Here's what I've learned about how the Kindle sorts books:
- You have three sorting choices on the Kindle: Most Recent First, Title and Author. The choice is made in the Home screen by toggling up, then right.
- Most Recent First sorts by the date the book was added to the Kindle, or the last time you opened it. It's in reverse chronological order. A book added at 3:01 will be shown before a book added at 3:00, regardless of Title or Author.
- Title sorts by the title as shown in the Home screen.
- Author sorts by the author, but this is not as straightforward as the first two options. I'm assuming that you have used Send to device in calibre to copy the book to the Kindle.
- If Preferences|Conversion|MOBI|Use author sort for author is checked, then calibre uses author_sort in the copy of the book sent to the Kindle. If it is not checked, author is used.
- Author/author_sort values of 'John Smith' and 'Smith, John' will both display on the Kindle Home page as 'John Smith', but sort according to the actual author value.
- If there is more than one book by an author, and the author/author_sort fields are identical for those books, the Kindle does not do a secondary sort on Title as one might reasonably expect. I haven't explored this deeply, but my sense is that the order within an author is random, and not based upon any other metadata like pubdate. This is annoying.
- Using a calibre-generated catalog is a much more pleasant way to browse your books on the Kindle, as all of these sorting issues are handled much more intelligently.
G