How Categories can be used as "Sony's collections"

[Anders Eriksson]

Hi I was answering Marcy, that misses the collections (used on the Sony's) option to organize the books. Then it stroke me that this is perhaps useful info to more people and can be difficult to find in the original thread.

Originally Posted by Anders Eriksson

You can do it with Favorites!

I have just experimented a little bit with the Favorites.

step 1. Go into the Favorites from the "main menu"

step 2. Long press on the OK and select "Add category"

step 3. Name the new category, this will correspond to sony's collections
repeat step 2 and 3 for more categories you want

step 4. exit the Favorites and go to some book you want add to some category/categories

step 5. long press on the OK, press down 1 time to highlight "Add to favorites" then press OK, then you will see your list of categories you have added, select one you want

repeat step 5. if the same book should also be added to some other category

NOTE: you can also do the step 5 on a folder and not only on a book.

Then you can navigate via the "Favorites" from the "main menu" to your different categories

I have not looked in the file structure on the device, but also from icon in favorites "an arrow" a bit like windows shortcuts, it seems like there are only links and not copies of the book.

If this was documented how it works on the device I can not see why it should be impossible for the Calibre developers to support also this generation as they have done for Sony's collections.

[fjtorres]

The individual entries in the favorites folder are plain txt files with the path of the linked file. The name of the link file seems to be irrelevant; I created a link file manually and it appeared in the list, properly sorted and all.

Possibilities, possibilities...

[Marcy]

Is there a way to do this not on the Pocketbook, i.e. using my much faster computer and keyboard to type? I have about 1800 books on my PB360 and the thought of doing this manually for each one is daunting. Best would be a way to import the tags I already have for each book in Calibre.

-Marcy

[mtravellerh]

Originally Posted by Marcy

Is there a way to do this not on the Pocketbook, i.e. using my much faster computer and keyboard to type? I have about 1800 books on my PB360 and the thought of doing this manually for each one is daunting. Best would be a way to import the tags I already have for each book in Calibre.

-Marcy

Not all of the Calibre tags can be imported currently. We will cooperate more tightly with Calibre in the future and I think we will find a way to support the tags better.

[brainycat]

I just got my new 302 two days ago. I'll post a synopsis of my reaction to the device later, but in the meantime I was able to put ~675 epubs, organized by tag, onto the device in about 20 minutes using the following procedure:

1) Open Calibre (I'm using 0.5.14)
2) Sort the catalog by tags (click on the 'Tags' header)

- This will return the catalog sorted by tags. Note that Calibre only sorts on the first tag listed

3) in the 'Search' field, type tag:{your first tag} documentation for search feature

- This will return a list of titles marked with that tag

4) Select all titles in the search result

- click on a title, then type CNTL-A

5) Click on the little arrow adjacent to the 'Save to disk' option on the top menu bar (On my system, the icon looks like a harddrive)
6) From the 'StD' minimenu, select "save only epub format" (You may or may not see that; I convert all my titles to epub, YMMV)
7) A file select dialog box pops up. I created a new directory {/path/to/ebooks/pb302}/TAGNAME

- Select the TAGNAME directory

8) Repeat steps 3-7 for each unique TAGNAME in your catalog
9) Connect your PB to the computer via the "PC Link" option, and copy the contents of the {/path/to/ebooks}/pb302 directory to the top directory in the PB filesystem

- This may take a while, depending on the size of your catalog and USB port speed

10) Safely unmount the PB device
11) After PB reboots, you will see the collections you made in the 'Books' menu.

This is my first swipe at this problem. If you're like me, you have several books with multiple tags. This method I've outlined will put duplicate files on your device (one copy in each relevant /TAGNAME directory), so if you're short on memory you may have issues.

Sometime in the next few days I will be writing a script that will look for duplicates in /pb302/* and create symlinks as necessary. I'll post it when I'm finished.

[tselling]

Calibre can be made to use the tags to put books into a specific directory on your reader automatically. I use this as my Save to Disk template:
{tags}/{series} {series_index: >3s} {publisher} {title} - {authors}

My tags are things like "/Science Fiction", "/Fantasy", "/Suspense-Thriller", etc. I use the slash in front of my tags because Calibre used to require that to automatically make a directory and put books into it before the templates. I don't know if its necessary anymore.

I don't use publisher as an actual publisher. I use a "-" in it for titles in a series and just blank for books not in a series to get the format I want. I only use ONE tag per book... I am not sure you could make multiple tags per book work automatically.

