PRS-350 Is Folder book organisation possible?

[SmartyPants]

Hi all,
I am new to Sony readers (although not to e-book readers in general), so please be gentle!

My question is, apart from organising books in Collections, what are other options? On my previous reader, i could organise everything in folder structure. Ie, i could have all books sorted into two major folders - Russian and English. Under each of these i would have a separate folder for each author.
There doesn not seem to be a similar option for Sony reader. Am i correct?

My other question, once i create a collection, my chosen order of books in that collection does not seem to be retained. Ie, i want the books in each collection to be sorted by Author name, but each time i return to the collection, the order is back to Last Added. Is there any way to fix this or is this The Sony Way??

apart from that, i love love love this reader!! Can not fault it really.

[FizzyWater]

The only way I know is by using different firmware.

[SmartyPants]

hmmm... yeah but can it be used for new readers?
As far as i understand its only for 505 and 300 models?

[grooks]

The folders/collection are really tags and they are only one level.

As for sort order, I cannot figure out how to force it to stay on a chosen sort. It always go back to added order.

This is a sore spot for those of us with Sony readers and with Kindles. For some reason, neither Sony nor Amazon seem interested in allowing for better book organization on their readers. IMO what makes a good library (brick and mortar location) great is their cataloging system. You would think that Sony and Amazon would get this and give their readers a good cataloging system via multiple layers of folder--in other words, collections with sub-collections.

[ShellShock]

Originally Posted by SmartyPants

hmmm... yeah but can it be used for new readers?
As far as i understand its only for 505 and 300 models?

Currently there is no 350/650 firmware that has proper folders.

[SmartyPants]

thanks all for your replies... ouch, Sony, great hardware, lousy software..
From reading the e-book.org forum i can see that developing an alternative software for a Sony reader is not an easy task.So i guess i have to learn to live with one-level folder structure.
Wow, i dont envy those with thousands of books on their reader.
And not being able to keep a chosen order within a collection is surely on oversight on Sony's part? Doesnt make sense to me.
Has that been the case with previous Sony readers?

[ReD]

The readers organize collections by order number which means that the last book added will be the last in the collection. To avoid this, I move each book to the position I want it to be in the collection. For example, if I'm adding a sixth book in a collection but want it to be the second in the list, I highlight the last book I added and move it so that it is numbered 2 in the left column (#) instead of 6. It can become very tedious especially when I have a lot of books to sort. When you're sorting by author it's a little easier because you can just sort all of the books by author and then move them all into a new collection. Of course, this is not really a solution but a bandage of sorts. It can a lot of work but I usually do all this while I'm watching tv (btw, sorry if this reply is confusing; I'm watching Poirot and am a bit distracted). I use the Sony software but maybe calibre has a way around all this.

[SmartyPants]

i am using Calibre and see no way of reordering books within the collection on Calibre itself?
Maybe i should actually try Sony software and see if its collection management is a bit better..

[shad0w_walker]

When it comes to organising collections I have only found one reasonable way to do it, atleast that works for me. I have setup Calibre with a save template that helps keep things reasonably ordered.

{author_sort}/{series_index:0>3s} - {title} - {authors}

That will sort the books into folders on the reader by a folder for the Author, then inside the folder the files will have a 000 - Title - Author format. This works very well if you are adding a series of books at a time as calibre will copy in alphabetical/numeric order, so they are added in the right order for the series.

I'm not sure if that's any help, but it lets me keep things like Discworld in order without losing my mind. Might be able to tinker with it and get it to put an ID infront to order things how you want by default.

Good luck.

[zmix]

I've encountered an odd problem when using Calibre with my Sony PRS350 reader... every time I add content to the Reader from Calibre, one of my "collections" in my Reader (containing PDF software manuals) has all of the manuals from "Apple" removed and I then need to manually re-add them to the collection...

[JSWolf]

I use Reader Library to sort out collections and it works very well and very easy. It's all drag and drop inside the collection.

[GlenBarrington]

Originally Posted by SmartyPants

thanks all for your replies... ouch, Sony, great hardware, lousy software..
From reading the e-book.org forum i can see that developing an alternative software for a Sony reader is not an easy task.So i guess i have to learn to live with one-level folder structure.
Wow, i dont envy those with thousands of books on their reader.
And not being able to keep a chosen order within a collection is surely on oversight on Sony's part? Doesnt make sense to me.
Has that been the case with previous Sony readers?

Lousy Software has long been a Sony tradition, in virtually every product line. The lack of folders was, umm, lacking on the 300 as well. I don't know about the others, I'm too new to eReaders.

But on a device with limited space like the 300/350, just how important is folder capability overall? I mean, I could see its need on a device with a memory card slot or much larger memory. Doesn't the memory capacity of the 3xx line pretty much require a load, read, delete strategy? I suspect the collections capability of the 3xx line was considered an equivalent capability for short term organization needs. (don't know - just speculating)

[ShellShock]

Originally Posted by GlenBarrington

But on a device with limited space like the 300/350, just how important is folder capability overall? I mean, I could see its need on a device with a memory card slot or much larger memory. Doesn't the memory capacity of the 3xx line pretty much require a load, read, delete strategy? I suspect the collections capability of the 3xx line was considered an equivalent capability for short term organization needs. (don't know - just speculating)

The 350 has 2 GB of in-built memory, which is enough to store hundreds, if not thousands, of books. The 650 has the same amount of in-built memory, plus two memory card slots, and is still limited to organising books by collections, exactly in the same way as the 350. So I don't think any perceived "limited" memory capacity of the devices is the reason for the lack of hierarchical folder support.

[SmartyPants]

Originally Posted by ShellShock

So I don't think any perceived "limited" memory capacity of the devices is the reason for the lack of hierarchical folder support.

totally agree. I usually dont 'load, read and delete'. All my ebooks are loaded on my device. I might have 10, 100 or 100 - doesnt matter, i still want them organised that way "I" want them organised. I simply find one-level organisation structure insufficient.
Will be waiting impatiently for any alternative firmware...