Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
With Calibre, how do you put the eBooks in the order you want in the collection?
|
I used calibre with Sony devices for years without having to worry about how they were sorted in Collections. I read an awful lot of series. By default, calibre builds a Collection for each series, and I believe they're sorted in numerical order. It also builds Collections from Tags you can apply to books in calibre, where I used to specify the genre of each book. Since Collections based on genre can be pretty large, the T1's ability to sort Collections by author and file name are very helpful for finding stuff.
I was happy with this arrangement for a long time.
But when I got my T1, I got a 16 GB card and copied all my books to it, and discovered that Sony readers limit the number of Collections you can have. Having a ton of Collections based on series was really a killer.
I'm currently experimenting with a new organizational scheme where I use a custom column in calibre to build my Collections on my T1. This custom column checks two other custom columns, a "Genre" column and a "Read?" column (with a yes/no check box) to determine the Collection that each book is assigned when going to a Sony device. If I have two Science Fiction books, and one of them has the "Read?" box checked, they go into two different collections:
Science Fiction.Military
Science Fiction.Military (Read)
If the "Read?" box isn't checked, they both go into the "Science Fiction.Military" Collection.
I'm trying this out because I wanted to leave books I've already read on the device for future reference, but I wanted to separate them from unread books, while still having them broken down into a manageable set of Collections, instead of a single giant "Read" Collection. It does mean that if I've read at least one book from every genre I have, I'm doubling my number of Collections, but even so, I'm using far fewer than I was before when I had series-based ones.
I try to use genres with some focus, like "Fantasy.Epic" and "Fantasy.Urban." These Collections still get pretty large. Sorting by Author and by File Name is helpful here. When sending books in a series to the device, I have calibre change the file name so that the series name and number are at the beginning. When I sort my Collections by File Name, this groups all series books together and puts them in numerical order.
I also use the "Tags" column in calibre for books that would be grouped together, but aren't really part of a numbered series, like the Judge Dee or the 1642 books. When sending books to the device, I have calibre include any tags as part of the file name. So if I go to my "Mystery" Collection and sort it by File Name, all my Judge Dee books will be grouped together. Same thing for my 1642 books in my "Science Fiction.Alternate History" Collection.
Anyway, that's just what I'm currently experimenting with. Maybe it's overcomplicated, but I like figuring out how to do things. And so far I've been pretty happy with the results I have on my reader.