Help with Series Setup

[AbPho]

Hello.

First off, I am not sure if I am calling this feature/operation correctly.

On my Kobo I currently sort/browse books via Shelves (calibre), or Collections (Kobo). If there are a set of books on a shelf that belong to a series I have been manually renaming the book titles to incorporate the series number. For example: Harry Potter & the Philosopher's Stone [1]. This reminds me which order the books are in. Very simple.

Recently in one of my collections I have noticed an additional line of text between the book title and the authors name. Specifically in this case it says:
Book Title
THE WHITE RABBIT CHRONICLES - #
Gena Showalter

I prefer this to my renaming method. I have been playing around in Calibre to try and get this to happen with all my books that are part of a series. I followed the instructions to setup a shelves and collections here to no avail. This might completely be the wrong thing for me.

After playing around some of my books previously had this extra line of text and now they are gone, or so I believe. These books were either purchased from kobo or sideloaded.

My question is; is it possible to add this line of text to have the series name and number show up on the Kobo?

Thank you in advance for any guidance. I can attach pictures is that helps people understand in case I am naming these headings incorrectly.

Cheers!

[AbPho]

Update:

The icing on the cake would be if I could sort each Collection on my kobo by this heading. Instead of the current Recent, Title, Author, File Size, File Type, and Date Added heading.

[MGlitch]

No, you can currently only sort by the options provided by Kobo, no patch or tweak can currently change this*. What you could do is swap out your books series metadata with the title metadata. Though you'd need to ensure you didn't have Calibre doing anything which might make this funky. And even then it's not a very pretty way to sort things.

This would result in the following

Series Name #
Book Name
Author

For books not in a series you would just leave the title in the title field. As I've stated this is not going to be a pretty solution, and is bound to have issues. Calibre would probably not love having so many unique series, though I'm sure it could handle it.

*I don't consider KoReader to be a patch or a tweak to Kobo since it entirely replaces Nickle. I think what you want may be possible in koreader, but I'm not sure as I've not used it.

[davidfor]

For getting the series info populated on the device, all you need to do is select the "Set series" option in the driver configuration, make sure the "Metadata management" option on the "Sending books to device" page of the calibre preferences is set to automatic and connect the device. Then, for every book on the device that is matched to a book in the current calibre library, the series information will be set. And whenever you connect the device, if there have been changes in the calibre library, they will be sent to the device.

The above only happens for books on the device that have been processed into the library. If you send a new book to the device, you need to disconnect, let it be processed by the firmware and then connect again.

So, the most common reasons for the series info not being updated are:

• New book added to the device and not processed
• Metadata management option not set to automatic
• Wrong driver configured. If you use the extended driver, you need to configure that.
• Book on device doesn't match a book in the library. This is common for purchased books as the title commonly includes the series info.

If the above still doesn't work, then I need a calibre debug log to look at. I can usually tell what is going wrong from this.

For series sorting, there is no support for using the series info for sorting. The only way to do it with recent firmware is to add the series info to the title or author. Using metadata plugboard is the best way to do this. The link you have has the details needed.

[AbPho]

Thanks David and Glitch.

I got it sorted. I understand the process. I did check my settings. I only had to change my Metadata Management setting.

With Calibre I transfer my book(s). Eject the Kobo. Reconnect the Kobo (with Calibre still running). Eject the Kobo again. And then I have my series info displayed. Yay.

I renamed all my books to NOT include the series info in the titles anymore.

This is so much better. Thanks again.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by AbPho

Thanks David and Glitch.

I got it sorted. I understand the process. I did check my settings. I only had to change my Metadata Management setting.

If I was a betting man, I would have put money on that being the problem

With Calibre I transfer my book(s). Eject the Kobo. Reconnect the Kobo (with Calibre still running). Eject the Kobo again. And then I have my series info displayed. Yay.

I renamed all my books to NOT include the series info in the titles anymore.

It looks so much cleaner when you do this. I just wish I could sort on the series info. Well, I really want a series list - looks like the Collections list but for the series. Sure, I can create collections for the series, but the information is in metadata, so the device can do it for me. And I'd prefer not to mix the two concepts.