Hi, I just bought my first Kobo (a Kobo Aura HD) and I'm trying to organize my (sideloaded) books, and specifically series, in a way to easily find them again on the Kobo. These are my experiences up till now, I'm hoping someone can help me get past some of the obstacles and maybe this post will be of some use to other (potential) Kobo users.
Here is what I've done so far:
I've organized my library in Calibre (also first time using that) making sure all the metadata is correct, adding series info etc.
I'm using the Kobo touch extended plugin to send the books to the device as kepubs and to create shelves for series.
I'm using the the Kobo utilities plugin to sort the books in the series shelves by number in the series. (
Two questions about that actually: 1: is there a way to do this automatically? 2: is there a way to always sort by series index first, then title, not just within the series shelves?)
After seeing all the sorting options etc in Calibre the actual sorting and search options on the device are a bit disappointing.
Most of the metadata is ignored except author, title, series and cover.
For browsing you have the option of a long list of all your books sorted by recently read, title or author (and by file size/ file type which are a bit a useless), series are ignored in sorting but are shown under the title.
The second option is to browse the shelves you created sorted by shelf name or date created (and number of books which again seems useless), no sorting by author which would have been useful for series shelves.
For a larger collection its probably better to stick to the search option but that also seems a bit limited.
You can search by title, author or keyword although you can't specify what you are looking for so it's really just searching for keywords I suppose. If a word shows up in an authors name as well as a title it will show both, there are no sorting options and no way to see if the found item is an author, title or series.
I'm not entirely sure where it searches for keywords either, it seems to me it just looks in author names, titles and series. I figured it would also search for shelf names but those are (incredibly) ignored. My solution of making a custom series shelf including the authors name failed for that reason.
I suppose I should be happy to be able to search for series name at least, but I should note that (like I mentioned earlier) series found in this way won't show the books ordered by book number in the series but by title.
The only way I can think of next to be able to search for a series by author name and have them sorted by book number in the series, is to add the series info in front of the book title and add the author name to the series name. This would lead to some very long titles and series names though so I was hoping someone can think of a different solution.
If you've read this far,
and sorry if it's a bit of a rant, I'm becoming a little frustrated trying to get seemingly simple things to work I how I want them I guess.
Ps. Hey, first post here, how are you doing?