So I get something like:

"/Suspense-Thriller/Odd Thomas 4 - Odd Hours - Dean Koontz.epub"
for a book in a series or

"/Suspense-Thriller/Terminal Freeze - Lincoln Child.epub"
for a book not in a series.

You can also setup a Send to Device template to do the same thing.

[Marcy]

Thank you!

I was able to modify your method a bit to get my books organized the way I wanted them to be.

-Marcy

[Marcy]

Originally Posted by brainycat

Sometime in the next few days I will be writing a script that will look for duplicates in /pb302/* and create symlinks as necessary. I'll post it when I'm finished.

Would there be any way of creating symlinks for all books in a series or with a tag? I have these all sorted by author, but I'd love to have a folder for Collections, that would have a sub-folder for every series and tag I have, so I can browse my books that way, without having them twice on my reader.

I suppose I'm getting greedy now. I was so happy to be able to better sort all my books!

-Marcy

[brainycat]

I have to admit I haven't started working on this yet, but my approach was to look for duplicated files, remove the second instance of the file and replace it with a link to the first. That should work for you as long as you have the files saved both by author/title and series/volume in /pb302/

[mtravellerh]

Originally Posted by Marcy

Would there be any way of creating symlinks for all books in a series or with a tag? I have these all sorted by author, but I'd love to have a folder for Collections, that would have a sub-folder for every series and tag I have, so I can browse my books that way, without having them twice on my reader.

I suppose I'm getting greedy now. I was so happy to be able to better sort all my books!

-Marcy

The favorites folder does this. If you create the structure in the favorite folder, you will have symlinks (over a text file) and the actual order of the books won't have changed

[Marcy]

Originally Posted by mtravellerh

The favorites folder does this. If you create the structure in the favorite folder, you will have symlinks (over a text file) and the actual order of the books won't have changed

Yes, but is there a way to create this on my computer automatically without having to manually put each book in favorites using the PB360? Did I mention I have over 1800 books on my reader? You can see how it would be cumbersome having to manually do that for each book.

-Marcy

[kacir]

I have one observation.
You are not able to make categories inside Favorites, unless you have at least one book placed in Favorites.
When the Favorites folder is completely empty and you press and hold OK, you simply leave the Favorites folder.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by Marcy

Yes, but is there a way to create this on my computer automatically without having to manually put each book in favorites using the PB360?

There is way to make favorites from PC in bulk, but I am afraid there is no special program for that at the moment.

The system for Favorites on PocketBook is (like the vast majority of features) very, very hacker friendly.
Just add a few favorites, create a few categories and add some books into categories.
Now connect the PocketBook to the PC and have a look at the /system/favorite/ directory.
Each book is represented by a file [some random string].flk
Each of those files has just one line containing the path to the book, like
/mnt/ext1/Books/SciFi/Cory Dostorow/Overclocked.epub

If I had several thousand files I would most probably write a few Vim scripts and shell scripts for creating such structure.

How are your books organized?
Do you have your categories already in some format?

[Anders Eriksson]

Originally Posted by kacir

I have one observation.
You are not able to make categories inside Favorites, unless you have at least one book placed in Favorites.
When the Favorites folder is completely empty and you press and hold OK, you simply leave the Favorites folder.

Please add this info to the bug thread and number it!

[Marcy]

Originally Posted by kacir

There is way to make favorites from PC in bulk, but I am afraid there is no special program for that at the moment.

The system for Favorites on PocketBook is (like the vast majority of features) very, very hacker friendly.
Just add a few favorites, create a few categories and add some books into categories.
Now connect the PocketBook to the PC and have a look at the /system/favorite/ directory.
Each book is represented by a file [some random string].flk
Each of those files has just one line containing the path to the book, like
/mnt/ext1/Books/SciFi/Cory Dostorow/Overclocked.epub

If I had several thousand files I would most probably write a few Vim scripts and shell scripts for creating such structure.

How are your books organized?
Do you have your categories already in some format?

This is beyond my meager scripting abilities.

I currently have them arranged on my reader by author/series/title or author/tag/title or author/title, depending on if the book is part of a series or has a tag. Tags are just to identify a particular universe for books of a series that doesn't have a particular order, i.e. Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe or Agatha Christie's Miss Marple. If the books are part of a series I save them with the filename number-title-author, other I save as title-author.

I would like to have a folder on my reader called Collections and within it sub-folders for each series/tag, so I could browse by series as well as by author. This would be especially helpful for things like the 1632 series which is written by multiple authors. I suppose I can just save everything twice, since I have ample room on my card, but that bothers my anal-retentive soul. Plus I won't have the proper "read" icons for all my books.

-Marcy