[Kythe42]

Hi, I'm new to this forum.

I've been using Calibre to manage my ebook collection for quite awhile and I didn't really care too much about having lots of metadata.

Now I've decided to make a separate library for the purpose of tracking my reading in case sites like Shelfari, GoodReads, and LibraryThing disappear. As such I've been making a whole bunch of custom columns. One of the many things I'm tracking is the dates that I've read books. The problem is that for a bunch of my books I really don't know the exact date I read the book. Sometimes all I know is the year.

It seems that Calibre doesn't want to let me set a partial date, either with just the month and year, or year alone. I'm pretty sure I was able to do this when I was experimenting around with this in previous versions of Calibre. If I remember correctly there used to just be three different drop-down menus for day, month, and year and it was possible for me to leave some of them blank. Now in the current version it pulls up a little calendar and makes me do a complete date.

I've tried doing the dates as text fields, but unfortunately they won't sort properly with partial dates unless I either do the dates in reverse order(2012/08/22) or put in zeros for the day and/or month for the partial dates(00/00/2012). Neither of those options looks that great in my opinion and preferably I'd like the month spelled out.

Does anyone know if there's a way for me to set partial dates using the custom date fields?

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me.