[Sony Collections] help with automatic collection-naming

[Ozric]

I have questions about how to use calibre to do a couple things with Collections on a Sony PRS-T1. I've tried figuring it out myself by going through the user manual and searching the forum, but it's been challenging to sort through all the technical stuff to put everything together.

Anyway...

1. The Collections on my Sony are built from a custom Genre column that I added myself. The Collection names are all appended with (Genre) so I get things like Romance.Leprechauns (Genre). Is it possible to have the (Genre) part left off the names?

2. In calibre, I would like to have something like a Read? column where I can make a check mark on books I've read. If I send books marked as Read to my Sony, I'd like caliber to automatically populate a new set of Collections that separate the read and unread books. I think it might be possible to use the template language to check if Read? is true, and if it is, use a SONY renaming rule to append (Read) to the genre-based Collection name, creating a new Collection for read books. If something along these lines is possible, would someone mind explaining how to set this up?

Thanks!

[speakingtohe]

2. In calibre, I would like to have something like a Read? column where I can make a check mark on books I've read. If I send books marked as Read to my Sony, I'd like caliber to automatically populate a new set of Collections that separate the read and unread books. I think it might be possible to use the template language to check if Read? is true, and if it is, use a SONY renaming rule to append (Read) to the genre-based Collection name, creating a new Collection for read books. If something along these lines is possible, would someone mind explaining how to set this up?

Not what you aer asking, but what I do.

In calibre I have 2 custom columns, read and tbr.

I type #tbr:true in the searchbar and sort on Read and send only books that are tbr and not read.

As I usually have several hundred books on my reader, I see no point in putting on ones I have read, but of course there are probably many reasons to do this.

I would think that if automatic management is turned off you could sort the books and send them in 2 batches with different templates.

Helen

[Ozric]

It's not a big deal with fiction, but for non-fiction books that I might want to reference in the future, it would be handy to keep them on the device, but not have them mixed up with stuff I've already read.

Currently I just put books I haven't read yet on my T1. I simply give each book I've read a rating in calibre, sort the books by rating, then select all the unrated ones and send them to the device. Not quite as elegant as the way you do it, but it works well enough.

It seems like it would be relatively easy to have calibre check a column for each book, and if it's true, assign that book to a different collection rather than the one it would default to. But calibre's customization possibilities appear rather vast, which is a great thing, but it's easy for me to get lost in all the technical stuff.

I did figure out a solution for issue 1, though

[speakingtohe]

It seems like it would be relatively easy to have calibre check a column for each book, and if it's true, assign that book to a different collection rather than the one it would default to. But calibre's customization possibilities appear rather vast, which is a great thing, but it's easy for me to get lost in all the technical stuff.

Probably not that easy. I don't have a T1 but I understand that there is a way to manually edit collection names on it. Still it seems you want two seperate collections for each current collection, which may be overkill if it is generally just for reference books. I rarely read reference books, I just refer to them

Helen

[Ozric]

Yeah, I could certainly do it manually just by assigning them to a "Read" collection in calibre, which is what I might end up doing if I can't find a spiffy automagical way of doing it. Fortunately I don't have a pressing need to find a solution right away, so I have some time to explore possibilities.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by Ozric

2. In calibre, I would like to have something like a Read? column where I can make a check mark on books I've read. If I send books marked as Read to my Sony, I'd like caliber to automatically populate a new set of Collections that separate the read and unread books. I think it might be possible to use the template language to check if Read? is true, and if it is, use a SONY renaming rule to append (Read) to the genre-based Collection name, creating a new Collection for read books. If something along these lines is possible, would someone mind explaining how to set this up?

You can do this by creating a composite custom column that combines #genre and #read into a single value, then creating collections from this new column instead of from #genre. For example, the template for the composite column could be

{#genre:ifempty(Unknown)} ({#read:switch(yes,Read,Unread)})

[Ozric]

That certainly looks easy enough. I'll look forward to trying it out when I return home from traveling.

Thanks!

[Ozric]

Excellent, I was able to get exactly what I was looking for with a slight modification to the code suggested above:

{#genre:ifempty(Unknown)} {#read:switch(yes,(Read),)}

Although this will pretty much double the number of collections I have, so I might change my mind and try something else if they get unwieldy later.

Thanks very much