Quote:
Originally Posted by phenomshel
I haven't actually tried this - I have an EZ Reader, which has folders. But I read by author - so being able to sort by author would probably be at least temporarily acceptable for me. Sorting by author is how I did it across six full large bookcases when I had my big physical book collection in Texas. As long as I put the book back in the right place, I could usually walk right to it.
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With a physical collection, you've got other info besides author's name: size & shape of book, logo of publisher, color of spine, and so on. I can spot the Harlequins in a row of sci-fi books easily on a bookshelf; I can't always spot them in a computer-generated list.
And with most ebook readers, there's the additional problem of how they get the author's name. Metadata is inconsistent--some publishers consistently arrange "lastname, firstname," but others (especially small publishers) use "firstname lastname," and freebies often have author names that are actually the name of the computer operator who formatted the Quark XPress file. (Nothing like downloading a free PDF and having it show up in the Reader as "aat small.qxp" with author "Lyn." Unless it's getting one that shows up as "15462009.v4-fin.qxp.")
I'm sure their system will work well with books bought at their store. (Especially since very likely nobody will be buying 4,000 books from their store.) The question is how well it'll work for books from other sources, and how much effort the Nook owner will need to put into managing the library.
A *good* system would let the owner click on a book, click on "edit metadata" (or "edit properties," so's not to confuse the non-techies who have no idea what "metadata" is) and change title & author to whatever they liked, to be stored in the Nook's memory.
I suspect, though, that if they'd thought that far ahead, they'd've created a tag or folder system.