Nested Collections?

[Terisa de morgan]

I used at Sony (BTW, Sony doesn't support it, but PRS+, a hack) but only two levels, for novellas and anthologies and I deeply miss it. The main problem, I think, is how to define the nesting in the input, because PRS+ way was a bit tricky, useful and simple but tricky.

[compurandom]

Originally Posted by meeera

Personally I much prefer the flexibility of tags, where each book can have a multiplicity of tags. I use series, genre, author, priority of reading, and a couple or three other things for my tags. (Not all series and all authors; selected ones. The rest I can easily find with Search.)

I don't think we're disagreeing here at all. In fact, I use tags pretty much the same way by the sound of it.

The difference being, I'd like the tags to be structured.
For example, I have a tag something like Manuals/computers/dell
And another like current-reading/fiction/verne (but not that long actually); all the books in that category are also tagged with verne and fiction.

What I'd like is that my screen of tags just shows Manuals and not the 20 categories prefixed by Manuals/ until I select on it to expand it.

Alternately, if I could search for two tags at once, instead of the long current-reading tag, I could tell it I want a pseudo-category of books tagged with both current-reading and verne, then I could tag all those books with just current-reading and I wouldn't need the heirarchal subtags.

[meeera]

[QUOTE=compurandom;3125927]I don't think we're disagreeing here at all. In fact, I use tags pretty much the same way by the sound of it.

Oh yes, I wasn't trying to disagree with anyone. Just concurring with davidfor about the specific need for nested collections being kinda an edge case in general, in terms of consumer requirements. Many, many users get by great with tag style collections once they get the hang of them after being so strongly trained by desktop computer OSes to use nested folders; a few users with very specific desires, not so much.

I can't help wondering whether another possible interim kludge for you might be using Calibre Companion for your searches, if you have a pocket android device? Just a thought.

[eschwartz]

I don't see nested collections as analogous to nested folders -- I enjoy the tag-like nature of collections, but I also like the ability to tag a tag -- which is what nested collections mean on old+hacked Kindle firmware.

e.g. tag a book in the TBR collection, AND in the Drizzt collection... but tag the Drizzt collection in the Forgotten Realms collection.

Still an edge case, I grant you, but it doesn't have anything to do with not getting the hang of tag-like collections vs. hierarchical directories.

[meeera]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

I don't see nested collections as analogous to nested folders -- I enjoy the tag-like nature of collections, but I also like the ability to tag a tag -- which is what nested collections mean on old+hacked Kindle firmware.

e.g. tag a book in the TBR collection, AND in the Drizzt collection... but tag the Drizzt collection in the Forgotten Realms collection.

Still an edge case, I grant you, but it doesn't have anything to do with not getting the hang of tag-like collections vs. hierarchical directories.

That's why I said "many users", not all. For a few, no amount of familiarity/knowledge will make them do what they want.

I've found IRL it takes average users a little time to get used to the idea of tagging rather than filing. That's what I was getting at.

[eschwartz]

I got what you meant.

And addendum to my previous post: FTR, to the connoisseur, nested tags is definitely not what calibre or Calibre Companion does. Although you can mimic it by creating multiple.hierarchical.tags with each dependency chain you want, you cannot actually put one tag inside another, and then change both tag chains with one edit.
(Considering that you always see all tags with calibre, that isn't so much of a problem... not sure how that works in CC which I don't use.)