Glowlight Plus 7.8 - worth a punt?

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Shagbark

What directory on the Nook do you put the sideloaded books into?
My 7.8" Nook can't see any files (epub or PDF) that I transfer onto the Nook!

Calibre put the files on the device, unfortunately I no longer remember the directory it used. I never put any books on my Nook manually, via the file explorer.

As the Nook was sold quite a while ago, I can no longer check where the files were.

[RWTS]

Originally Posted by Shagbark

What directory on the Nook do you put the sideloaded books into?
My 7.8" Nook can't see any files (epub or PDF) that I transfer onto the Nook!

I have the 7.8" Nook. My device has a folder named NOOK for sideloaded books. It can take a few minutes for the books to show up after ejecting the device (I use Windows).


Edited to add:

My Nook has the following folders:

.adobe-digital-editions
Android
Digital Editions
LOST.DIR
NOOK

Along with a file:

.metadata_never_index

Do you have these on your device?

[Shagbark]

I had those directories originally, but they didn't help. To get my books to appear, I created, under NOOK, the subdirectories Books, Documents, My Files [space between words], and MyDocuments [no space], because those are the names of the directories that documents had to go under on my Nook Simpletouch.

The books under Documents aren't visible, or else (more likely) search is so buggy that I can't find them (and I'm certainly not going to take an hour to scroll through hundreds of listing pages to find them manually). I didn't test "Books". Files under "My Files" are visible if I choose "My Files"; files under "MyDocuments" are visible under "All Types" or "Everything Else".

The Nook software is so useless that I used the Android program "adb" to install the launcher "Text Launcher" and the document viewer KOReader on it. KOReader can display more filetypes, can display PDFs in landscape mode, AND lets me search the directory structure for them. So I boot the nook, wait for the slow and useless Nook software to load, tap the upside-down 'U', select Text Launcher, launch KOReader, and use it to find, select, and read whatever I want to.

[RWTS]

Ah, maybe that's the difference between our experiences. I only have a few books loaded at any given time. Glad you were able to find a solution that works for you.

[Shagbark]

Originally Posted by RWTS

Ah, maybe that's the difference between our experiences. I only have a few books loaded at any given time. Glad you were able to find a solution that works for you.

Yes, all the current e-readers seem to be meant only for people who have less than a hundred e-books on them. I don't know why--you'd think that Barnes & Noble or Amazon would be happy to sell people hundreds of e-books, but they don't make e-readers that let you organize hundreds of e-books in a reasonable amount of time. The disappearance of SD card slots, and even of 32G e-readers, is another move showing they don't care about the people who buy the most books. Strange.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Shagbark

Yes, all the current e-readers seem to be meant only for people who have less than a hundred e-books on them. I don't know why--you'd think that Barnes & Noble or Amazon would be happy to sell people hundreds of e-books, but they don't make e-readers that let you organize hundreds of e-books in a reasonable amount of time. The disappearance of SD card slots, and even of 32G e-readers, is another move showing they don't care about the people who buy the most books. Strange.

Not ALL the current ereaders. You can organize your books on a Kobo automatically via Calibre, no matter how many you have on the device.

And the latest Kobos are both 32 GB.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Not ALL the current ereaders. You can organize your books on a Kobo automatically via Calibre, no matter how many you have on the device.

And the latest Kobos are both 32 GB.

The latest Kobo is 16GB.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The latest Kobo is 16GB.

Ah, yes, the new Clara. I forgot that.

[Renate]

Most people want cars that go faster than the speed limit.
Most ereader users want more storage than they'll ever use.
There's no reason manufacturers need to be so cheap with the memory.
Ok, entry level Kindle? Shave another $0.30 off it.

[HLS]

I like mine. I never use it but I like it.

[Shagbark]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Not ALL the current ereaders. You can organize your books on a Kobo automatically via Calibre, no matter how many you have on the device.

What organizational structure does it allow?
A tagging system like Gmail's would be ideal.
A directory structure is acceptable.
"Bookshelves" are not good enough if you have more than a thousand documents, and a joke when you have more than ten thousand.

Bookshelves might work acceptably on a desktop, because you could scroll through the list at high speed, and also see the full text of all of the titles as you do. They don't work at all on an e-reader because you can only see a max of about 5 titles per page (I think it's 4 on the Kindle, bcoz they repeat the bottom item on the next page), and it takes several seconds to turn each page, so it takes about 10 minutes just to scroll through a bookshelf with 1000 items on it--and that's without even reading any of the titles.

The bigger problem is that it takes even more time to put all the books on that bookshelf in the first place, as you must do that one at a time, and each one takes about half a minute on an e-reader, so it takes roughly 8 hours to put 1000 book on a bookshelf. The software could easily be written to make this take much less time, and to take almost no time if they gave us a desktop app so we could organize the books on the desktop and then move them to the e-reader, already organized.

Basically, once you have more than a few thousand documents, you must stick with one organizational structure to use on all your devices, because you don't have time to re-organize them, ever. That means using a directory structure, which is the only structure any operating system offers. So you need to be able to just copy the directory structure onto the e-reader, without any manual intervention.

If you're wondering how it is that I have more than 10,000 documents--well, I don't read them all, or ever expect to. When I'm researching a topic, I search for journal articles and download 20 or so that might be relevant. Then I might read the abstracts of each to decide which is relevant, or I might do a keyword search on the texts to figure out which one is relevant, and mark their filename to note that. Download 3 articles a day for 30 years, and you've got 33,000 articles.

