Quote:
Originally Posted by theonna
But... If Kobo had made shelves more easily created- like being able to search for author and add all results to the shelf, search for title and add to another shelf, find all items not in any shelf and add them yet to another.
|
Creating shelves on a Kobo is definitely an issue, especially for larger libraries. Some of your ideas are good ones, though it would probably be better to have them as saved searches that are updated when you update your library. (I think iTunes does this, and likely other products.)
Quote:
|
Of course needs of people that read books with different not supported alphabets, seem to be so unimportant, that nobody so far even considered how having a file manager in lieu of being able to search for books would help them.
|
I'm confused. Wouldn't this depend more upon the input method than database vs. file manager?
Quote:
|
Now I hear again and again, how having a file manager would increase user error
|
When I say such things, I mean that a file manager would make it much more difficult to keep data synchronized. Keep in mind, reader software probably reads a book once to retrieve the relevant metadata (title, author, cover, etc.) and stores that data somewhere else. In Kobo's case, that's a database. Now a file manager would either have to update that data itself or force the system to update the data upon exit, otherwise inconsistencies will pop up. There is also a chance that a user will modify/remove a file that they shouldn't, such as the Kobo database or key for encrypted ePubs.
Quote:
|
Unfortunately with shelves, you find yourself needing them, yet managing them on your reader, if you have significant amount of books is impossible.
|
Shelves have to be created somewhere. For Kobo, that's on the reader or in Calibre. Directories also have to be created somewhere, may that be on the reader or on a computer. Not a huge difference in my opinion. Now directories are easier to create in some respects. Shelves are easier to create in other respects. On the other hand, shelves are much more powerful, since they easily accommodate having a book on multiple shelves. (You can easily do this with links, in Unix parlance, and aliases, using the Mac terminology. But it is a more complex concept. We also have to face the fact that the world runs on Windows, where the use of this idea seems much less common outside of the icons used to launch programs.)
As things stand today, I agree that Kobo does a very poor job at managing large libraries. Assuming that you use shelves, I would argue that anyone browsing through more than a thousand books is going to hate Kobo's software. If you're creating the shelves using Kobo's software, you're probably going to hate them if you're managing more than a hundred books. So yes, there is definite room for improvement. I just don't think that directories are the best way for Kobo to solve the problem. Something like saved searches and making better use of the available metadata, certainly.