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tknofetish · 07-13-2010, 04:38 PM

First off, let me start by saying that Calibre is an awesome program, and GRiker and Kovid are without doubt crazy big-time heroes for all the work and support they put in via these forums. I'm currently upgrading my 750+ ebook library from Mobipocket Reader on a five-year old Treo 650 to my fancy new iPad, and Calibre has made the job simple, enjoyable and highly rewarding. Except, of course, for the one tiny little annoying problem I'm here to post about, that is...

What on Earth is up with iTunes's sort order for imported books? I'm successfully sending books to iTunes via Calibre with no trouble, but as soon as they get into iTunes they shift into a random (but repeatable) sort order that appears to have nothing to do with anything. It's not related to title, author, series or any of the "Sort" versions of the same, it's not based on the string you add to the Composer field, and it's definitely not based on Date Added (to either Calibre or iTunes). And yet no matter what, my books always sort into exactly the same mixed-up order, no matter how many times I add or delete them, and even after I alter the metadata and reconvert, they still sort in the same crazy pattern.

This wouldn't be too horrible except that the sort order in iTunes is also the sort order on the Bookshelf view on the iPad itself, and I'm waaay to OCD to live with a scrambled mess like that. The question is whether I'm OCD enough to sort 750 books by hand on the iPad (and then do it all AGAIN on my iPhone), or if there's some sort of method for Calibre to overcome this limitation. I'm fairly certain the problem is in iTunes and not Calibre, however, because the same sort behavior occurs when I manually add the epub files to iTunes without using Calibre to send them. So I don't think this is a Calibre bug or issue, but I am hoping you all are aware of it and have developed some sort of a workaround...

I've searched all over the internet (here, Apple support forums, Threepress, every Google search imaginable, etc...) and haven't really found a whole lot of discussion on this issue. There's no way I'm the only person out there with a very large ebook library that cares about how the bookshelf view is presented (it seems like "very large ebook library" and "OCD" would be two categories with a lot of overlap)... So I'll put it to all of you - how are you sorting your collections? Are you ignoring the bookshelf view and just using Author/Category/Title (PS: LOVE the series in the Category Field function!)? Are you sorting by hand? Is there a simple switch in Calibre or iTunes somewhere I'm missing? Am I the only one experiencing this weirdness? Or has everyone just gone back to Stanza?

If it matters, I am using the most recent version of Calibre (0.7.8) with iTunes 9.2 on Windows. And if this would be better placed in the “Apple” forum, I can try it there, as well. That said, any thoughts or feedback you all might have would be greatly appreciated. And to Kovid and GRiker, thanks again for all your great work...

07-13-2010, 04:38 PM	#147
tknofetish Junior Member Posts: 1 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jul 2010 Device: iPad	First off, let me start by saying that Calibre is an awesome program, and GRiker and Kovid are without doubt crazy big-time heroes for all the work and support they put in via these forums. I'm currently upgrading my 750+ ebook library from Mobipocket Reader on a five-year old Treo 650 to my fancy new iPad, and Calibre has made the job simple, enjoyable and highly rewarding. Except, of course, for the one tiny little annoying problem I'm here to post about, that is... What on Earth is up with iTunes's sort order for imported books? I'm successfully sending books to iTunes via Calibre with no trouble, but as soon as they get into iTunes they shift into a random (but repeatable) sort order that appears to have nothing to do with anything. It's not related to title, author, series or any of the "Sort" versions of the same, it's not based on the string you add to the Composer field, and it's definitely not based on Date Added (to either Calibre or iTunes). And yet no matter what, my books always sort into exactly the same mixed-up order, no matter how many times I add or delete them, and even after I alter the metadata and reconvert, they still sort in the same crazy pattern. This wouldn't be too horrible except that the sort order in iTunes is also the sort order on the Bookshelf view on the iPad itself, and I'm waaay to OCD to live with a scrambled mess like that. The question is whether I'm OCD enough to sort 750 books by hand on the iPad (and then do it all AGAIN on my iPhone), or if there's some sort of method for Calibre to overcome this limitation. I'm fairly certain the problem is in iTunes and not Calibre, however, because the same sort behavior occurs when I manually add the epub files to iTunes without using Calibre to send them. So I don't think this is a Calibre bug or issue, but I am hoping you all are aware of it and have developed some sort of a workaround... I've searched all over the internet (here, Apple support forums, Threepress, every Google search imaginable, etc...) and haven't really found a whole lot of discussion on this issue. There's no way I'm the only person out there with a very large ebook library that cares about how the bookshelf view is presented (it seems like "very large ebook library" and "OCD" would be two categories with a lot of overlap)... So I'll put it to all of you - how are you sorting your collections? Are you ignoring the bookshelf view and just using Author/Category/Title (PS: LOVE the series in the Category Field function!)? Are you sorting by hand? Is there a simple switch in Calibre or iTunes somewhere I'm missing? Am I the only one experiencing this weirdness? Or has everyone just gone back to Stanza? If it matters, I am using the most recent version of Calibre (0.7.8) with iTunes 9.2 on Windows. And if this would be better placed in the “Apple” forum, I can try it there, as well. That said, any thoughts or feedback you all might have would be greatly appreciated. And to Kovid and GRiker, thanks again for all your great work...