I only got a Simple Touch Nook this year and I'm getting frustrated with an inability to organize documents from online sources.  Using the shelving system doesn't work because I have too many files and it forces you to scroll through all of them to select what you want for each shelf. 

I'm using Calibre to import the documents, which then show up in the 'document' section of the Nook organized in folders by author.  Instead I'd like to organize them by source or genre.  I KNOW there is a way to do this- I just can't find the one website that seemed to describe it again! 

I know that Calibre itself uses a tagging system to organize files, but that isn't helpful for me because I'm not looking at the files in Calibre itself...I want them organized in the Nook.  Scrolling through endless pages of names is very frustrating! 

An example of what I mean....let's say I have 2 steampunk stories and 2 traditional fantasy.  I want to be able to go to the nook's document section and see them grouped in folders labeled 'steampunk' and 'traditional fantasy'.  Even better would be subfolders, such as a master folder labeled 'fiction' with the 'steampunk' and 'traditional fantasy' folders inside.

Please help!  Maybe there's an even easier way to do this, like a setting on the Nook that I'm missing.  I just know I'm desperate to properly organize!

A girl at work and I both had the N1 and I took the trade in deal at Christmas. She did not. I just told her yesterday that while I like the lighter weight and the shape of the NST, I really miss the shelving. I am a baby with Calibre. So far I have only used it to convert books bought at Amazon to epub and then load them to my Nook. When the Calibre expert comes along, here's what I want to know (which adds to your additional question):

Right now things go on to my Nook through 3 sources: 1- direct purchase through B&N, 2- other sites where I buy epubs or PDF's and then get loaded through Adobe Digital and cable transferred to the Nook or 3- Amazon books changed to an epub format and loaded via cable through Calibre. When the expert answers the OP's question about Calibre and shelving, please also answer this: is there a way to take my B&N purcashed content and load it in to Calibre (maybe through Nook for PC the way I use Kindle for PC for the Amazon stuff), and also my outside content and load it in to Calibre (most of the original files are still on my computer) and then sort? Would I also need to strip the content off the Nook and then reload it all from Calibre via the shelving? And can you order the shelves in the order you want them?

Because at the end of the day, what I want to be able to do is have my NST display all the literary stuff first, then the non-fiction, then the travel, then the SFW ficiton, and only at the back of scrolling through 17 pages of content do you get to the naughty stuff.

Thanks!

I tag all my books in Calibre how I'd like them sorted.  When I put the books onto my Sony PRS600, those tags transfer over.  I can sort my ebooks by Author or Title or Series or Collections.  Collections are the tags I've created in Calibre.

I have a Nook Color but I've never hooked it up to my computer to see if those tags from Calibre transfer over.  The Nook bothers me because I can put a book onto multiple shelves.  I tried to create shevles to categorize the books I have on there but I couldn't see the book description when deciding what shelf I wanted it on and the book stayed on the list once I did put it on a shelf.  I found it very frustrating so I gave up on it.

One solution: load them as folders to your SD card.  then you can sort however you want.

Sherri, how will they appear on the actual Nook then?  By whatever folders I put them in?  I've never used a SD card, but I have plenty lying around

Yes, in actual folders.  You just access from from your SD card instead of your library.  I have mine in

Contemporary / Historical / Paranormal

and then:

by author and series

Thank you for the info, Sherri!  I knew there had to be a simple way to do this!

I was so excited that I sent someone out to procure a new SD card to devote to the Nook.  I've been quite ill and was too busy moaning and lazing about in bed to do it myself.  Unfortunately they returned with a standard SD card, not the mirco card I had requested. 

With a great huffing sigh I gathered my strength and ventured forth to seek and gather what I needed.  I returned home triumphant with my shiny new micro card in hand...

...only to discover my computer does not have a micro slot.

No problem, I think to myself, I'll just use my adaptor and all will be well.

I searched high, low, and inside the cat, but the adaptor was nowhere to be found. Now I sit defeated and my Nook goes unorganized.   Tis a sad, sad day.

You don't need an adapter.  Just drop and drag ONTO the SD card, like you would if you were sideloading a book.  Usually the SD card is a separate drive, like E or G. (depending on your computer)

Sherri, sounds like the problem is that jonascat's computer doesn't have a microSD slot and the microSD card that someone bought them didn't come with an adaptor to let the micro card go into the regular SD slot.

jonascat, I happen to have an extra microSD adaptor.  I'm happy to send it to you.  Will PM you.

You don't need an adapter.  Just drop and drag ONTO the SD card, like you would if you were sideloading a book.

Yes, with the MicroSD card in the Nook, once you plug into the computer it should show up as another hard drive. On mine, the computer recognizes the Nook as "Nook" and the MicroSD card as "Removable Disk (f:)".

