Quote:
Originally Posted by theonna
You are correct if you NEED all that metadata to be processed by the reader itself, unfortunately this approach yields extremely long processing times when actually trying to use reader at it's full capacity, some of us have more than a 1000 books in our collections. Also this database is highly susceptible to being corrupted and deleting items takes almost as long as adding them. Nook and Kindle do not have any of this issues.
As far as file manager support- it is the most helpful feature, especially to those of us with large collections, once organized by folders large collection is easily searched, transferred between devices and using it definitely beats a need to create hundreds of collections, especially since Kobo interface only lets you create collections manually and add books also manually one at a time, which is a total no go with a large collection of books. In short- Kobo becomes a nightmare to use for anyone with large collection of books, no matter how wonderful the screen is, if I cant find a book or have to wait for an hour after disconnecting my reader from computer...Which happens if you get close to 2gig of books on your reader, each time you disconnect from computer.
And I am not even touching a problem when you cant find any book, that is written in different language, than the default keyboard allows, even though you can read it just fine. File manager is the easiest solution for this.
Sorry for the long post.
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Sorry but this does not lead to long processing time. When I did a factory reset on my Aura after trying to duplicate a bug involving turning the light on while playing solitaire, it took 6 minutes to process 1600 books (~1.4GB). As for the disconnection time? You only need to process new books. So unless you routinely load 2 gigs of new books every time you connect...
As for creating collections aka shelves? Again, Calibre does an excellent job of that. For the most part, I don't bother. Author, series or book title fragment in search works quite well for locating books. Want to locate a book in the Prince Roger series? rog in the search bar. Care to locate the Belisarius series? beli in the search bar -- actually bel works but also pops up David Edding's Belgariad series. Tap on Belisarius and see all 6 books in the series. Total elapsed time from tapping the search bar on the home page, tapping on library since the search bar on the home page defaults to bookstore, type in 3-4 letters, 1 to 3 taps to select a book was less than 5 seconds.
And I have close to 8 thousand books on my computer, some of which I know I will never read again but why have 5TB of local storage if you can't keep old files around? I use Calibre to manage that collection just ensuring I edit the author name/author sort to allow keeping books together. Considering that the H. Beam Piper books I own have come with H B Piper, H. B. Piper, H. Beam Piper. H Beam Piper and Henry Beam Piper as the author name, Calibre makes it easy to modify the metadata to have all of them as author: H. Beam Piper and author sort as Piper, H. Beam
Deleting items doesn't seem to take all that long to me. But then I only delete one at a time from the Kobo UI. For mass deletions, I generally use Calibre. For really mass deletions, SD Formatter works like a charm.
Searching for a book using the Kobo search bar seems quite speedy. It took less than a second to return
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court when I typed conn in the search bar. Typing in 'webe' to locate books by David Weber returned David Weber as the only search return before I got my finger off the keyboard from typing the 2nd e. Of course, I then had to scroll through the 8 pages of books by David Weber to see all of them.
Had I been looking for a specific book, say
The Apocalypse Troll, typing ap brought that up as the second item on the search list while 'apo' made it one of three choices (
The Apocalypse Troll,
Napoleon the Little and
The Ultimate Weapon).
Going to my computer and trying to find a book in the collection there took longer either boring down through the directory structure or doing a search on the root directory.
As for finding a book in a different language? The only issues I've had were with Cyrillic books. Locating them in the library isn't all that hard since I did go to the trouble of setting the author/author sort and book title in latin characters. Again bulk edits of metadata makes life much easier. Since the Kobo ereader is Linux based, adding more languages should not be that major a task.
As for needing all that metadata? Depends on how you define need. Personally, I find much of it useful and would like to keep that information around. Trivia such as where I am in reading multiple books, font, font size, margin and line spacing selected for the book when I last had it open, when was I last reading that book, etc.
Personally, I tend to feel that a file browser might be handy but compared to a decent search function? I'll take the search function every time..
Regards,
David