[GeoffR]

I had an idea how to add the ability to search for tags/keywords as a way to get around Kobo's slow collections implementation. (I don't use collections myself, I usually just use the search function to find the book directly, or to get a list of all books by an author or series, so the following is just from what I have seen others posting about the speed of collections.)

The search function operates on the title, author, series, and subtitle fields, and it appears to be very fast. I have 650+ books on my Glo and if I search for "k" it takes only a second to build and display a list of 287 books containing the letter "k" in one of those four fields. In theory if I added these 287 books to a collection called "k" then it should be even faster to display that collection (since it only has to search one field). I haven't tried this, but I gather from what others have posted that it would probably take longer than 1 second to display a collection of 287 books.

The subtitle field seems pretty much useless. The subtitle just gets added to the end of the title, so if I wanted a subtitle I could just include it in the title and get exactly the same effect.

So the idea is to somehow disable the display of the subtitle (firmware patch), and add a feature to Calibre to insert the book's tags into the subtitle field in the form t::<tag name>. Then if I had tags such as t::fantasy and t::mystery for example, entering "t::" into the search bar would bring up a pick list of all my tags, and performing the search for say "t::fantasy" would bring up a list of all books with the t::fantasy tag.

My questions are: Would this work? If so, would it be faster than collections? And if so, would it be more useful than having subtitles?