IIRC, though it helps if you put in the SD card then format it from the Nook first. Some SD cards don't come formatted correctly, so it helps to do that from the machine you intend to use it in so that it's ready to go when you load data on it. Go to 'Settings'  -> 'Device Info' -> 'SD Card' -> 'Format SD card'.

Then when it's formatted it should be ready to load.

Inside Calibre, I keep my Collection information in the Tags field. Then when sending to the Nook I want the stories to be sorted by that collection information. In "Preferences" --> "Saving Books to Disk" I have the save template set to...

{tags}/{title}-{author_sort}

So when I save tags to either the Nook MicroSD card or on one of my hard drives, (which I can then drag-n-drop onto the Nook SD card) the book will be saved as...

Romance/Always the Baker = Bricker, Sandra

So the story will be stores in a File on the Nook called "Romance", with the title first and the author last. You can switch it around and put the author first if you want them to sort by author, but I'm usually more interested in finding a book by title rather than author, so do it this way.

Thank you so much for the generous author, Sarah, but Cindy is correct- putting the card in the Nook itself lets the computer read it. I don't know why I didn't think of it- I keep making this more complicated than it needs to be!

And thank you so much for the tips, Cindy- it works quite well.  I have it sorting by author first because it's easier for me.  One question though...when I'm saving to disk, it saves the zip file as well with the original file, etc. on it.  This muddies things when I'm viewing it on the Nook, as each document has three versions.    Should I be selecting save only Epub format to disc?  The only issue when I do this it that it seems to want me to select the folder each time instead of creating them as it does with the template setting.  Or do I just sort by type on the Nook and ignore the rest?

Never mind, I figured out what I was doing wrong while saving.

With the template- right now I have an extra folder.  For example, it saves romance/author/title/actual files.  I'd like it if when I clicked on the author folder, all of the documents by that author were there instead of having to click on each document's individual folder., then go back to the main author folder to select the next document.  Is this possible? 

Hard to say what's going on without seeing what your settings are, but make sure on your template to only use "/" when you want it to create a new file. "-" will just seperate stuff in the title. I think you're wanting....

{tags}/{author}/{title}

in the template should make a folder with the genre (if you have it set up in your "tags" column), then fill that folder with the authors, and then fill each author's folder their books.

IIRC. It's been a while, and once I got mine the way I wanted it I haven't touched it since. You may have to play with it a bit. Just mess with it and save just one file someplace on your hard drive and see if it works. Don't try a chunk of files until you've got it saving to Disk like you want.

Yep, that sequence works perfect!  I've been messing around with it on and off today just trying to get comfortable with the language it uses.  Right now I'm trying to have a subfolder for series that only appears if the document is part of a series (instead of appearing everytime with unknown when the series field is blank.)  I think it's just an if/then type statement like I would do in the creation of a database. 

I'm also finding other fun things that are probably obvious to everyone else, like how the metadata can appear as a page at the start of the document (v. helpful for a quick summary.)  I've just never played with Calibre before and I'd amazed at all the options.  It's really quite a powerful little program. 

Of course now that I have it set up I have to go through all of my bookmarks and reload all my internet documents...this is going to take quite a bit of time.

I like several of the Calibre plug-ins. So far, I've used "Find Duplicates" and "Count Pages" a lot. Count pages is only an estimate, but I like it better than trying to figure out how big a book is by file size. And I love the "FanfictionDownloader" and "Epub Merge".

I collect a lot of fanfic, and that really speeds up the process. I can load a lot of links and Calibre will go and get all the chapers in a fanfic and save it as one file, if your usual Archive is on their list. And when I've got a lot of fanfic in a series, I can merge them into just one file with the other plug in. Handy when I have some series that may be a dozen stories long, but only a page or two each. I just collect them into one Epub file.

I'd love to use the Kindle Collections, but it won't work with the Kindle Touch with Special Offers. Bummer.

That's what I'm using it for too (fanfic)! I was using a stand alone downloader that only worked for fanfiction.net- thank you so much for the tip about the plug-in, that is incredibly helpful.  I just installed it and I'm happy to see it works for AO3 as well.  I do have a lot of fic on livejournal or old websites though that I'll still have to do by hand...actually right now I'm searching out material for the old western show The Magnificent Seven using the internet wayback machine.  Geocities, baby! 

Epub Merge will also be great for fics that are spread out across multiple pages on livejournal or other websites.  I really can't thank you enough for letting me in on all of this...I probably would have never stumbled across it on my own.  I build databases and write code for a living, but I just never have time to probably investigate my own devices.

Epub Merge will also be great for fics that are spread out across multiple pages on livejournal or other websites.

