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Originally Posted by Shagbark
Spoiler:
What organizational structure does it allow?
A tagging system like Gmail's would be ideal.
A directory structure is acceptable.
"Bookshelves" are not good enough if you have more than a thousand documents, and a joke when you have more than ten thousand.
Bookshelves might work acceptably on a desktop, because you could scroll through the list at high speed, and also see the full text of all of the titles as you do. They don't work at all on an e-reader because you can only see a max of about 5 titles per page (I think it's 4 on the Kindle, bcoz they repeat the bottom item on the next page), and it takes several seconds to turn each page, so it takes about 10 minutes just to scroll through a bookshelf with 1000 items on it--and that's without even reading any of the titles.
The bigger problem is that it takes even more time to put all the books on that bookshelf in the first place, as you must do that one at a time, and each one takes about half a minute on an e-reader, so it takes roughly 8 hours to put 1000 book on a bookshelf. The software could easily be written to make this take much less time, and to take almost no time if they gave us a desktop app so we could organize the books on the desktop and then move them to the e-reader, already organized.
Basically, once you have more than a few thousand documents, you must stick with one organizational structure to use on all your devices, because you don't have time to re-organize them, ever. That means using a directory structure, which is the only structure any operating system offers. So you need to be able to just copy the directory structure onto the e-reader, without any manual intervention.
If you're wondering how it is that I have more than 10,000 documents--well, I don't read them all, or ever expect to. When I'm researching a topic, I search for journal articles and download 20 or so that might be relevant. Then I might read the abstracts of each to decide which is relevant, or I might do a keyword search on the texts to figure out which one is relevant, and mark their filename to note that. Download 3 articles a day for 30 years, and you've got 33,000 articles.
(Actually, 30 years ago I still had to print them out rather than download them. Still, you get the picture.)
You might think I could copy just the relevant ones onto my e-reader. But I've downloaded them into my organizational directory structure. Picking out just the ones I plan to read would be very, very time-consuming. It's bad enough just picking out which directories to copy onto my e-reader. Also, it isn't really possible to know which ones are relevant in advance; reading one article might direct me towards another.
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First, it doesn't take several seconds to turn each page. At least not on modern Kindles and Kobos.
Second, no manual work on a Kobo is needed. Of course, that's only if you already have your books sorted and tagged in Calibre. Then you specify the custom categories (genres, tags, whatever you like) you want your books sorted into in the Calibre settings and the next time you connect your Kobo Calibre automatically sorts the books on the Kobo according to the specified categories. If you change anything in those categories, again the next time you connect your Kobo the changes are mirrored to the device automatically.
I have more than 25,000 books in Calibre and a couple of thousand on my Kobos. I don't have to do any manual work with collections on my devices at all. Everything is automatic. Authors, titles, series, tags and so on.