Calibre Catalog Feature Request

[Katsunami]

Hi

Yesterday I've decided to drop all my unread books onto my Kindle. They're too many to browse comfortably on the Kindle, but I have found that the Catalog does a wonderful job in helping me to find and select a book. I really like the sections the catalog creates, making it possible to search by author, series, genres, etc.

Today I got an idea. Sometimes I don't want to read a huge book and just want something short in between. I use the page count plugin, and decided to add another column for the tag browser:

1-100 (Short Stories)
101-200 (Novella)
201-300 (Short Novel)
301-400 (Standard Novel)
401-600 (Medium Novel)
601-800 (Long Novel)
801-1000 (Long Novel +)
1001-1200 (Tome)
1201-1400 (Tome +)
1401+ (Complete Tree)

This works beautifully to let m select a book in a desired range, but it seems not to be possible to add this column to the sections, apart from sacrificing Genre, and choose my Length colum instead of Tags.

Is it possible to add a custom section based on a custom column? If so, how can this be done? If not, is this a feature that could be implemented (relatively) easily?

[theducks]

Use saved searches (using your size names).
You can even select those from the Tag Browser

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Hi

Yesterday I've decided to drop all my unread books onto my Kindle. They're too many to browse comfortably on the Kindle, but I have found that the Catalog does a wonderful job in helping me to find and select a book. I really like the sections the catalog creates, making it possible to search by author, series, genres, etc.

Today I got an idea. Sometimes I don't want to read a huge book and just want something short in between. I use the page count plugin, and decided to add another column for the tag browser:

1-100 (Short Stories) #pages:<101
101-200 (Novella) #pages:>100 and #pages:<201
201-300 (Short Novel)
301-400 (Standard Novel)
401-600 (Medium Novel)
601-800 (Long Novel)
801-1000 (Long Novel +)
1001-1200 (Tome)
1201-1400 (Tome +)
1401+ (Complete Tree)

This works beautifully to let m select a book in a desired range, but it seems not to be possible to add this column to the sections, apart from sacrificing Genre, and choose my Length colum instead of Tags.

Is it possible to add a custom section based on a custom column? If so, how can this be done? If not, is this a feature that could be implemented (relatively) easily?

[Sabardeyn]

I cannot speak for calibre, but I know that the word count demarcations for books have always been a bit contentious for the book community as a whole (readers, authors, publishers, etc).

I intend to do something similar within my own database. However, I'm just adding the size terms as normal tags, not a new custom column. While helpful, I don't believe this information to be so critical that it must be handled as a distinct and discrete bit of data.

However, to play Devil's Advocate , I could see perhaps a derived column which would take the page count, perform a look-up on the size per your table and then display "Long Novel (927 pgs)" into the display, or similar, for each book record.

Now I'm not sure how that could be implemented exactly.... but apparently theducks has!

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by theducks

Use saved searches (using your size names).
You can even select those from the Tag Browser

Thanks. I actually didn't think of that.

However, the saved search does not show the number of books the search is going to find, as a custom column does.

Can this be set as well?
Can the saved search be used as a custom section in the Catalog?

I could of course just create a Length tag with a subset of lengths, and it (probably) will be in the Catalog, but then I'll need to look under Genre for book lengths. It's a workaround, but not very pretty