That one will merge files already in Calibre, so don't know how helpful it will be in collecting fic chapters. Hopefully the Fanficdownloader will continue to get updated with new ways of downloading multiple files from various sites.

Also, another tip that may or may not work, depending on what browser you use and what I have installed, but I use Mozilla Firefox. If I go to a page in Fanfiction.net or http://archiveofourown.org and put my cursor on a link, then I can right-click and select "Copy Links" --> "Copy All Links" and it will put all the links on the page into the clipboard, which you can then copy to Fanfictiondownloader. It will take a few minutes to collect them, but it will then collect the stories from the links on the whole page and ignore the other links.

(I've got Firefox plug-ins running, and can't remember if this is a Firefox tool or an add-on.) But that way you can download them in bulk. And there's a way to set the adult feature as default for those stories where you have to hit the "adult" button to get to the next level. I think that's in the help file.

Glad to be of help!  I know what being a fanfic addict is like. Been collecting and reading it for years.

Just to double check there maybe isn't an easier way to do this...

Right now I'm looking at fanfic on old geocities sites.  I'm selecting the entire page and pasting it to a word file.  I then save the word file as text only and put it into Calibre and convert it. 

Some webpages I can just save the page itself as an html only file and put it into calibre without the extra step of putting it in Word.  But some of the older sites are badly arranged, which is why I need to copy/paste and convert to text only to strip out the html that makes it go wonky.   I tried saving the page itself as text only but the formating was badly off.

As some of these fics are on multiple pages, I'm doing this for each page, sticking them in calibre and using Epub Merge to make it one file. 

I don't really think there's a more efficient way to do this, but I think it's clear I don't know all that much about either my Nook or Calibre.  :) 

  I then save the word file as text only and put it into Calibre and convert it.

Some of the old Geocities fanfic really is messed up. I think it's best to go through it one web page at a time, because I've found some old fanfic has pages missing. In that case, I just forget about it, because it's too much story in most instances to leave out and still have the story enjoyable.

What I do in those cases is 'cut-n-paste all the seperate pages into one Word file. Then decide what I want to save. Most times I'm really just interested in saving the spaces and the italics. (or in some cases, the bold if it's used in place of italics.) IMHO, most fic is fine with just the italic preserved when needed.

Once I get all the pages into one file, I do a 'search and replace' with this formatting code.

Find What: //

Replace with: +

(I want to replace all double slashes with plus signs. Fic doesn't usually have double slashes in it, but sometimes there will be URL sites listed, and it's important for this to work to make sure all of them are gone. You can replace them later if needed. I've chosen thes particular symbols because they're less used than others you might run across)

Then runs a search and replace with this code....

Find What: ^? (then hit Alt F to bring up "Font: Italic" on the format)

Replace with: //^&//

(This tells Word to find any Character that is Italic and surround it with //. So an italic word such as fanfic will look like //f////a////n////f////i////c//)

Then I save the whole document as a text file and close it.

Then I re-open the new text file. That way all the html crap is striped out.

Then I "Select All" and chose my font.

Then I search and replace this....

Find what: //*//

Replace with: ^& (Then press "Alt F" so that the format: underneath says "Italic")

and chose "Use Wildcards" in the checkboxes below.

(This tells Word to take anything between two slashes and make it italic. If you've not missed any extras, it should work. If you have extra // anywhere, it'll throw it off. But you can check out the whole document to make sure before you do the next step.)

After running that Search and Replace. Search for and remove any // marks. You should then have all the original italic words italic again, but have stripped out all the HTML freakiness that can screw you up. Then if you need the URL ones back, Search and Replace the + sign with //.

I've used this method for years to clean up html weirdnes, and usually have a Macro set up to run the whole process up to the closing of the Text file. Then another macro to take out the // after they're served their purpose.

You can do the same to perserve the bold if you want to. Just chose other symbols to surround the bold characters and then replace them back.

Then I save the whole file as HTML, and drag-n-drop to Caliber, already cleaned up.

(yet, I screw up the coding here, and can't get it back. sigh.)

I found the copy all links add-on, but I also found another one that copies urls from all open tabs.  This is useful for me because often I don't want every story from an author, so I can open in tabs only the ones I do want and just grab them.  Here it is in case it's useful for you too...

 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/copy-urls-expert/

I so wish I had known about all of this a few years ago- I can see how easy this would all be if you're adding a few stories a night as you go- I'm trying to download my entire extended collection!  

(I'm dabbled in fic myself- well, more than dabbled, I have a folder for just about every fandom there is.  But I've posted very little)

Thanks for the link! I'll have a better chance to check it out later.

