Send to Device with series order

[chaley]

@all of you with 650s:

As I have said, I don't have a 650. However, given the questions in this thread, I read the manual and several reviews. One thing stands out. Apparently a 650 can change the sort order when displaying collections (my 300 cannot). I don't know what all the options are, but it seems that the choices include (at least) author, title, and "by added order".

When calibre builds a collection, it does it in such a way that the reader thinks the books were added in the order dictated by the sort calibre used. As such, calibre's order will (or should) be seen only when 'by added order' is selected. Selecting anything else will sort in some other way. My guess is that choosing author will sort the collection strictly alphabetically using the author field, in which case 'David Weber' will sort before 'Eric Flint' because 'D' is less than 'E'. If there is a title option, then again I guess that it will sort strictly alphabetically, but in this case it might use the title_sort field instead of the title field.

Can anyone confirm the above?

Note that the sony's database, which includes calibre's 'added order', can be seen by looking at the the file at /database/cache/media.xml in the device's memory (not the storage card). There is no problem with looking at this file, but I strongly recommend that you don't change it. It is a text file, and can be opened with notepad++, wordpad, or any other editor that understands unix line endings (\n only). Each book is a line of XML, with the syntax fieldname="some data". The collections are a list of IDs, which refer to the id= attribute in a book's XML. Of interest would be:
- verify that the order of books in a collection in the database matches the order seen when sorting by 'added order'.
- to see if there is a title_sort field for each record, and if so whether it differs from title, and if so whether sorting by title will actually sort by title_sort.

[marie44]

Originally Posted by chaley

@all of you with 650s:

As I have said, I don't have a 650. However, given the questions in this thread, I read the manual and several reviews. One thing stands out. Apparently a 650 can change the sort order when displaying collections (my 300 cannot). I don't know what all the options are, but it seems that the choices include (at least) author, title, and "by added order".

When calibre builds a collection, it does it in such a way that the reader thinks the books were added in the order dictated by the sort calibre used. As such, calibre's order will (or should) be seen only when 'by added order' is selected. Selecting anything else will sort in some other way. My guess is that choosing author will sort the collection strictly alphabetically using the author field, in which case 'David Weber' will sort before 'Eric Flint' because 'D' is less than 'E'. If there is a title option, then again I guess that it will sort strictly alphabetically, but in this case it might use the title_sort field instead of the title field.

Can anyone confirm the above?

I was beginning to wonder if we were talking across each other - I think this confirms it! The options I have to sort by within a collection are: Added Order (default showing), Date, Title, Author, File Name. And yes, Author sorts alphabetically by first name (although through a thread on this forum I was able to change the names displayed to Last Name, First Name and it now sorts by last name when I sort by Author.) I am not sure how to determine if Title is sorting by title or title_sort - I think by title_sort, though, since it does ignore the articles a,an,the?

What I had originally wanted was, when I sort by Author in a collection, to see w/in each author series arranged in order, which obviously hasn't worked out so well. However - given what you've said about the "By Added Order" option, I can see that on my device "Added Order" displays books in order by title, and if there is series information the series title is substituted for the title, and then w/in series sorted by series index - and sorts all series correctly(!). If I could get it to sort, on the "Added Order" display, by author first and then in order by title & series information, that would be pretty damn close to what I want. I'm assuming (hoping!) there's probably a way to adjust my #sony_sort column to reflect this?

[marie44]

@chaley: This seems to do it - I changed #sony_sort to:

{author_sort} - {series}{series_index:0>2s| | - }{title}

and it's displaying correctly in the "Added Order" sort option in collections. Now if only "Added Order" had the little alphabet along the side like Title & Author sort do to make browsing easier, I'd be thrilled. :P In the meantime, this will do! Thank you!!!

Oh, and I'm glad my "unrelated problem" earlier regarding the prequel being out of order was useful.

And as long as I have people's attention - when I view my "all books" option, it default sorts by author, and, I think courtesy of jackie_w's plugboard I'd implemented earlier, it does group series together - but it orders them in reverse order. I don't use this view hardly ever, but I'm still curious as why it's doing this (or, more likely, what I did by accident to make it do this), if anybody has any thoughts.