(Actually, 30 years ago I still had to print them out rather than download them. Still, you get the picture.)

You might think I could copy just the relevant ones onto my e-reader. But I've downloaded them into my organizational directory structure. Picking out just the ones I plan to read would be very, very time-consuming. It's bad enough just picking out which directories to copy onto my e-reader. Also, it isn't really possible to know which ones are relevant in advance; reading one article might direct me towards another.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Shagbark

Spoiler:

What organizational structure does it allow?
A tagging system like Gmail's would be ideal.
A directory structure is acceptable.
"Bookshelves" are not good enough if you have more than a thousand documents, and a joke when you have more than ten thousand.

Bookshelves might work acceptably on a desktop, because you could scroll through the list at high speed, and also see the full text of all of the titles as you do. They don't work at all on an e-reader because you can only see a max of about 5 titles per page (I think it's 4 on the Kindle, bcoz they repeat the bottom item on the next page), and it takes several seconds to turn each page, so it takes about 10 minutes just to scroll through a bookshelf with 1000 items on it--and that's without even reading any of the titles.

The bigger problem is that it takes even more time to put all the books on that bookshelf in the first place, as you must do that one at a time, and each one takes about half a minute on an e-reader, so it takes roughly 8 hours to put 1000 book on a bookshelf. The software could easily be written to make this take much less time, and to take almost no time if they gave us a desktop app so we could organize the books on the desktop and then move them to the e-reader, already organized.

Basically, once you have more than a few thousand documents, you must stick with one organizational structure to use on all your devices, because you don't have time to re-organize them, ever. That means using a directory structure, which is the only structure any operating system offers. So you need to be able to just copy the directory structure onto the e-reader, without any manual intervention.

If you're wondering how it is that I have more than 10,000 documents--well, I don't read them all, or ever expect to. When I'm researching a topic, I search for journal articles and download 20 or so that might be relevant. Then I might read the abstracts of each to decide which is relevant, or I might do a keyword search on the texts to figure out which one is relevant, and mark their filename to note that. Download 3 articles a day for 30 years, and you've got 33,000 articles.

(Actually, 30 years ago I still had to print them out rather than download them. Still, you get the picture.)

You might think I could copy just the relevant ones onto my e-reader. But I've downloaded them into my organizational directory structure. Picking out just the ones I plan to read would be very, very time-consuming. It's bad enough just picking out which directories to copy onto my e-reader. Also, it isn't really possible to know which ones are relevant in advance; reading one article might direct me towards another.

First, it doesn't take several seconds to turn each page. At least not on modern Kindles and Kobos.

Second, no manual work on a Kobo is needed. Of course, that's only if you already have your books sorted and tagged in Calibre. Then you specify the custom categories (genres, tags, whatever you like) you want your books sorted into in the Calibre settings and the next time you connect your Kobo Calibre automatically sorts the books on the Kobo according to the specified categories. If you change anything in those categories, again the next time you connect your Kobo the changes are mirrored to the device automatically.

I have more than 25,000 books in Calibre and a couple of thousand on my Kobos. I don't have to do any manual work with collections on my devices at all. Everything is automatic. Authors, titles, series, tags and so on.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Shagbark

The bigger problem is that it takes even more time to put all the books on that bookshelf in the first place, as you must do that one at a time, and each one takes about half a minute on an e-reader, so it takes roughly 8 hours to put 1000 book on a bookshelf. The software could easily be written to make this take much less time, and to take almost no time if they gave us a desktop app so we could organize the books on the desktop and then move them to the e-reader, already organized.

You tag the books the books in Calibre on a desktop PC. You can add as many tags as you like. Then when you send the book or document to your Kobo via Calibre, each tag will be associated with a collection.

So if you have ten thousand books on a device and you only use five tags to categorize all those books, of course it will be unwieldy. But there is nothing stopping you from tagging Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep as Mystery, Private Eye, Hardboiled, Pulp, Books I want to read in the next three weeks... etc. Then on your Kobo, The Big Sleep will show up in each of those collections.

In addition, it will also show that it is book 1 in the Philip Marlowe series (or whatever you choose to call the series) and it will show if you sort by author and choose Raymond Chandler.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Shagbark

The software could easily be written to make this take much less time, and to take almost no time if they gave us a desktop app so we could organize the books on the desktop and then move them to the e-reader, already organized.

It's already been written - Calibre. The problem is that Amazon and B&N both have closed, proprietary OS on their ereaders, which doesn't allow any automatic management via Calibre. Kobo allows it, though. Exactly what you describe - you organize the books in Calibre on your desktop and then move them to your Kobo, already organized. And you can change and modify this organization as much as you want, without having to delete and re-send the books.

[Renate]

There are any number of tools that can synchronize a directory structure between a desktop and an Android.
If the tool is using ADB as the underlying mechanism there is the disadvantage that there is no delete primitive.
Is that really a problem?
Let's suppose I have 10,000 documents in a hierarchy that I've just decided to rearrange/invert.
Just delete the old structure on the Android and synchronize with the desktop.
How often do you do that anyway?

If you're a fan of bookshelves or tags, have fun.
You'll have to do that all yourselves anyway since there is hardly any standard.

I (and that's just me) like every thing in a flat presentation.
Maybe you have OverDrive and also some separate directories with stuff.
I just want them to appear in one list that I can sort by title, author, expiration date, modified date, last read, never read.
That's good enough for me. (It may not be for you.)