Kobo Question: Organizing My Books

[somfmagttl]

Currently, I use Apple's iBooks app and the desktop version of Kindle on my laptop. My books are organized into "collections" by general subject areas, e.g. History, Biography, Politics, etc. I'm considering buying a dedicated device for reading my e-books. One feature that is important to me is having the ability to easily change the order of my various book categories or collections. It's easy in iBooks, but not so easy in Kindle. Question: How easy is this to do on the Kobo devices?

Thanks very much for any replies.

[PeterT]

If you use calibre extremely easy. Every time you attach the eReader to your computer, calibre will update the collections books are in to reflect how they are classified in calibre

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

[somfmagttl]

I not entirely sure if my question was clear since I'm not familiar with the Kobo software. My question had to do with organizing (and re-organizing) the order in which the collections are listed (e.g., alphabetically or in some other fashion), not the sorting/updating of individual books within collections.

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by somfmagttl

One feature that is important to me is having the ability to easily change the order of my various book categories or collections. It's easy in iBooks, but not so easy in Kindle. Question: How easy is this to do on the Kobo devices?

If you store all your books in Calibre and manage your Collections there (via Tags or some other custom column(s)) it is trivial to transfer Collections from Calibre to a Kobo device. It all happens during Calibre's send-to-device via USB process. If you decide, at a later date, to change any/all your calibre Collections you can rearrange the Collections on the Kobo simply by re-connecting the Kobo to Calibre and waiting for the magic to happen automatically.

Once the Collections have been transferred you can sort the list of Collections on the Kobo by Name or by Number of Books or by Date Created.

If you select a single Collection you can sort the book list by:

• Recent
• Date added
• Title
• Author
• Series
• File size
• File type

In case it's of interest, transferring the following Calibre metadata to a Kobo is also trivial:

• Cover image (will be used as a thumbnail in the Kobo GUI and as a screensaver when the Kobo is in standby mode)
• Series name & number
• Comments
• Publisher
• Language

With a little extra effort you can use Calibre's Metadata Plugboard feature and the Kobo Utilities plugin to transfer any other useful custom data of your choice. For example, I also transfer Page and Word counts.

[oren64]

The order of collections can be sort by:
Collection name (alphabetically).
Number of books.
Date created.