Quote:
Originally Posted by parkher
As to the inefficiency of folders as the way of organizing books - maybe so, but with huge numbers of books it is a fast ant simple way. It does not require importing books into Calibre. Besides, it is not clear how many books Calibre can really handle before choking.
And in a case of multi-author series etc, I add "see there" instead of an actual book several times. It is really no big deal to get to the book. If you have a file manager, that is  . |
Calibre can go well over 30,000 books without any noticeable issues. One of my acquaintance's subset of his collection of Gutenberg harvest downloads was about that many books when he sucked them into Calibre for easier management. The joy of wget as he grabbed as the English language files from Gutenberg.
As for a file manager on the Kobo? I find that search is much easier to use as it takes me much fewer taps/swipes to find a specific book. I cleanup the metadata and run the epubs through Flightcrew (inside of Sigil) and epubcheck before sending them to the Kobo. So I have series, author(s) and title information easily searchable. A search on a series name returns all books in the series, a search on a book title returns that book, a search on an author name returns all books for which author, co-author or editor matches. And all with many fewer screen taps than are required to dig down through a directory structure -- 3 to 4 characters in the search field often has the result I am looking for in the first page of results shown as I type.
For example, I am trying to find a book in the 1632 series but it does not show under the name of the major author as I dig down through the directory structure on my hard drive.
On the Kobo, I have most of the Ring of Fire series. I can search by series (Ring Of Fire) or 163 (all the books in the major series start with 163x as the year they are set in). I type in ring, get ring of fire as the first result, select that and the first page of results has 1635 - The Tangled Web by Virginia DeMarce (total 9 taps on the screen). Search by 16 gives me multiple pages of results with the second page having the result I wanted (total 9 taps and a swipe on the screen). Of those taps, 4 were to bring up the search bar and select library since I was not on the home screen when I started the search.
If I want to find a book by Thorne Smith, entering tho on the search bar has Thorne Smith as the 6th item on the displayed search results, another tap on that and I have his 9 books on my Kobo on the two pages displayed. Plus a item claiming the Kobo bookstore has 34 matching items.
To me this is much easier than digging down the directory tree as I have my library structured on my hard drive. Especially when you are not sure about the name of the author, book title, etc.
If someone wants a file browser and Kobo implements it, I have no problem with that. OTOH, I'd rather Kobo spent their time/money on correcting existing problems than on adding a "feature" which does not appeal to me.
Regards,
David