[Katsunami]

I've tried to store all unread books that I have in Calibre (~150 at this point in time... and I'm not NEARLY done re-acquiring my paper books as eBooks, or adding the classics I want to read, so this would become more and more in the future) on the Kindle Paperwhite, so I don't have to decide beforehand what I'm going to read next.

It's impossible. It doesn't work. The device works against me.

1. I've added a plugboard to add series to the title. It works, but the names are often way too long. Sometimes the title gets cut off before the series name ends... (Up until now, I only always had one series on the device, and the plugboard added only the index.)

2. So, I've got an idea. I'll just store the series name in the Author field like this: Lastname, Firstname (Series_Name Index). Then when sorting by Author, the books will also be sorted by series.

WRONG!

I like my authors to be stored as Lastname, Firstname, same as Author_Sort. Why? Because If find it strange-looking to see "J.R.R. Tolkien" sorted after "Terry Brooks". Seeing "Tolkien, J.R.R." sorted after "Brooks, Terry" is much more logical to me.

Enter the Kindle.

"Hey, a comma! The book must be using Lastname, Firstname. Let's be very helpful and reverse that for the user so it will display properly. That craps out my idea to put the series into the Authors field, because when Calibre sends it, it looks like that:

Brooks, Terry (The Word & The Void 1).

The Kindle very helpfully changes that into:

Terry (The Word & The Void 1) Brooks.

That's useless. If I want to have the seris, I'll have to look deeper into Calibre's template capabilities, and replace the comma with something else (probably an underscore). Even that will not fix the problem that the Kindle apparently cannot do "Intuïtive sorting". Therefore, if there'se a very long series loaded ("The Lengend of Drizzt", up to 23 books right now, into which all previous Drizzt series are sub-series), then TLoD 2 comes AFTER TLoD 19.

3. If you have books on the Kindle, and you're going to put them into collections then you can put them into more than one collection; therefore, they are always displayed if you're selecting them. As far as I can see, there is no way to shut off display of books that are in a collection already.

On a Kindle, they could have just reduced the memory to 128 MB. It's almost impossible to manage more than a few books on the device without jumping through hoops, or hacking and jailbreaking it to add the capability to have calibre control the collections.