Quote:
Originally Posted by sigma8
I'm also a new owner of the 505, and am curious about this issue too. Couldn't you set up collections? From what I understand, you need to use Sony's software to do that (shame), but wouldn't that simplify organization? Can there be nested collections?
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Calibre has the ability to create collections, too. It does this automatically based on tags in the books metadata. Of course, you need to ensure that the metadata is there in the first place, but that's not a big deal. You can have as many tags as you like, and more than one per book, but it's stilled not much of a solution.
Collections only provide one axis of organization, and they can't (so far as I know) be nested. So if you've got more than a hundred or so collections, you have a large flat list to search through, like the large flat list of authors and titles, and that takes a while. And if you have a smaller number of collections, then each collection has necessarily a larger number of books, so you still have all the searching, but a couple of button-presses later.
On my computer, I organize books into a hierarchy of folders: fiction/nonfiction -- genre -- author. For me, it would be great to be able to do something similar on the PRS but, so far as I know, there is no way.
I don't find it particularly burdensome to be limited to a hundred or so books on the PRS. I am a programmer and I sit in front of a computer a large part of the day, so it's not a big deal for me to feed the PRS occasionally. But given that memory is cheap and ebooks are small, it is sad that support for large collections hasn't been properly thought through.
Apple iPods have the same problem with MP3 files. I once discussed this with somebody who worked for Apple -- how you can have an MP3 player that will store 50,000 MP3 tracks, and no way to organize them except into flat lists. And his response was : we intend the large capacity for video; in practice nobody can afford to buy more than a thousand or so MP3 tracks lawfully. Which I thought was a pretty brain-dead response. Sony could argue the same way -- that the PRS supports memory addons so you can use it as an MP3 player, not to store large numbers of books. But, whatever, it's pretty slack in my view.
The lack of organization/navigation facilities is the only thing, in my view, that lets down an otherwise excellent device.