How is your workflow?

[Kasper Hviid]

Hello,

I wonder if people here would like to share how they, in general, organizes their Kobo - do you have a neat, categorized collection or just a big pile? Which shelves do you have? Things like that.

Myself, I have yet to decide on how to organizing my digital literature. I have just gotten around to using Calibre to manage my collection. I have 200+ books in a big pile, no shelves yet - I use the search function to find a certain title.

Kobo's Archivements and Reading Stats are a guilty pleasure of mine. I am aware that they are totally childish. Still, I feel cheated when I do a factory reset and loses my score!

Regards,
Kasper

[PeterT]

My books are all loaded via calibre, and my shelves are

• Series Name - derived from the Series field in calibre
• Reading / Finished - derived from the reading % on the device
• Bug - eBooks I have created to demonstrate issues with the Adobe render engine for ePubs
• Canada Reads - eBooks from last years Canada Read's event on CBC Radio
• Manuals - PDFs that are the manuals for numerous household devices
• Star eBooks - ePubs that are from The Toronto Star's collection of extended articles (StarDispatches.com)
• To Read - books I really SHOULD make an effort to read

[dmapr]

Like PeterT, I load all the books via Calibre. Unlike PeterT my shelve categories are not nearly as numerous. I too use a series -> shelf conversion, and I also create a shelf per author, but that's it.

[Ripplinger]

Another user that would have a far less enjoyable reading experience without Calibre. I do the same as PeterT with shelves from the series' names that Calibre automatically creates when sending to the reader. I have custom columns added to Calibre for books that I've read.

Once I finish a book, I remove it from the reader and only keep between 200-400 books on the reader at any one time. Having your entire collection on the reader just slows things down, and there's really no need to have them all. Pretty sure that slowdown happens with all readers though, it's not specific to Kobo.

[GeoffR]

I keep a copy of all my books on my Glo, with the originals in Calibre. One of the things I like about an ereader is being able to carry around my whole library, including the books I have read. If I buy a book from Kobo I download a copy of the standard epub version as well to put in Calibre, and Calibre matches this copy to the kepub on the Glo. This way I can use the normal Calibre methods to edit the metadata for the epub version and have it reflected in the kepub version on the device.

I have a little over 500 books so far, so I haven't found a need for any shelves, I just use the search function or browse through the library listings sorted by Author. I generally think of books in terms of author or series, I don't always remember titles. Using the search function to generate a list of all books by author or series lets me find any book easily, probably much faster than using a shelf.

I always tweak books before sideloading to remove things which cause problems for the Glo, usually it is simple to do, but the odd book has more serious problems. The main things I do are: set orphans/widows to zero to get rid of the annoying 1-2 blank lines at the bottom of the page; remove fixed font, justification, and left/right margins so that the device's adjusters work properly; add a top page margin to compensate for the current firmware's lack of one; add SVG code so that cover and other images can be scaled to suit the device's screen;

I use Calibre to send covers to to Glo, which generally gives better results than allowing the device to generate the cover image itself.

I use the KoboUtilities plugin to add missing metadata for sideloaded books and to fix incorrect metadata in kepub books downloaded direct from Kobo. It is important to get series info and author name spelling consistent between books to allow the search function to work well.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Kasper Hviid

I wonder if people here would like to share how they, in general, organizes their Kobo - do you have a neat, categorized collection or just a big pile? Which shelves do you have? Things like that.

I don't use shelves anymore. I do use Calibre to add series information to books. Since search is able to search on title, author and series, I find this meets my needs and I don't have the complaints about slowness when you have a couple of hundred shelves and lots of books on them. Since the majority of my ebooks fall into 4 categories (science fiction, fantasy, mystery and classics -- Thorne Smith is classic, isn't he -- I found most of my shelves were either author or series.

I do take a few minutes to clean up most ebooks before I sideload them. Sigil with FlightCrew and epubcheck are my two favourite tools. This has saved me from the common problem of sideloading a batch of ebooks and having the processing screen hang on one bad book with no indication of which ebook caused the issue.

Originally Posted by Kasper Hviid

Myself, I have yet to decide on how to organizing my digital literature. I have just gotten around to using Calibre to manage my collection. I have 200+ books in a big pile, no shelves yet - I use the search function to find a certain title.

I have around 1780 books on my Aura at this time and search takes care of my needs for locating books. When I tried to use shelves, it was too much like work to maintain them.

Regards,
David

[glos]

Hi!
I keep 1/10th of the books I have in Calibre in my Aura so it's not too chaotic.

Shelves:
TBR (To be read) from 1 list I have with reading list plugin
Re-Read: same
Holmestice 2010: same (a few books from a collection)
Five Stars: all my favorite books are always with me (~250)
these were created with Calibre
then in the Aura I created the "For Calibre" shelf: when I finish a book from the TBR shelf I move it there, to remind me to update calibre (many times I want to add tags to it, also I change unread to read and delete it from the tbr reading list) and when I've done that I delete it from the Aura.

I populate the various lists on the reading list plugin automatically by searches of tags on the #myshelves custom column that I created specifically for the shelves on the Aura, it's very intuitive.

