Expecting My First Kobo Today

[DNSB]

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.

Nope. I was discussing creating collections with calibre to be synced to my Kobos.

Originally Posted by Quoth

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.

The problem for me was that when I had thousands of books and a small number of collections (in your example, 10,000 ebooks and 50 collections so an average of 400 books per collection assuming that you don't have books in multiple collections which I did). To get granular enough to help finding a book without endless paging, I found that I was looking at 300+ collections with ~3000 books on a Kobo.

calibre made it relatively easy to do this but the end result—for me—was not useful since I had over 50 pages of collections to page through, select a collection and then page through the books in it. If I was just picking a random book to read, much easy to use calibre's random book option.

[Quoth]

I see your difficulty.

Search on Kobo is good because it looks at title, author, subtitle, series and collections.

I only use collections to find the most recently added book in that genre. I don't know how many collections I have but I felt at the start that using tags was a mistake (mysteriously the default for the Sony PRS350, so I changed that to Collection column.

I probably don't have as many as 50... I'll check. Hmm, more than I thought, about 100. But there are a number of stupid ones that have crept in over the years with 1 or 2 books.
510 on SFold, SF 116, Romance 250, School 197, Reference 73, Mystery 237, Fantasy 293, Plays 86 (obviously items in that should also be in other collections).
8069 ebooks (likely 75% PD, used to be 95%, but I went a bit mad this last two years buying ebooks, more than previous 10 years).

I think less than 50 collections matter.

[meeera]

Originally Posted by DNSB

The problem for me was that when I had thousands of books and a small number of collections (in your example, 10,000 ebooks and 50 collections[...].

earlier on:

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

Those are two drastically different scenarios, a couple of hundred vs 10 000. And your original assertion was that the number of collections gets ridiculous to scroll though, not that the number of books per collection is unwieldy.

I imagine that that proportion of Kobo customers who have 10 000 books on their device rounds to zero. And the number of collections (not books per collection) is whatever the user wants it to be.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by meeera

Those are two drastically different scenarios, a couple of hundred vs 10 000. And your original assertion was that the number of collections gets ridiculous to scroll though, not that the number of books per collection is unwieldy.

The 10,000/50 was not my suggestion. And as for the hundreds? To make collections useful for me, I needed fine granularity and that results in a large number of collections. Eventually, I gave up this much as I gave up on creating a directory structure to allowing finding and managing my ebook collection on my computer. The game was not worth the candle.

And what I was saying is that if you have a large number of books and a small number of collections, the number of books in each collection gets large and a pain to scroll through. If you go for finer granularity in creating collections, the number of collections gets large and a pain to scroll through.

For my purposes, search is a much more refined method of locating books.

Originally Posted by meeera

I imagine that that proportion of Kobo customers who have 10 000 books on their device rounds to zero. And the number of collections (not books per collection) is whatever the user wants it to be.

Too small a number of collections is useless for locating a book. Too large a number of collections takes too many pages at 5 per page to scroll through making them almost as useless.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by DNSB

The 10,000/50 was not my suggestion.

…

For my purposes, search is a much more refined method of locating books.


Too small a number of collections is useless for locating a book. Too large a number of collections takes too many pages at 5 per page to scroll through making them almost as useless.

I agree, on Kobo search works well and all what you write there is true.

[John F]

Originally Posted by Quoth

...

Search on Kobo is good because it looks at title, author, subtitle, series and collections.

...

So if you do a search from "My Books", those are the only things it looks at?
I have a collection called "Booker Prize". When I do a search for "Booker", I get zero results, even though there are two books in the collection; not what I expected.

For those who like search, how are you preparing for searching? Putting keywords in subtitle?

[Quoth]

I only put actual subtitles or sometimes part of the blurb in the Subtitle field.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by John F

So if you do a search from "My Books", those are the only things it looks at?
I have a collection called "Booker Prize". When I do a search for "Booker", I get zero results, even though there are two books in the collection; not what I expected.

For those who like search, how are you preparing for searching? Putting keywords in subtitle?

Too much like work. I use the default search which looks at title, author, subtitle & series despite the greyed out text in the search box saying only 'title, author, or series'. I do keep an eye on the results that show up as I type.

Personally, I don't care what awards a book has won so searching for Hugo, Nebula, John W. Campbell, Bram Stoker, Locus, etc. is not of interest. I used to have collections for the various science fiction, fantasy, mystery, etc. awards but ran into 2 issues. One being the sheer number of awards and two being that I found I did not really care whether a book had won an award or not.

[John F]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Too much like work. I use the default search which looks at title, author, subtitle & series despite the greyed out text in the search box saying only 'title, author, or series'. I do keep an eye on the results that show up as I type.

Personally, I don't care what awards a book has won so searching for Hugo, Nebula, John W. Campbell, Bram Stoker, Locus, etc. is not of interest. I used to have collections for the various science fiction, fantasy, mystery, etc. awards but ran into 2 issues. One being the sheer number of awards and two being that I found I did not really care whether a book had won an award or not.

So what do you populate the subtitle with?

[John F]

Originally Posted by Quoth

...

Search on Kobo is good because it looks at title, author, subtitle, series and collections.

...

I take it the bolded part (above) is a typo?

Originally Posted by DNSB

... I use the default search which looks at title, author, subtitle & series despite the greyed out text in the search box saying only 'title, author, or series'. ...

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by John F

So what do you populate the subtitle with?

Either the subtitle that came with the book if it's worth keeping or leave it blank. Most subtitles are rather useless since they don't have any worthwhile information. I don't need the series in the subtitle, I don't need 'Perfect for lovers of <list of authors>, I don't need 'A Novel'. I don't need 'An Urban Paranormal Fantasy Destined To Be A Classic'.

A title/subtitle such as A Bit of Luck: Alternate Histories in Honor of Eric Flint, I will keep the subtitle. A title/subtitle such as: Starman Jones (Heinlein's Juveniles Book 7) gets the subtitle dumped.

[John F]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Either the subtitle that came with the book if it's worth keeping or leave it blank. Most subtitles are rather useless since they don't have any worthwhile information. I don't need the series in the subtitle, I don't need 'Perfect for lovers of <list of authors>, I don't need 'A Novel'. I don't need 'An Urban Paranormal Fantasy Destined To Be A Classic'.

A title/subtitle such as A Bit of Luck: Alternate Histories in Honor of Eric Flint, I will keep the subtitle. A title/subtitle such as: Starman Jones (Heinlein's Juveniles Book 7) gets the subtitle dumped.

I prefer to use the GUI to searching. If I didn't have collections and wanted to do search, I would probably put my collections/tags in subtitle.

The nice thing about Kobo/calibre is that it has some nice choices on ways to get things done, so people can pick what works best for them.

[Sirtel]

I keep my custom page count in the subtitle field, so I can see at a glance how long the book is.

[John F]

Sometimes I put published date in the subtitle field.

[Graham44]

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?"

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.)

Did you get your Kobo Clara Colour? How do you like it?