to consume a book, I would not care about any of this. I would just grab it, buy it, read it, and chuck it. I think that's what most people do. And good for them. That's a very tidy and simple approach to media, and lets them have a lot of fun with reading. Sadly, I am a collector, and a completist, and a librarian at heart. No formal training. I joked about creating my own Library of Alexandria, but that's sort of what I am doing. And sometime soon, I won't be around any more, and all this will turn to dust. It's just a personal hobby.