New sorting issues?

[greycobalt]

I have an extensive ebook library aside from what I've purchased via Amazon, and I use Calibre to keep it organized. It's always worked flawlessly. However, a few days ago, I noticed something that has been bothering me quite a bit (I'm a tad OCD on organization ).

Right now I'm reading through a Star Wars series of mine. It's called Legacy of the Force. There are 9 books in it. In Calibre, I set it up so they would show up in order on the Kindle as opposed to how they would be sorted by default (by random title). They look like this:

Star Wars - Legacy of the Force - 1 - Betrayal
Star Wars - Legacy of the Force - 2 - Bloodlines

...and so on. In fact, I have several very long series on my Kindle (Harry Potter, Song of Fire and Ice, more Star Wars and Star Trek series) that I use this method with. It's worked perfectly up until now, in which it just displays at random for no discernible reason, after no action of my own. I finished the 5th book in the Legacy series, so I went to open the 6th. It was not after the 5th. After the fifth was this:

Star Wars - Legacy of the Force - 7 - Fury
Star Wars - Lost Tribe of the Sith - 4 - Savior

...and it continues with increasingly bizarre choices, including earlier volumes of Legacy, and other Star Wars books that begin with letters before L.

Long story short, my books are appearing all sorts of out of order, and I have no idea why. Anyone else have any ideas? On top of that, any idea why a certain book would just be missing when it's in the Kindle's files when connected to my computer, and Calibre shows it as in my library and device library? I'm sad and confused. Thanks in advance for any help!

[kiwidude]

What model Kindle? If I assume a Kindle 3 from your profile... what setting is your Kindle set to when you look at those books? Is it set to sort by Most Recent, Title or Author?

If you set it to Most Recent, obviously that is a useless setting for Kindle owners to keep series order.

If you set it to Author, then the Kindle will sort by Published date reversed. So whether books appear in correct order is down to the metadata you have in calibre.

if you set it by Title, then the Kindle will sort alphabetically. I've never had an issue with this. Are you using a metadata plugboard to set your book titles to include the series information (the recommended approach)?

As for your second question about books missing, the general theory is to try restarting your device, and if that doesn't work delete the book and send it again.

[greycobalt]

Sorry, I haven't updated my profile info for a while. I'm actually using a Kindle Fire now. I always sort my book my title, because again, I'm anal like that. I did check for strange metadata in Calibre, but I didn't notice anything different that would cause it to sort weird. And before the issue actually started appearing, I hadn't connected my Kindle to Calibre since November, when it released. So it acted fine for almost 6 months before it started sorting them oddly.

As for the second question, I ended up finding them in the Documents section of the Fire, which is strange, since it's the same format as every other book that shows up normally under Books. No idea why.

Thanks for your response.

[Jeff L]

Are you perhaps sending your books by email now as opposed to sideloading directly by cable.

When you send by email, Amazon sets the EXTH 501 CDEContentType entry to PDOC which places the book in the Documents folder.

The entry needs to be EBOK in order to appear in the Books section. Calibre does this for conversions, but then Amazon will reset this if you email the book.

[greycobalt]

No, all my transfers have been through my desktop using a USB cable. :-/

[theducks]

Originally Posted by greycobalt

No, all my transfers have been through my desktop using a USB cable. :-/

Configure the Mobi output options: Remove all Personal docs tags in the Kindle section

[olaf]

I just started recording the date purchased in a new column in my calibre library. I set it up in the format of mm/dd/yyyy and entered several dates. But I then tried to sort by date and it seemed that it was sorting by the "day" numeric only. I changed the format to yyyy-mm-dd and tried sorting again, but still messed up - it's not sorted by date correctly. What am I doing wrong? It's defined as a date, and I assumed it's stored all one way, no matter what the output format is. How do I ensure that stuff entered is correctly sorted by date in ascending or descending order?

ETA: I m using Calibre version 8.51

[theducks]

Originally Posted by olaf

I just started recording the date purchased in a new column in my calibre library. I set it up in the format of mm/dd/yyyy and entered several dates. But I then tried to sort by date and it seemed that it was sorting by the "day" numeric only. I changed the format to yyyy-mm-dd and tried sorting again, but still messed up - it's not sorted by date correctly. What am I doing wrong? It's defined as a date, and I assumed it's stored all one way, no matter what the output format is. How do I ensure that stuff entered is correctly sorted by date in ascending or descending order?

Strange
I have several date (MM/dd/yyy, dd MMM yyyy hh) columns. They all sort perfectly.

Calibre on XP Sp3 is my most used OS

Check the tweak # Control how dates are displayed

[olaf]

theDucks: Thank you - the tweak you mentioned solved my problem. I had been using lower case m's for the month but noticed the tweak only showed month in UPPERCASE. So I changed the format to be MM/dd/yyyy instead of mm/dd/yyyy and now the sorting works fine. Not sure why month has to be capitalized, but that solved the problem. Thanks again!

[theducks]

Originally Posted by olaf

theDucks: Thank you - the tweak you mentioned solved my problem. I had been using lower case m's for the month but noticed the tweak only showed month in UPPERCASE. So I changed the format to be MM/dd/yyyy instead of mm/dd/yyyy and now the sorting works fine. Not sure why month has to be capitalized, but that solved the problem. Thanks again!

For some templates, Case changes whether there are Leading 0's.
Rule #1: follow the naming Rules precisely