Library Management between PC and Poke 3

[rsbrux]

Having adopted Calibre to mange my e-books on my PC when I used a Sony PRS-300, I am still using it to interface with my Onyx Boox Poke3. This worked OK when I had a small number of books but is becoming unsatisfactory as my library grows. Here are my problems:

1. Calibre offers a sort by author, which, logically enough for a western public, sorts by last name.
2. The Poke3 library also offers a sort by author, which, however (perhaps logically for the Chinese developers) sorts by first name.
3. Calibre offers extensive tagging, which appears to be of no use on the Poke3.
4. The Poke3 offers "bookshelves" as an additional way of organizing books, but this doesn't appear able to synchronize with any PC-based library management software.
5. As an alternative, posters on other fora have given up on using the Boox library in "scan" view (the only one which supports sorting) and have resorted to using the "directory" view instead. Instead of using PC-based library management software, users of this workaround simply synchronize the Boox directory structure with a directory on a PC, using whatever hierarchical organization (e.g. by author or by genre) they find convenient.
6. There are documents on my Poke3 which do not appear in Calibre. Presumably they were simply copied over from my PC as described above. They seem to be missing metadata. Although they list on the Poke3 in the same form (<title> - <author>) as the other books, they fail to sort by author, appearing before all other books in an ascending author sort.

.
The Poke3 is not very conducive to Library Management, due to the small screen, the sparse display (5-6 titles/screen) and the slow response on the UI (especially when typing). I therefore prefer to perform Library management on my PC (running Windows 10), but find the current setup less than satisfactory. Is there a better way of handling this?
I would like to avoid installing 3rd party readers on the Poke3. The native Boox NeoReader has a good reading interface and has the advantage of keeping everything I want to read in one app. I therefore depend on Calibre to transfer DRM-protected files to the Poke3 in a form it can use.
Should I nonetheless consider alternatives to Calibre on the PC side or NeoReader on the Poke3 side? If so, what?

P.S. An additional problem that I forgot to mention is books which have the author field populated as "<lastname>, <firstname>" these manage to confuse both Calibre and the Poke3.
Also, after closing and reopening Calibre with the Poke3 connected, Calibre sees the books that the Poke3 refuses to sort (see point 6 above).

[Renate]

Unfortunately all this stuff is difficult.
The best is if your database has author recorded both as a print string and as a sort string.
How else do you know that both "Jethro Tull" and "Billy Joel" are under "J"?
And with titles do you ignore articles at the beginning or not? In which languages?

[rsbrux]

Hi Renate,

Thanks for responding.

Sorry, but I don't know what you mean by the distinction between "print string" and "sort string". I will have to go back and reread the Calibre manual ;-)

I don't have any music (yet), so the problem with individual artists vs. groups doesn't arise for me.

I would like to ignore the articles at the beginning of titles, but have given up:
1. There is no consistency in the titles as received or as displayed. Titles are displayed differently on the Poke3 from in Calibre. For example, "The Defenders" in Calibre and "Defenders, The" on the Poke3.
2. It is probably hopeless anyway, since I have titles in English, German, French, Spanish and Italian.

Probably a topic for a new thread in the Calibre section: if I have my smartphone docked, Calibre 7.7.0 shows "Main (2 books)" in the "On Device" column by some titles and even "Main (2 books)" by one. What does this mean? I'm pretty sure that I don't have these books on my smartphone, much less multiple copies!

[Renate]

I was just using music stuff as an example.
If you want stuff exactly so, you'll need to save it so yourself.

Print (or display) string    Sort string
-------------------------    -------------------
James St. John               Saint John, James
The 39 Steps                 Thirty-nine Steps, The
Otto von Bismarck            Bismarck, Otto von

I don't use Calibre, so I can't say much about that.

[rsbrux]

Thanks again!

Calibre doesn't seem to have "sort string" and "display string", but it does allow you to add your own columns. I'm not sure how much good that will do me, since any extra fields will not be accessible on the Poke3. For organizing books on the PC I find Calibre adequate as is. It's the organization on the Poke3 that I find problematic.

As it turns out, I *do* have a lot of e-books on my smartphone. I probably copied them there when I was between e-readers. Time for me to clean things up!