MobileRead Forums - View Single Post

FatDog · 08-19-2011, 04:17 PM

Let me re-phrase your question to make sure I understand:

You want reader software (not just a database) that lets you group your books by series, then shows the titles in series order, not just alphabetical.

This is a nice feature but no reader software that I know of supports this. The best you can do is an author sort to group books, then you have to have a sub-field like TAGS to sort on where you can put series numbers like this:

JR01 - The Surgon
JR02 - The Appretence
JR03 - The Sinner

(This is how I have had to tag the Rizzoli and Isles books - JR is because some of the books are sub-titled "Jane Rizzoli - Book 3")

You might try downloading a copy of "Calibre" and adding a few of your epubs to it. There are some YouTube videos showing you how to do this.

Then you can see that:

* Calibre goes out to try and get various book information from Amazon and other sources
* The Calibre software lets you see this internal information and edit or re-arrange it.
* You can add your own text to the "Genere" or other fields to do what you want

But Calibre is NOT a reader software, but ebook management software. The idea is that you do all your database work from a PC (the keyboards and screen sizes are much better), but then you send the books to some device for reading. This tends to mean the next 2 books in a series.

This is not exactly what you want - but what you are asking for takes a lot of thought and organization and editing because "Novel X of series Y" is not standard fields in the epub record.

I did a lot of investigation a few years back to try to find some XML or structure that could organize books. (Take a look at the Project Guttenberg XML schema for example.) While some were good - they would only work with software designed for that schema.

Right now - the epub record structure is the closest thing to a standard we have so we have to find ways to use the "Notes" or "Genere" fields to do things we want.

Try Calibre - you will see that you have to make a lot of decisions on how to name series - but I might make different decisions. Both will work and both will be 'right' and ... both will be 'wrong' if we try to use each others information.

08-19-2011, 04:17 PM	#6
FatDog Witless protection Agent Posts: 290 Karma: 1002898 Join Date: Nov 2009 Location: Los Angeles Device: Kindle	Let me re-phrase your question to make sure I understand: You want reader software (not just a database) that lets you group your books by series, then shows the titles in series order, not just alphabetical. This is a nice feature but no reader software that I know of supports this. The best you can do is an author sort to group books, then you have to have a sub-field like TAGS to sort on where you can put series numbers like this: JR01 - The Surgon JR02 - The Appretence JR03 - The Sinner (This is how I have had to tag the Rizzoli and Isles books - JR is because some of the books are sub-titled "Jane Rizzoli - Book 3") You might try downloading a copy of "Calibre" and adding a few of your epubs to it. There are some YouTube videos showing you how to do this. Then you can see that: * Calibre goes out to try and get various book information from Amazon and other sources * The Calibre software lets you see this internal information and edit or re-arrange it. * You can add your own text to the "Genere" or other fields to do what you want But Calibre is NOT a reader software, but ebook management software. The idea is that you do all your database work from a PC (the keyboards and screen sizes are much better), but then you send the books to some device for reading. This tends to mean the next 2 books in a series. This is not exactly what you want - but what you are asking for takes a lot of thought and organization and editing because "Novel X of series Y" is not standard fields in the epub record. I did a lot of investigation a few years back to try to find some XML or structure that could organize books. (Take a look at the Project Guttenberg XML schema for example.) While some were good - they would only work with software designed for that schema. Right now - the epub record structure is the closest thing to a standard we have so we have to find ways to use the "Notes" or "Genere" fields to do things we want. Try Calibre - you will see that you have to make a lot of decisions on how to name series - but I might make different decisions. Both will work and both will be 'right' and ... both will be 'wrong' if we try to use each others information.