Kindle Voyage Secondary Sort

[scifantasy]

Hi, all. I've been reading these fora off and on for a while--the community here has been invaluable for understanding how to get the best use out of Kindle and Calibre. Thanks!

Now, I've come across a situation that I can't find an answer to on my own or through some searching here, so I figured I'd post and ask.

After a rather impressive three years or so, my old five-button Kindle (pre-touchscreen) finally gave up the ghost earlier this year, so I splurged on a Voyage. Generally, I'm in favor of it--the screen is fantastic, the interface fairly clean. A few additional bells and whistles, some of which seem unnecessary (I run my Kindle in offline mode entirely so I don't generally encounter them), but it's a solid device.

However, the one problem I have is the sorting.

My setup is fairly simple, I imagine. All my books are in a Calibre library--new books get downloaded on my computer and added to Calibre immediately--and everything is loaded onto the Kindle via Calibre. Typically, I keep my Kindle library sorted by author, and on the old model, the secondary sort was publication date, and failing that, upload order. This meant that I could manipulate the ordering of books within a given author name through the order in which I loaded them on to the device.

Now, however, the Kindle Voyage sorts by a straight title check within a given author. This means that any series I have--such as Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos series--ends up scattered by title across the author's name section of my library.

Unfortunately, the solution I can think of to solve the title--a plugboard modification to prepend the series and book number to the title upon upload, the same way .mobi books (and it's only mobi; KF8 don't need it, I've learned) get author_sort edits for multiple-author support--is aesthetically displeasing: I wouldn't want to see "Vlad Taltos I: Jhereg," "Vlad Taltos II: Yendi," and so on down the line. (Imagine that with the Dresden Files, and the problem gets even worse.)

And it does look like the Kindle uses the actual Title field, not any hidden field; there doesn't seem to be any way to get the Kindle to read one metadata attribute as the Title, and yet display another onscreen.

Or am I wrong about that?

My question is just that: is there any way to get the Kindle Voyage to sort, as a secondary characteristic within an author's name given Author Sort, on anything other than the actual and displayed Title field?

(I suspect the answer is no--but I want to make sure.)

I should mention that I haven't downloaded the latest firmware, so if the solution is there, great!

Thanks in advance, and thanks again for all the help over the years.

(And apologies for being wordy...)

[HarryT]

No.

I don't see the problem with using a plugboard for sorting by series within author. It's what I've done for years and it works extremely well.

[scifantasy]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I don't see the problem with using a plugboard for sorting by series within author. It's what I've done for years and it works extremely well.

From a technical perspective, there's no problem; it's all aesthetic/personal-preference stuff. It just feels less...elegant, to me. *shrug*