[fo128]

Pretty new to the entire concept. I have thousands of e-books (epub, txt pdf etc.) and got tired reading them on the PC screen, so I bought myself the Kobo Aura HD.

I am trying to load all these books onto the kobo which is fairly simple and straightforward - using drag and drop for example.
However, read about shelves and device management options on this forum, but I feel I am still missing one last step into fully grasping the concept (in using Calibre as a central management point)!

As a first step, I followed the instructions and created My (custom) shelves in Calibre. This step does sort the books on the kobo (as described) according to the shelve name I enter under the "custom" tab. Now, if I add one or two or three books at a time, that option is acceptable, but when I need to do this with all my e-books at once, this could take weeks/months to edit the shelves for each book individually.

As I add my entire e-book library to Calibre, is there a way to create custom shelves (automatically), based and sorted on the author's name for example (after all, it is already there in the Basic Metadata waiting to b used), without having to input that info MANUALLY into the custom "My Shelves" column for each and every book?

My aim is to have My Shelves / My Collection on the kobo sorted according to authors.
Also, is there a way to create multiple sub-shelves - for example - (main shelve) Sci-Fi -> (sub-shelves) Isaac Asimov; Arthur Clark;......

Thank you for any of your inputs.