[jgray]

Not wanting to deal with using Calibre to make Collections, I came up with a way to do it on the ereader, without manually going through thousands of books to add to a collection.

My method only makes sense if you have very few collections, and they don't overlap. I just wanted Fiction and Nonfiction collections. The major drawback to this method is that you lose the reading status of your books. Since I was starting with a new ereader, it wasn't a concern.

What I did was to put all of the nonfiction books in a folder called Nonfiction. I then created a new collection called Nonfiction, adding all the books.

The next step was to copy all of the fiction to the reader, in a different folder (the folders are for my convenience, not the ereader's). Now, when I created a collection for the fiction, I sorted by Recent, which put the fiction at the top of the list. Since I had only 54 nonfiction books, I selected All, then unselected the last 54. If you do these two steps on different days, you could sort by Date Added.

This is by no means an elegant solution, but in my case, it did the job, without having to use additional software.

If Kobo would allow us to create collections by folder and subfolder, it would make this process much easier. Perhaps they will add this in a future firmware (are you listening, Kobo?).

BTW, I assume that the list of which book is in a given collection is stored in the SQL database. From what I read online, epub 3 has metadata fields for this, but epub 2 does not. Epub 2 does have series, however.