[scoobertron]

I keep my books in folders relating to where I got them from (feedbooks/guternburg etc). This makes it a bit easier to process them in a batch if I need to e.g. fiddle with the css. I don't have any shelves, though I will sometimes make one to flag a book in a certain way, say if I have downloaded the wrong language or something. I have a script that generates cover images based on the old penguin covers for each book and copies them into the images folder on the kobo which makes everything nice and uniform. Though I have just started renaming files to kepub.epub to get rid of the long paragraph bug, so it looks like I will need to find another way of doing that (I have around 900 books and don't want to sort the covers out individually).

[anacreon]

I have half my books on the Aura (1800+ presently). I use the virtual libraries in Calibre to separate Archive, Aura, Sony for those PDFs that don't convert well to epubs (though I find the Sony's low definition difficult to bear now I've tasted the Aura). I also have a virtual Library for an uncle to whom I offered the PRS-T1 Sony (at the time the latest) for his 90th birthday, which I manage.

After much shuffling around, I have now limited myself to 38 shelves:

• one for a very few starred books, limited to one each of authors I discovered very recently (not those I knew and loved before having a reader), whom I want to follow
• one for presently read books and one for those to read in the near future (I try to keep the first category under 12, 24 for the second, to keep it to a max of 2 pages on the Aura
• one each for the less numerous languages
• one for the bought books
• one for complete works
• one each for genre (action, poetry, essays, travel, juvenile etc.), but none for novels
• one each for a few countries (greek, latin, japanese, russian litterature)
• one for short stories (I started it recently, so is incomplete

I don't wish to have too many shelves, and I find the information in the metadata and the calibre catalogs sufficient for the few series I read.

[ectoplasm]

I guess I'm unusual. I consider my Kobo temporary storage while I'm reading a book, so I keep 2 to 4 books on the Kobo at any time. It also makes the home screen easy to navigate and I don't use the shelfs at all.

I use Calibre for long term storage and organization, including tags to keep track of what I've read. I use Sigil to touch up epubs the way I want. Sideloading to the Kobo involves copying to my local server and then downloading via the Kobo browser.

[tempest@de]

I use calibre to manage the books and when I add a book I usually take a look to see if it needs to be tweaked to met my preferences, even the books that I buy from kobo, I prefer to download them to the pc and convert them to get rid off the blank lines between paragraphs, I absolutely hate them.

I use shelves for genres, so when I’m in the mood for something from a specific genre I browse that shelve, when I want to read something form a specific author I use the search option to find it.

I don’t have all my books in the glo, usually I only delete books from the glo if I don’t like them and don’t want to keep them, I usually mark them with one star, and I created a filter in calibre that colors that book in red so I know I don’t like it and will delete it from the glo, it stays in calibre so in the future I know that I didn’t like that book. I also use a filter to mark the books read in blue.

In calibre I have a column for the books that that I just added and need to be checked and /or converted, when I check them I change the status so I know which ones are ready to send to the glo.

[Mivo]

Originally Posted by ectoplasm

I guess I'm unusual. I consider my Kobo temporary storage while I'm reading a book, so I keep 2 to 4 books on the Kobo at any time. It also makes the home screen easy to navigate and I don't use the shelfs at all.

Not quite as extreme, but I do essentially the same: I only keep two or three novels on my Glo (the ones I am currently reading, or that I will read next), plus a set of about twenty non-fiction reference books that live permanently on the device.

I use Calibre for storing and sorting my library. It feeds my two other readers too, and the tablets.

[Kasper Hviid]

Wow, fantastic answers - it is amazing to discover the numerous ways people handle their digital literature! Inspired by the various post I have finally gotten around to create shelves:

I have made a few shelves for genres: Horror, Science fiction, Whodunnit, Erotica, Comics, Fiction, Short stories, Writing, Psychology, Society, Animation, Culture, Drawing
It is both fiction and non-fiction mixed together, too bad.
I also have a shelve called Fiction in order to roughly separate it from non-fiction.

Books and manuals on specific software mostly have the programs name in their title, so no need for shelves for those. I can just search.

I have also created some main shelves, using the ! to get them first on the list:
! Curiosities (A category of amusing titles such as 'Our British Snails' 'Secret Chambers and Hiding Places' or 'The Curve of Life')
! Danish (Books in Danish)
! Favorites (my favorite books)
! Finished (books I have finished reading)
! Frozen (books that I oughta read, but has sort of given up on)
! Oughta (books I really oughta read, because, they're "important")
! Wanna (books I wanna read, because, "oh that one sounds fun!")
! Wanna 2.0 (books I want to read again)

Shelves can be used to avoid constantly navigating at gigantic suffocating library that could never be read in a single lifetime. Still, I'm tempted by the simple living approach suggested by ectoplasm...

I somehow find it slightly embarrassing when I fiddle too much with my library. Compared to how much time I have spend on actually reading, I have used quite a lot of time organizing my digital collection. But reading manuals on Calibre and Sigil might also count as reading ... at least my Reading Stats register it as such.