[davidfor]

@zenji:

Reading through your posts the one thing that comes to my mind is that you have no idea what is going on. And you did very little research before doing something that was obviously going to have side affects. This started with your warning about losing collections when you sign out of your Kobo device. That has been met with a universal response which is basically, "Well, duh". This fact is well known here and has been discussed many times over the years.

The advice to sign out of the Kobo account to fix problems is something commonly given. The most likely reason for it is when there is a database corruption. And mostly it comes with a warning about what you lose. You seemed to have picked the one place that none of that advice was given. But personally, I'm a lot more surprised that you didn't complain about losing the reading status than losing the collection organisation. That is the usual thing people are worried about.

Lets be clear, in case the others haven't made it clear enough: Kobo only syncs details about books purchased from them and synced through their environment. Kobo uploads nothing about your sideloaded books that will be returned to the device. That includes reading status, bookmarks/annotations and what collections the books are in. And of course it means the books as well. The existence of the collections are synced as they can also contain purchased books downloaded directly to the device. And they are synced whether there are books in the collection or not.

You will note above that I have included bookmarks and annotations as something not synced for sideloaded books. While you think Kobo is saving these for sideloaded books, they are not. The fact that they can survive a sign-out is almost a bug. And they will only survive for epubs and PDF. They won't survive for any other format that is sideloaded. They also won't survive if the epubs are on the external SD card (for those with older devices that have one). And they won't survive a factory reset. They only survive the sign-out because Kobo does not clean them up properly. And even then, you won't know they are still there until you open a book that has them.

You are making a big fuss about collections. As I said, all this is very well known here. One of the very common things new Kobo users have commented on over the years is the difficulty to put books in collections and then asked if there was an easier way to do it. And, as has been pointed out, there is. And again, it has been discussed a lot, so much there is a sticky thread in place for it. Hence the frequently offered suggestion to use calibre.

As to whether Kobo should be syncing this information, again, this has been heavily discussed here. Some people think they should, some are glad they don't and some are vehement that they shouldn't. But, Kobo does not and have never claimed to. Why they don't, I don't know. The privacy issues that @DNSB pointed out is probably a big reason. But the development and support costs will be another reason. And simply whether they think it is an important feature for their customers. And that to me is the real reason they don't do it. They don't think enough of their customers want this to make it worth the investment.

As far as I can see, no other ereader manufacturer supports this either. Kindles don't. You will probably say that they do, but, to get the book on the device so that it is synced, you have to email it to Amazon and then sync. And it has to be a MOBI, not one of the better formats. Again, they don't sync anything about books put on the device via the USB connection. Tolino don't do it automatically. For them, you need to sideload the book and then explicitly push it to the server. It isn't automatic. And if you don't do that, nothing is remembered. In both of these cases, if you did the equivalent of signing out of the account, you would lose the collections.

Lastly, and for my curiosity, when you spent all that time organising your books into collections, did you do it one at a time? Or did you use one of the methods to do it in bulk?