Troubleshooting Sorting Options

[grzzly]

Something that bugs me a little are the limited sorting options. Maybe I'm not quite seeing how to do it, I'm hoping.

As I want quick access to my currently read book(s) and I want things like a good Sherlock Holmes short story always ready I use the Collections.

Now, if I sort by authors (which is most logical to me) I have my collections at the very end which is exactly where I don't want them. If I sort by collections it sets newest to front which is confusing to me as everything gets chaotic and messy then. Am I overlooking some sorting function or is it just something I have to deal with? How do you do it?

Thanks for the help.

It is kluge for sure. We were hoping they would improve it for the K3 but apparently we hoped in vain.

[Pushka]

You can force the order of the collections to be the way you want, by using symbols before the collection name. eg, the collection I want first I use **(collection), then *(collection), then you can use others like # { etc. To get them in the right order, you then sort by Title, and all the names with a symbol will be on the first few pages. After that, all the titles follow but you can ignore those.

I dont have a k3 yet, but I read that some of these symbols dont work so you might need to experiment a little.

Originally Posted by Pushka

You can force the order of the collections to be the way you want, by using symbols before the collection name. eg, the collection I want first I use **(collection), then *(collection), then you can use others like # { etc. To get them in the right order, you then sort by Title, and all the names with a symbol will be on the first few pages. After that, all the titles follow but you can ignore those.

I dont have a k3 yet, but I read that some of these symbols dont work so you might need to experiment a little.

If you sort by Collections you cannot choose to have them sorted any way other than by last used. There is no option to sort alphabetically.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by jswinden

If you sort by Collections you cannot choose to have them sorted any way other than by last used. There is no option to sort alphabetically.

No, that's not what Pushka's saying. He's saying that if you do a Title sort, then normally all your collections are listed alphabetically in amongst the titles. If, however, you prefix all your collections with, say, a "*", and then do a title sort, the collections will list first, before any of the "real" titles, and they will then be listed alphabetically.

[grzzly]

Unfortunatelyit doesn't work. I just tried it, and it really always moves them to the end. Everything would be fine if the collections came FIRST instead of LAST when sorting by author or title. Is there no way of achieving this? Maybe with a hack? Is there maybe some wizard in this forum who can manage this?

Deleted.

[krazy4katz]

I am a bit confused here. If I sort by title, my collections sort alphabetically, not at the end. For example, my "Fiction" collection comes under "f" when I sort by title. So I would think Pushka's solution would work... For me, I only have about 6 collections, so they all appear on the first page if I sort by collection. If I have the home screen sorted by title, I just push "f" and go there to find my fiction collections.

k4k

[grzzly]

You're right actually. I just realised my mistake when trying earlier. Well that solves the problem for now then, I suppose. It would still be great if amazon fixed this or gave some more options at least.

It works but it is kluge. The reason I like Collections is to get all the clutter on the home down to as few pages as possible. Sorting by Collections lists the Collections first followed only by books not assigned to a Collection and finally the Archive. Sorting by Title you can make the Collections display first using his trick, but then you have hundreds of books cluttering up pages and pages of Home screens. Yuk. Amazon should add a bit more control to Collection sorting.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by jswinden

It works but it is kluge. The reason I like Collections is to get all the clutter on the home down to as few pages as possible. Sorting by Collections lists the Collections first followed only by books not assigned to a Collection and finally the Archive. Sorting by Title you can make the Collections display first using his trick, but then you have hundreds of books cluttering up pages and pages of Home screens. Yuk. Amazon should add a bit more control to Collection sorting.

You're right, it is a kludge, but at least it's a workaround until Amazon get around to providing proper alphabetic sorting of collections. I have all my books in collections (I have one collection for each author or series), hence when I'm in title mode I just look at the collections and ignore everything else.

Karma to Pushka for coming up with this idea.

[tlrowley]

I don't have my K3 yet, but this is the sorting specification for K2.

Originally Posted by Kindleboads.com

I didn't see if anyone listed the sort order of the symbols when used in Collection names. I believe the order is:
<space> (Sorts before other characters but Kindle removes leading spaces from the Collection name.)
-_;:!?/.`^~'"()[]{}@$*\&#%+<=>|
letters in alphabetical sort order. Upper/lower case does not seem to matter for the sort but the Kindle will let you create two collections with the same name if the characters are in a different case, i.e. READ and Read, but will not let there be two collections with exactly the same name.
This does not match the ASCII sort order.

I'm sorry I didn't make note of the KB user to give them credit.

Originally Posted by HarryT

Karma to Pushka for coming up with this idea.

Definitely! Thanks for the idea Pushka! Periods seem to be the least noticeable so I added a single period before the first letter of each Collection to have them list alphabetically.

[tlrowley]

If you have your books sorted into collections by series (or author), you can force the Kindle to sort them in order - as long as you're not too OCD about your metadata (or if the OCD for proper series order is stronger than publish date!)

You need to set the "publish date" field in reverse order to the series order - for example Book1 should have a publish date of 12-2010, Book2 11-2010 and Book3 10-2010. Then, if Books 1-3 are in the same collection, and the collection (not the home screen) is sorted by Author, the books will show up in the correct order. You can handle multiple series by the same author by changing the year published.

I suspect this wouldn't work well for series with different authors, but I don't have any of those, yet.

This trick allows me to have my books in series order without having to put the number in the Title.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by jswinden

Definitely! Thanks for the idea Pushka! Periods seem to be the least noticeable so I added a single period before the first letter of each Collection to have them list alphabetically.

I've used an underscore "_" which works equally well.