eReader

I got a Kobo on Saturday. I like it, particularly for reading individual books.

I am not just dealing with the individual books. As you would expect for a device that brags about storing up to a thousand books, I am dealing with a library.

There are four categories; Books, Previews, News and Mags, and Shortlist. I don't have any periodicals, but I currently have 86 books-and-(non-Kobo)-previews in the Books category, and 75 Kobo previews in the Previews category. And the Shortlist is, as the name suggests, a favourites list. Each of these categories can be sorted alphabetically (by title), alphabetically (by author), or according to "Recent Reads".

(Close your eyes, Gentle Reader. Imagine your library, the shelves and shelves of books. Actually, if you're like me, that is way too much for the purposes of this example, so imagine one bookcase.)

(Now imagine all these books being subject to either the alphabetical, the other alphabetical, or the last-picked-up sorting strategy--and nothing but. Always. And you can see five or six of them at a time.)

I am having a few serious problems with the organizing at this point.

(1) The "Recent Reads" sorting isn't. It's actually sorting by file most recently accessed or modified. Downloading a book therefore counts as "reading" it. This would only be mildly annoying except that

(2) I can't mark books as unread. If I look at a book (or a non-Kobo preview) in my library, that book jumps to the top of my booklist. If I download a book I want to read later, that book's now at the top of my booklist. If I am browsing the library and accidentally open a book[1], that book's now at the top of my booklist. If I mark a book that I opened but didn't want to read as finished, it doesn't jump to the top of the list but it doesn't go to the bottom of the queue, either.

Did I mention that the library shows books six to a screen at most--five if you want to read the title and author name instead of just see a thumbnail of the cover? And that I have eighty-six books and seventy-five previews?

This actually makes me twitchy about letting other people see the damn thing, because they're probably going to poke something[2] and then I'm going to be doing the scroll through library/open book/back to library dance until all my books are back at the top of the list where I'd rather they were.

(3) I can't create or assign categories, tags, or what-have-you. I'm not looking for something hugely complex here (although if it was there, I'd probably happily use it), but it's starting to really annoy me that I can't even distinguish between short stories and novels, or between fiction and non-fiction. And speaking of tags,

(4) It doesn't display or allow you to modify the attributes that do exist. I can't tell my Kobo Touch not to display books I've already read. I can't tell it to only display books I haven't read, or only display books I'm reading. I am pretty sure it's tracking what I've finished and what I currently have open--the Calibre records show "Im_Reading" and "Finished" Categories on books as appropriate, and lack any tags for ones I haven't opened yet.

Hell, I can't even change books from Books to Previews. (There was one item in the Kobo store which was essentially a half-dozen excerpts of novels being published in the coming months. It's filed under Books. It is so a Preview. >.< )

Loosely related;

(5) The non-Kobo books get the short end of the stick. Can't highlight text or do a dictionary search in them, which I can live without, and they are all filed as books. Doesn't matter if they're previews, or magazines, or previews of magazines.

(I've tried editing the Collections in Calibre. I end up with two copies of an ePub in the Books category, one of which is secretly marked "Preview" in some way that makes no difference whatsoever to the Kobo Touch.)

So... yeah. Suggestions about how to make the Kobo Touch something with a sorting scheme that doesn't break once you have more than fifteen books on it would be awesome.

With regards to desktop management of an elibrary: The Kobo desktop app doesn't even see non-Kobo books. Calibre sees them, but is ridiculously slow on my machine and modifying Collections results in duplicate copies of the books appearing on my ereader (and Calibre doesn't wrap tags, so the tag list for any book with more than maybe eight tags ends in an ellipsis and runs off the edge of the Tags column). And I do not see the point of an ereader that carries a thousand books if it's not going to be a library in my pocket, so "just delete things you're not reading" is really not useful to me. If I want to sit down and look over my collection and hem and haw about what to bring along to read...

Hell, for that I have realbooks. More of them than could fit on the Kobo, actually.

Help?
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[1]It's a touchscreen, I read it on the bus, it happens.
[2] Admittedly the purpose of the Kobo Touch.