Quote:
Originally Posted by DaleDe
None is a pretty all inclusive term. The Hanlin models have a simple directory structure that works perfectly fine for lots of books. Implementing a simple Unix file system works fine so long as the reader doesn't try to traverse it and make a collection from the various folders.
Dale
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I maintain: none. I have a PEZ, which supports folders; it works fine for a few hundred books. It does not work well for a few thousand, much less an entire large library.
A 2gb card can easily hold 3,000 novel-length ebooks... or five times that many short stories. A library at your fingertips... viewable 8-10 titles at a time. EReaders don't even have the elegance of Windows Explorer, with filenames in a neat list & resorted by date or filetype with a single click.
If you put the entire Baen CD collection of ebooks on an ereader--limited to a single format of choice--how would they be sorted? Folder per CD, so you wade through a couple-dozen folders, trying to remember which CD name corresponds to which series? How are the ebooks organized inside the folders--is it easy to note sub-series, or are they all in filename order, or renumbered in chrono order, or release-date order?
If a person also wants a collection of fanfiction related to some of those books (the Vorkosigan Saga has inspired several excellent novel-length stories), where should those be placed; how can the nav system identify them as related-to-these-other-books?
These aren't insurmountable problems; we all manage to find something that works for us. But computer nav systems don't have the versatility of physical shelves--there's no "stack these on the shelf right below those, so they're visible but obviously separate"; there's no "place a bit of cardboard between these two books to identify different series."
Currently, ebook readers are designed well for reading, not for storage and archiving. While memory capacities have increased, the navigation software hasn't kept pace. It's especially troublesome for readers of short stories; it's easy to quickly wind up with several dozen tiny files cluttering up the folder structure.