Most of my collection is fanfic. I've been collecting it since '96. I've been reading on electronic devices since then as well. One of my hobbies is trying to fit them all on one device, just to see if it'll work. I love e-ink machines, love to play with them. Much more fun now that they're cheaper!

I'm a 'buddy story' fan, so gravitate toward those kinds of fandoms, and I enjoy gay and m/m fanfic, so most of my collection are those. I've written some in the past, both gen and slash, in one fandom. Enjoyed it, but got interested in other things so lost the writing bug.

I know a lot of people don't see the point in 'collecting' fanfic, but I've had more than one archive disapear on me. Which is why I'm not much of a 'cloud storage' person. I know that nothing on-line is forever. Not even my own stuff.

Just in going through my archives I'm finding stories that have gone missing or livejournals that were deleted.  It's also just so convenient to have it all in one place!

Quick question....when you double tap a book on the Nook, it brings up the title, author, and size, with a button to actually open the book.  Is there a way to make it show the summary inputted into the notes field in Calibre?  I ask because titles, as I've said, don't do me much good.  I started replacing the actual title with the summary, so that it's visible when I double click.  That way I don't have to open the book and scroll down to the summary page, then hit the home button on the nook and go back...too many steps.

So replacing title with summary is working for me, but I would like to keep the title just for kicks.  I wouldn't need to actually replace the title with the summary if there was a way to make the notes field visible.

(Does anything I just wrote even make sense?  Difficult to explain)

((I'm a huge fan of slash and the buddy genre as well.  I started with Sentinel- and picked up many bad writting habits from that fandom!  Don't really have a 'home' fandom at this point...I wrote a giant fic that was 48 chapters long recently, now I'm taking a break))

Is there a way to make it show the summary inputted into the notes field in Calibre?

I've check it a bit, and don't think there's any way to set the Nook up that way. Doesn't look to me like they even have a place on the screen for it.

There is a way to have Calibre put all the Metadata on the first page of a book. You'd still have to open it but it'd be at the front. I haven't done that yet, but could probably find the instructions.

I put series information in the titles, because no matter what system I use I want the series to sort together. But I've got over 200 different 'collections', so I know what fandom, gen or slash fanfic is in, and the Pro books get sorted by sets and subsets as well through the tags.

((I'm a huge fan of slash and the buddy genre as well.  I started with Sentinel- and picked up many bad writting habits from that fandom!  Don't really have a 'home' fandom at this point...I wrote a giant fic that was 48 chapters long recently, now I'm taking a break))

Wow, that is huge. I've writen some fairly decent sized ones, and one that had a sequal, but I can't think of anything that big. I do think taking a break helps.

I started out on-line with Starsky & Hutch and got into The Sentinel from there. Added some others along the way and most now reading in the BBC Sherlock fandom. I usually only read in one fandom at a time, and pretty much wallow in it until I move on. Pro books and original works I skip around genre's in, at will, but usually stay with a series until I'm done. I've just finished book 9 of an 11 book Pro series. I'm going to take a quick break before jumping into the last two. I don't know if the book #9 was dull because I lost interest, or the author did. We'll see after a quick intermission on my part.

I did more searching and there is no way to display a summary on the 'about' page.  This seems to be a purposeful decision by Barnes and Nobles, as they don't really want people side loading books.  Books bought through the store itself do have a summary.

Including the metadata as a page in the book is simple- it's just a checkbox in the structure detection portion of the convert fields on Calibre.  It puts the metadata as a page under the cover page.  I still don't like it through, because I have to open the book, page over to pass the cover and view the summary, then hit the home button, then tap library.  If I switch out the title for the summary, I just double tap the book and then hit close. 

Right now my folders are arranged fandom, then author, then series.  But I'm putting unknown as the author for oneshots and such and only using author if I'm collecting multiple stories from them.  Seems to be working okay. 

(Weirdly, I just got into Starsky and Hutch this year, along with the A-Team of all thing.  Okay, I'm still very much into the A-Team.  I'm the same way with all consuming obsessions...eventually I burn out and move on)

I think I'll play with my eBook filing and Calibre this weekend and I have a couple of questions.  Hope Cindy's hanging around!

My Calibre directory has the default filing set up, by author and I have no problem with that.  But I'd like to further distinguish within the author directory by having the books listed under that author in series order.  Right now the books are listed alphabetically by title.  I have to know which book is the correct book that I'm ready to read in series order. 

How can I get the books listed not by title but by series order.  If there is not series by that author, I just place "Standalone" in the Series area.  Reading the helpful info in this board would I input the following in the "save to disk" area for where the Calibre folder on my PC?  {author}/{series}/{title}

Another question I have is if I make this change will it update everything in the Calibre folder to the new filing format or only items I save from now on?

Appreciate any assistance!