Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
I'll disagree with that. Kobo can organize eBooks a number of different ways to find what you want. Directories are not nearly as capable. You can put the same one copy of an eBook in different collections, you can sort by series, you can see books currently being read and more.
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You can't disagree with my simple statement of fact. You might quibble that "many" KOReader users are still a very small niche and therefore not "many," I suppose.
Setting aside nitpicking of semantics, there's nothing to disagree with in what you wrote, only in what you left out. Assuming a perfect world, having to put it in a collection would be about as easy and portable as quickly putting it into a folder, but that's neither here nor there.
There are two big issues with metadata. I've only mentioned the technical problem so far, which luckily has been
mostly resolved on modern Kobo software. Putting your latest Humble Bundle on your device is not nearly as bad as it once was.
The second and much more important aspect is that I don't want to painstakingly edit metadata to be able to find a document. I just want to quickly put it in a folder and go. I described what my world looks like here:
https://github.com/koreader/koreader...ment-284213219 It's not like you have an on/off switch, between no metadata and perfect metadata. That just might work. No, in reality the majority of metadata is mostly useless. So I could waste my time in specialized programs like calibre, or I could just quickly place a file in an appropriate folder with an appropriate name.
Metadata offers many theoretical advantages, such as having the same file show up in multiple locations as you mentioned (e.g., in scifi, in Arthur C. Clarke, and in '80s fiction). It also easily enables doing rather silly things like finding the third book of every series. Your imagination's more likely to be a limiting factor there than with simple folders. But those advantages are meaningless to me when all I want to do is to quickly read something on the go or on something other than a monitor. Most of the time I don't want to play a librarian creating a catalog card; I just want to read something.
Incidentally, the ebooks I
buy often have worse metadata than those I get for free from sources like Gallica, DBNL or Project Gutenberg. Archive.org varies.
If you always have perfect metadata, that's cool. If you like editing your metadata, more power to you. But without KOReader's basic file manager, I'd have returned the H2O I bought back in 2014 on the basis of its screen, naïvely assuming it was otherwise more or less the same as a BeBook 2 with better hardware. That's the ereader I want, and the closest you'll get is a Kobo Forma or Libra + KOReader. Metadata is a great
addition, but it's like the current cart requirement in grocery stores that haven't installed a counter at the entrance and exit. A cart is occasionally useful, but most of the time it's a bother at best.
To be clear, I wrote a quick proof of concept metadata DB search GUI a couple of days ago (or rather, I transplanted a DB search onto the existing file search). Providing a basis for people to build upon tends to result in improvements more often than if they have to build it from scratch. So unless I won't have time, coming sometime soon.