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Originally Posted by tompe
But nearly all questions you will ask will belong to this set and since it is a fixed tree it is optimized for the questions you want to pose.
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No it is not. If your tree is: Genre->Author->Title how are you going to find all books from Author 'Jones' who has written five fantasy books, half a dozen SciFi and three non fiction books on biology?
You can find them easily if your tree was Author->Genre->Title but then you will have problems finding all SciFi books by different authors
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I get the advantage of tags but to be able to simulate a fixed directory structure you have to write a tagging tool that can handle the kind of constraints that are implicit in the fixed tree. You have to have a level on your tags and you have to be able to say that for a certain sequence of levelled tags the next tag must belong to a specific set.
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No you don't need a level in tags, you'll get it for free. The only thing you need is different (agreed) tags like: Author, Genre, Title, Language. Those tag names are already in mobi books.
You will have an menu with those tag names. That menu will be identical to a folder list. Select for example Genre. Then you get a list of available genres: (Only the ones that are in
your library) Then select for example SciFi and then you only can select from author, language, title and so on. It will narrow down. As soon as you selected SciFi you will not find any authors that only wrote romance
So if your preferred Folder structure is something like Language->Genre->Author->Title nobody is stopping you from moving through the menu in this order. It is like walking a directory tree. The big advantage is that also nobody is stopping you from walking it in this way: Author->Language->Genre->Title
Every cheap MP3 player works more or less like that. On my Zen I can select music on composer, artist, title, album and genre. So if I want R&B I will find all R&B songs from all artists that are on the player. Even if they are on different albums from different artists etc. I'll also find the one R&B number on the album from an artist who normally does only Celtic Love songs. If I have no R&B at all it will not be visible in my genre list it only shows what is available. If I invent a new genre called qwreksjfjhfkjfh that will be available as soon as that text is in a genre tag somewhere in an MP3 on the player. As soon as I delete it, that genre is not available anymore.
On my MP3 player I can even modify the menu's and leave out things I don't need. I have the 'Type' Video, but I don't use it for watching video, so that choice is made hidden by me. You can use that on an eBook reader to hide the language tag if you only read in one language. If you don't care about the publisher, why show the tag? Hide it.