Expecting My First Kobo Today

[Critteranne]

I'll be getting my Kobo Clara Colour today!

So I'll probably start posting in this forum, asking simple questions like "How do I sort all these books?" and "Where did they put the menu?"

I already have more Kobo books than I realized. I bought some Kobo-only Humble Bundles last year because they were too good to avoid. (I can also transfer my old DRM-free Fictionwise and Baen books.)

[Sirtel]

Ask away, we will gladly answer if we can.

I remember having a lot of questions when I got my first Kobo too... back in 2019.

And congrats on your new toy!

[TheSmitty]

Enjoy! They are nice devices for sure.

[meeera]

Enjoy! My answer to "how do I sort all these books?" is to have them all DRM-stripped and properly tagged in Calibre, then use Calibre to manage collections on the device. There's a sticky or wiki thread about how to do that. (It might be labelled "shelves", the old term for collections.)

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by meeera

Enjoy! My answer to "how do I sort all these books?" is to have them all DRM-stripped and properly tagged in Calibre, then use Calibre to manage collections on the device. There's a sticky or wiki thread about how to do that. (It might be labelled "shelves", the old term for collections.)

I don't bother with collections. I just use search for any of the metadata that Kobo supports to locate books. Once you get more than a couple of hundred books on an ereader, the number of collections gets ridiculous to scroll through.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I don't bother with collections. I just use search for any of the metadata that Kobo supports to locate books. Once you get more than a couple of hundred books on an ereader, the number of collections gets ridiculous to scroll through.

Not necessarily. I have thousands of books and some 25 collections, based on genres and a few other custom categories. While I also use search for the most part, I do find collections useful sometimes, when I remember neither the author nor the title.

[DNSB]

Since the three genres that chew up 99.4% of the ebooks on my Sage and other Kobo ereaders would be Science Fiction, Fantasy and Cooking, I don't find genre based collections to be of much use. I played with finer grained collections and, to me, it was too much work to keep them maintained compared to the time it saved me locating books. I felt I was back trying to invent an efficient directory structure which I wasted much time on before moving to calibre.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Since the three genres that chew up 99.4% of the ebooks on my Sage and other Kobo ereaders would be Science Fiction, Fantasy and Cooking, I don't find genre based collections to be of much use. I played with finer grained collections and, to me, it was too much work to keep them maintained compared to the time it saved me locating books. I felt I was back trying to invent an efficient directory structure which I wasted much time on before moving to calibre.

Well, yes, if you read only a couple of genres, then genre-based collections are pointless.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Well, yes, if you read only a couple of genres, then genre-based collections are pointless.

And most other collections are useless since they duplicate search functionality. Even shared world sets can be searched based on the series name. Not using collections also helps me to avoid the issues reported on several occasions where having hundreds of collections has caused sync issues.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by DNSB

And most other collections are useless since they duplicate search functionality. Even shared world sets can be searched based on the series name. Not using collections also helps me to avoid the issues reported on several occasions where having hundreds of collections has caused sync issues.

They're not useless if you don't remember author, title or series, as is often the case with me. Or if you simply want to browse one specific genre or custom category to find your next read.

I don't sync, so those issues are not relevant to me.

In short, while you personally may find collections useless, others clearly don't.

[dewd]

Originally Posted by Critteranne

I'll be getting my Kobo Clara Colour today!

So I'll probably start posting in this forum, asking simple questions like "How do I sort all these books?" and "Where did they put the menu?"

Ha - I'm a day behind you - I'm expecting my first Kobo - also a Clara Colour - today! So I'm piggy-backing on your thread, and maybe we'll learn from one another instead of annoying all the experienced people with two separate threads.

My first question is this (and I admit, I've only just started browsing the Kobo forum, so apologies if appropriate - I know I can highlight in different colours on the KCC, but is there a way to get those annotations into Calibre while keeping the annotation colours? I'm aware that the system I've been using with my kindle (the Annotations plugin) won't do the colour thing.

[meeera]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Once you get more than a couple of hundred books on an ereader, the number of collections gets ridiculous to scroll through.

That makes no sense. Regardless of the number of books, the number of collections will depend entirely on what particular collection approach the individual person is using.

Maybe once _you_ get more than a couple of hundred books, _your_ collections would get ridiculous. Mine don't.

[Quoth]

Maybe DNSB means creating manually on the device rather than on Calibre and updating the ereader, which doesn't work on newer Kindles. I've given up on Kindle Collections since the DXG.

I agree you can have 10,000 ebooks and only 50 collections. This is why I like Kobo + Calibre. Everything works.

Managing collections where it's not supported by Calibre seems a disaster.

[meeera]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Maybe DNSB means creating manually on the device rather than on Calibre and updating the ereader, which doesn't work on newer Kindles. I've given up on Kindle Collections since the DXG..

This is the Kobo forum, we're all talking about Kobos, and my comment that he was replying to was about managing collections with Calibre.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by meeera

This is the Kobo forum, we're all talking about Kobos, and my comment that he was replying to was about managing collections with Calibre.

I'm baffled.
There isn't a problem with a Kobo and managing collections with Calibre. But even with a few hundred ebooks it gets tiresome to add books to collections on the device instead. Which is why I use a Kobo rather than Kindle.