KOReader Books or Collections View?

[iandol]

First off, thank you to the KOReader developers for a wonderful piece of software. I love the flexibility of tweaking the presentation of the text and all the other interface features.

I use Calibre to sync my EPUBs, and they are placed in author folders by default. In the Kobo or Plato top-level interface, the folders are not shown, only the EPUBs (a books view). In KOReader (not the history view but the file view), there is no equivalent view. Is there a way to see just the EPUB files, and ignore the folders?

EDIT: how can I add collections, I didn't find anything in the user guide or wiki?
EDIT2: I found how to add a collection, only when adding a book, not in the collections view...


Thanks in advance for any help!

[jonnyl]

There is no way to ignore the folders, but someone provided a related user patch that automatically adds all books to the Favorites, so they can be browsed in a flat view there:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=358538

While you're in a collection, you can tap the hamburger menu (top left) and select 'Add a book to collection'.

[Goldbucket]

Just tell Calibre to not export to author subfolders and you will have a flat file structure.

[iandol]

Thank you to both for your help!

Originally Posted by Goldbucket

Just tell Calibre to not export to author subfolders and you will have a flat file structure.

I already have >380 books in folders, and I wonder what would happen if I change this setting, it will apply to books going forwards, but what about the previous books. If I manually move (with a script) all EPUBs out of folders to root, that would probably break the links Calibre has for which books are already synced?

There are several workarounds from the thread @jonnyl mentioned apart from the patch, amazing how flexible KOReader is!!!

[PetBest]

See and download https://github.com/peterstamps/All_e...ew_on_KOreader

This KOreader plugin organizes ALL your eBooks of type epub, pdf, awz3, mobi, docx into a single collection!
Many people asked for such solution on Reddit and other.

It works independent on how you have organized the structure (all books in one folder or like the structure that Calibre by default creates on your reader.

It works as a normal KOreader Collection and is standard called 'All Books'.
You can click on the 'hamburger - or three horizontal stripes at left upper corner' menu in the collection view to sort the collection list.

More than 10.000 ebooks in a few hundred folders of Authors is created very fast is a few seconds. After a restart the Collection is visible.

Under menu Tools (wrench/screwdriver icon) go to next page (page 2) and click on More Tools > Click on All eBooks Collection.

This will start the function.
That function can be coupled to a gesture that you like. I used swipe-up movement on right edge of my reader screen and that starts the creation of the collection. Always restart KOreader after a new creation process to make the collection and its changes visible.
I use swipe-down at right edge to jump to Collections list.

You can repeat this function without any problem.

Have FUN.

PS: I used inspiration from a similar solution that was created as a patch but that was always using Favorites and it had severe issues with large collections..only a few hundred books otherwise it crashed. Only epub and pdf were processed.
If you have other types like .txt that you want to make visible look into the source code and and that looks like this (find it around lines 160-165):

local pfile = popen('find "'..directory..'" -maxdepth 10 -type f -name "*.epub" -o -name "*.pdf" -o -name "*.azw3" -o -name "*.mobi" -o -name "*.DOCX" | sort ')

So if you want .txt then it will look like this

local pfile = popen('find "'..directory..'" -maxdepth 10 -type f -name "*.epub" -o -name "*.pdf" -o -name "*.azw3" -o -name "*.mobi" -o -name "*.DOCX" -o -name "*.txt" | sort ')

Note: I have tested it on Ubuntu, Radpberry Pi 4 Bookworm and Android. i expect it will also work on Kobo as I use standard functions of KOreader.

[JimmXinu]

Minor necromancy because googling for a similar intent (see all books at once in KOReader ) lead me here, and there is an official answer now starting with KOReader 2025.04 "Full Moon" using KOReader Collections:

KOReader Collections can be populated MANUALLY from inside the collection's list from the 'hamburger' menu, choosing "Add all books from a folder and its subfolders"
Collections: add books from a folder koreader/koreader#12892

KOReader Collections can be populated AUTOMATICALLY from the list of collections, by long pressing the collection name and choosing "Connect Folders" then "Include subfolders"
Collections: connect folders koreader/koreader#13336

Note that in my experience with a large number of books in the directories (6700), ordering the collection by title or author took super long. 20-30 minutes long.

So I'm not sure how usable a solution this is.

[hius07]

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

Note that in my experience with a large number of books in the directories (6700), ordering the collection by title or author took super long. 20-30 minutes long.

So I'm not sure how usable a solution this is.

Are the folders connected?
Can you disconnect and measure again, to understand what takes the time mostly: rereading the storage or sorting?

Also, can you compare the time when sorting by title and by filename.

[hius07]

And finally, can you go to the upper folder of your library, press the Plus (upper right) icon and start Extract and cache book information. It may take time.

[JimmXinu]

I assume it was some combination of reading the metadata and the sorting. Connecting dir (plus subdirs) took reasonable time and reported the correct number of files.

At the time, I was using 9 (poorly balanced) subdirs and rather lengthy titles that I'd plugboard'ed into the kepubs to also have word count and all tags (to kludge metadata for Kindle/Nook).

I've since switched to a flat level dir with 6700 epubs and just title (+word count) in the epub title field. Files are named from Calibre {id}, so 100.epub, 13000.epub, etc.

A new collection linked to that dir sorts by name quite quickly; a second or two. Takes longer (5-10s) to open the collect, or the dir in file browser.

Sorting the collection by title just took 53 minutes.

At this point, I'm using KOReader; but I'm using the History and Search Calibre metadata features to avoid the file manager as much as possible.

I'll try to time the Extract and cache book information option tomorrow.

[JimmXinu]

TOMORROW: TODAY:

Just tapping into the directory (6700 books) takes +10 seconds. Extract and cache book information (after clicking through ~5 dialogs) took 1h 16m.

(It is nice that there's ongoing a progress dialog. It indicates that most of the books were not cached, so apparently the collection arrange did not cache books, but some books were alread cached.)

After caching everything, sorting by title or author in the file browser took ~15s. Sorting by date modified took ~11s.

In contrast, just opening the directory (from clicking into it or leaving a book) takes about the same 10s, so I assume it's running the same logic.

Going back to the connected Collection: Opening the collection took ~10s, while set to sort by title. Switching to author sort and then back to title was <2s each.

So clearly caching the metadata helps a lot.

However, now I have to look at what happens when books are updated. That's the entire reason I went to KOReader from Kobo native. I update books on my reader several times a day.

Opening the directory again after USB connect/update/disconnect took 1m 11s while set to sort by date modified. And metadata changes to books previously cached was updated until I manually requested it to update for those books. KOReader user guide seems to indicate it only updates when requested.

Opening the connected collection again was basically the same as before. ~10s to open, shows previously cached data, even if changed during update.

In conclusion:

Connected Collections, once metadata has been cached, probably work fine for most users. Sorry for disparaging the feature.

Not ideal for my user pattern, but I'm still learning.

[hius07]

Thank you very much for the detailed feedback.