How do you manage books?

It's disturbing how little debate their is about Calibre being basically the golden standard for book managers. What's more disturbing is this ``golden standard'' is a bloated, obtuse hodgepodge that refuses not to be my epub reader even if I explicitly tell it not to in its settings pane, even if I explicitly specify that mime-type with Emacs--a setting that other software respects, mind you. Calibre doesn't let you sort by genres, sub-genres, or other subsets except by means of a very specific, hacky, exhausting way — way so exhausting to figure out that you'll make like sour grapes and pretend like categorizing your books by arbitrary criteria in a book manager is simply too unreasonable. Why does it take so long to load? Why does my ebook reader come with a library manager and vice versa? Is it so unreasonable to separate Calibre's blatantly separate pieces of software and keep it all under the umbrella of a suite? Does no one realize how stupid it is that I have to wait ten seconds to read a fucking book?

The counterpoint to all this are the type of people who don't care about metadata at all. They're insane enough that they convert all their pdf's to text files (nevermind artbooks, I guess) and read it all through less. Or they keep their books under some directory — say ~/Documents/Books and cd into that directory whenever they need to and then search for the book they want recursively with Find. This is somewhat reasonable since I just use Emacs, and Helm-find supports fuzzy search. Not an optimal solution but manageable, but it's not efficient. Why is there no middleground? Why do I have to choose between Unix autism and super-omega bloat when the only difference is literally thumbnails? What the hell has this world come to?

1. If you keep books after having read them, you're an autistic shill.
2. If you read enough books that even after having read them, you have so many that you need organizing, you're autistic.