It's not a big deal with fiction, but for non-fiction books that I might want to reference in the future, it would be handy to keep them on the device, but not have them mixed up with stuff I've already read.
Currently I just put books I haven't read yet on my T1. I simply give each book I've read a rating in calibre, sort the books by rating, then select all the unrated ones and send them to the device. Not quite as elegant as the way you do it, but it works well enough.
It seems like it would be relatively easy to have calibre check a column for each book, and if it's true, assign that book to a different collection rather than the one it would default to. But calibre's customization possibilities appear rather vast, which is a great thing, but it's easy for me to get lost in all the technical stuff.
I did figure out a solution for issue 1, though
