Calibre Kobo Aura HD help with shelves introduction

[fo128]

Pretty new to the entire concept. I have thousands of e-books (epub, txt pdf etc.) and got tired reading them on the PC screen, so I bought myself the Kobo Aura HD.

I am trying to load all these books onto the kobo which is fairly simple and straightforward - using drag and drop for example.
However, read about shelves and device management options on this forum, but I feel I am still missing one last step into fully grasping the concept (in using Calibre as a central management point)!

As a first step, I followed the instructions and created My (custom) shelves in Calibre. This step does sort the books on the kobo (as described) according to the shelve name I enter under the "custom" tab. Now, if I add one or two or three books at a time, that option is acceptable, but when I need to do this with all my e-books at once, this could take weeks/months to edit the shelves for each book individually.

As I add my entire e-book library to Calibre, is there a way to create custom shelves (automatically), based and sorted on the author's name for example (after all, it is already there in the Basic Metadata waiting to b used), without having to input that info MANUALLY into the custom "My Shelves" column for each and every book?

My aim is to have My Shelves / My Collection on the kobo sorted according to authors.
Also, is there a way to create multiple sub-shelves - for example - (main shelve) Sci-Fi -> (sub-shelves) Isaac Asimov; Arthur Clark;......

Thank you for any of your inputs.

[davidfor]

The first post of Quick Guide to Shelf Management with calibre 0.9.1 & above describes what you need to do. And to create a shelf for each author, add "author" as one of the shelf columns in the driver configuration. If you have followed those instructions and it isn't working, we'll have to look at why.

If the problem is how to set the shelf column in the calibre library, it takes work. But, you can select all the books you want to set the value for and use the bulk metadata editor. Once you have done that, connecting the device will update the shelves on the device.

As to nested shelves, the Kobo doesn't do them. Just the single level.

[fo128]

Hi davidfor,

Thank you for the time taken to reply.

I figured it out eventually (sinking head in shame) - I simply had to add the string "author" in the driver setting (where in the example "series" was used), and it actually works.
I tried with a small number of books and they were all neatly stored under their respective author on the Kobo.

As a suggestion, it would actually help get a better understanding if the thread Quick Guide to Shelf Management with calibre 0.9.1 & above actually mentions (for those like me) that there are different tag/sorting options besides the default "series" used in the example, because that is where I hit the wall. But that is me!

Going to read some books now!!

&

[PeterT]

I'm currently away from home but when I return I'll add some codifications to the first post of that thread on other possible columns that are useful in naming collections.