[jesscat]

Originally Posted by meme

@jesscat - A separate custom column for collections would definitely be cleaner than tags. Your post is a great explanation of why and how to do this

Thanks! Yes, this works well for me. Actually, I had already created a column called "Collections" not too long before before you developed this plug-in - I just attempted to maintain it manually (I even posted in the forum asking Kovid if there was any way to make a column in the Calibre library view that used info from the device view, so I could at least see the collection in the library view, but there isn't). It was a pain to do that, but I really wanted to be able to see my collections in the library view even if I couldn't manage them.

So when the plug-in appeared, it was easy for me to just continue using that column. And again, I don't use collections for things like genre or author, so this is a better solution for me - I have only about six collections, and while a few of them are in fact also Calibre tags, my tag list is hundreds long, so it would be laborious to customize the plug-in using tags. Plus I wouldn't be able nearly as easily to see which collections a book is in.

Possibly you might consider adding this to the suggested custom columns in the first post. The one thing I screwed up was that when I first created the column I made it "Text" rather than "Comma separated text, like tags." When I just maintained it manually it didn't matter, but for the plug-in, to assign a book to more than one collection you need the latter (at least I assume so?). So I had to make a new column and copy the contents over.

But - I wouldn't have had to do that if there were an "import collections name into [custom] column. That is a *fabulous* idea!!

Originally Posted by meme

The plugin should not cause the collections listed against the book to disappear. The format it writes the collections out in is the same as the Kindle so it should be readable. However, if you can identify something specific there's always the possibility that something needs to be fixed.

Hmm. I don't know why this has happened then. Very few of my books are Amazon purchased, and even those I tend to de-DRM (just for my own use, but to avoid issues like the one you mention). Still, the "collections" column in my device view is now entirely empty, while it used to show my collections (that's how I manually maintained my library column before the plug-in). I don't believe the change occurred right when I first installed the plug-in (which was one of the early versions, possibly the second or third), but I don't know exactly when.

Any thoughts about how I could go about debugging this?