How on earth does Ordering work?

[iamnuff]

I've been trying to sort this out since I first got Calibre, but it seems like nonsense.

My books are all out of order. Changing the names often changes the order, but not in any pattern i can recognize and the "number" option in metadata doesn't seem to do anything.

You'd think that using the format "Series name, Book X" would order everything perfectly, but apparently calibre doesn't adhere to alphabetical/numerical ordering rules, because it likes to put book 9 at the top.

Honestly, would it be such a chore to enable us to drag and drop out ebooks into whatever order we want, then keep them there?
I'm at the point where I'm considering finding another ereader program because this one is so user-unfriendly. Putting my stuff in the right order should be the work of seconds or minutes.

[theducks]

Alpha Numeric for Text only, tag fields 1,10,2,20,200,3 you must leading 0 pad so all have same # digits

Series will sort by name and number (if you have a range of numbers in the [] )

The arrow in the column header says which direction, click again to flip

BTW Windows and Linux file explorers all work the same. Click the column header to sort

[gbm]

Originally Posted by iamnuff

I've been trying to sort this out since I first got Calibre, but it seems like nonsense.

My books are all out of order. Changing the names often changes the order, but not in any pattern i can recognize and the "number" option in metadata doesn't seem to do anything.

You'd think that using the format "Series name, Book X" would order everything perfectly, but apparently calibre doesn't adhere to alphabetical/numerical ordering rules, because it likes to put book 9 at the top.

Honestly, would it be such a chore to enable us to drag and drop out ebooks into whatever order we want, then keep them there?
I'm at the point where I'm considering finding another ereader program because this one is so user-unfriendly. Putting my stuff in the right order should be the work of seconds or minutes.

See:
http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/gui.html#search-sort

bernie

[fidvo]

Where are you looking at the way it's sorting?

In the main Calibre window? Because in there, Calibre sorts exactly the way you tell it to. Click on a column heading and it sorts by that column. Pretty standard for column/row-based sorting. If you're seeing weird results here, it's not because Calibre's doing anything wrong. Maybe you didn't put the series id number in brackets, or maybe you used inconsistent spelling in the series name. Or maybe you clicked on Series first, then Title. If you want to sort on Series then Title, click on Title first then Series. A little counterintuitive at first, but it makes perfect sense if you think about it. And once again, this is the standard way software of this type works.

Are you looking in the library folder itself? Don't do this. Because, don't. Poking around in the library folder is like looking under the hood of a car. There may be occasional times when you want to do this, but for day-to-day operation, you sit in the driver's seat and use the interface that was designed for that purpose.

Or are you looking at the sorting of books as you're adding them to your library? Calibre adds new books to the top of the list, which means if you add several books from a series, it adds Book 1 to the top, then Book 2 above that, then Book 3 above that, and so on. They end up in reverse order, but only temporarily. The next time you click on a column header or go into one of the Edit Metadata windows or restart Calibre, they'll be in the right place.

By the way, you might try the View Manager and Reading List plugins, both of which deal with sorting in different ways.

[phossler]

I really like the View Manager PI that fivdo mentioned. You can create multiple named views, each arranged in a different order

If you define and populate your own columns (Library Order in this case), you can sort by those also.

Combining these with the virtual library capability (mine is tag based) really give you a lot of flexibility

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by iamnuff

I've been trying to sort this out since I first got Calibre, but it seems like nonsense.

My books are all out of order. Changing the names often changes the order, but not in any pattern i can recognize and the "number" option in metadata doesn't seem to do anything.

You'd think that using the format "Series name, Book X" would order everything perfectly, but apparently calibre doesn't adhere to alphabetical/numerical ordering rules, because it likes to put book 9 at the top.

Honestly, would it be such a chore to enable us to drag and drop out ebooks into whatever order we want, then keep them there?
I'm at the point where I'm considering finding another ereader program because this one is so user-unfriendly. Putting my stuff in the right order should be the work of seconds or minutes.

calibre uses a standard alphanumeric sort on the title_sort field (A|An|The belong at the END)
Sounds like your problem is you are abusing the title field to contain series.
Use the series field -- that is what it is for. If you need series info in the title (readers that don't support series metadata) use a plugboard to add that during export.



Drag-and-drop ordering is a terrible idea, it has no flexibility whatsoever and is in general a bad design principle. (Using drag-and-drop to automatically mark contextual metadata is useful -- in VERY carefully controlled circumstances. Which this isn't.)

[iamnuff]

Ok, what I actually did was reinstall the Ereader. Now clicking the "title" column actually works, rather than doing nothing at all.

No idea what was up with it before, but I was expecting Calibre to auto-sort based on book name or series number, because the columns wasn't actually clickable.

Is there something in the options settings that locks them all in place or something? Because I may have done that by accident, or it might not have been anything I did at all.

either way, I got frustrated enough to reinstall the whole thing and now suddenly it works.

Not sure if it will continue sorting by title from now on, or if i'm going to have to tell it to do that every time I start Calibre up, but that's not a problem at all.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by iamnuff

Ok, what I actually did was reinstall the Ereader. Now clicking the "title" column actually works, rather than doing nothing at all.

No idea what was up with it before, but I was expecting Calibre to auto-sort based on book name or series number, because the columns wasn't actually clickable.

Is there something in the options settings that locks them all in place or something? Because I may have done that by accident, or it might not have been anything I did at all.

either way, I got frustrated enough to reinstall the whole thing and now suddenly it works.

Not sure if it will continue sorting by title from now on, or if i'm going to have to tell it to do that every time I start Calibre up, but that's not a problem at all.

e-reader?
Calibre is a:
1) Library manager
2) has a Format conversion tool
3) has a Book viewer (non-DRM)

Default Library order is the Order added. That is what you will see every time you start the program

UNLESS

You have set Preferences: Tweaks: <ID: sort_columns_at_startup>

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by theducks

e-reader?
Calibre is a:
1) Library manager
2) has a Format conversion tool
3) has a Book viewer (non-DRM)

Default Library order is the Order added. That is what you will see every time you start the program

UNLESS

You have set Preferences: Tweaks: <ID: sort_columns_at_startup>

@iamnuff - or as others have advised, install the View Manager plugin

BR