How to manage collections for Sony PRS-950

[Leyor]

Hiya guys,

I just got my Sony PRS-950 and I'm trying to get my library organized.
I have around 800 books atm. They all have various tags. I'm naturally using Calibre.

I prefer to have my books grouped by authors, and since there's no folders on the sony, I think the best way would be to have collections sorted by authors.

So it seems to me that I have to do the following tasks:

1. Convert my tags to the authors name
2. Have the sony plug-in base the collections on the tags.

I tried to read the walkthroughs and wiki's, both here and calibre on expressions. I blacked out, once I woke up I realized that I'm nowhere as smart as I thought I was I've used the search function, but seems all the posts are done by people with a rudimentary understanding of this, that I just can't figure out from the walkthroughs.

I was wondering if anyone could be helpful and tell me the exact commands to use in the find and replace that allows me to replace the tags with the authors name.

And the command line to set in the sony device plugin to base collections on authors?

Thank you very much.

[itimpi]

If you simply want the books by author, then I would not bother with Collections. Sorting the books by Author with an option to fast-jump to authors starting with a particular letter is a standard feature of the PRS-950.

Having said that I would strongly recommend having Collections based on Series enabled as that means that you will see books in the correct order within such a collection on the Sony.

Whether you also want collections based on tags tends to depend on whether you have restricted their proliferation within Calibre. if they represent Genre, then they can be useful to use as collections, while if you simply let Calibre download them from the Internet you probably have too many for them to be useful as collections.

[Leyor]

My tags arent useful at the moment, I just let Calibre download them from the internet. That's also one of the reason I really want to do a bulk search and replace.

What I really want is a way to get an easy overview, basically having the authors being collections emulate folders with each authors books in them.

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by Leyor

My tags arent useful at the moment, I just let Calibre download them from the internet. That's also one of the reason I really want to do a bulk search and replace.

What I really want is a way to get an easy overview, basically having the authors being collections emulate folders with each authors books in them.

If you want to create Sony Collections by author, I believe all you need to do is:

1. go to Preferences - Sending books to device. In the box labelled Metadata management set it to Automatic management
2. go to Preferences - Plugins - Device Interface - Sony - Customize. Then find the box with a long label starting 'Comma separated list of metadata...'. The default is series, tags (I think), set it to authors
3. Connect your device to Calibre, let it do its stuff then disconnect. All the Collections should be there.

By the way, Calibre also has other goodies specific to auto-managing Sony devices, e.g. thumbnails, title renaming

[Leyor]

Thanks a bunch, will try that out now

[Leyor]

Thank you, that was 1 billion times easier than I thought

Now to find some of the other goodies

Btw. does automatic management means all changes I made are synched with my device through calibre? Or only when I delete and send my books again?

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by Leyor

Btw. does automatic management means all changes I made are synched with my device through calibre? Or only when I delete and send my books again?

I don't have a simple answer to what is and isn't automatically synched just by connecting. First you should read the descriptions attached to the Automatic Management setting and it's alternatives.

What I can say is:

• your Collections will be automatically synched just by connecting.
• if you set up a Metadata Plugboard for your Sony (using the device_db:PRS505 option) then this is automatically synched. This is the title-renaming goody I referred to.
• the cover inside an epub is not automatically synched just by connecting. This cover may possibly be updated simply by resending, but not necessarily - it depends on the particular epub. If it doesn't update you will need to do an epub-to-epub conversion to get a new cover actually inside the epub.
• Thumbnails can be automatically synched just by connecting, but only if you check the relevant boxes in the Preferences Sony Device Interface plugin to which I referred you in my earlier post. If you check the 'Upload separate cover thumbnails...' box then Calibre will create the thumbnails on the Sony when you send-to-device the books (epub, pdf, rtf, txt, both DRM and non-DRM). You need to also check the 'Refresh separate covers...' box if you want the thumbnails to be automatically refreshed every time you connect. It's possible that this second option may be slow if you have a lot of books on the device. You would need to experiment. If you don't check either of these 2 boxes, the Sony will extract a thumbnail from the book itself when you first send each book - in my opinion, this is usually unsatisfactory.

Is this enough to be going on with?

[Leyor]

Thanks for the help,

There's alot to start with, very much appreciated