Manual Creation / Management of Collections

[ahi]

I would like to manage my collections more manually than either the Sony Library or Calibre enable me to. Is there a tool that lets one do so?

Specifically my issue is that I'd like to manage through scripting what book goes into what collection, having most books be part of more than one collections... basically using collections a bit more unorthodoxly than they were probably meant to be.

Doing this through a GUI is a bit of a pain, so I'd really like to be able to provide a formatted list or XML file to a console tool that does the "magic" for the collections.

- Ahi

Ps.: My apologies if I am less coherent than I ought to be. I feel a bit iffy with my terminology on this topic.

[gwynevans]

Have you looked at the 'tags' feature of Calibre, as that would seem to allow what you describe. Other than that, it's a matter of parsing and editing the media.xml file on the device.

[ahi]

Originally Posted by gwynevans

Have you looked at the 'tags' feature of Calibre, as that would seem to allow what you describe. Other than that, it's a matter of parsing and editing the media.xml file on the device.

Maybe I need to take a second look at Calibre.

Are books within collections sorted by title or author or something specific? Or is it an order that has to be manually specified?

I suppose I might have to resort to making a script manually output a media.xml file, if Calibre's way is not quite what I want.

- Ahi

[ahi]

Well, tags in Calibre are pretty good... except for the fact that books within tag-based collections appear in random order... or, at least, not by title and not by author. Under what circumstances is this what people expect Calibre to do?

- Ahi

[gwynevans]

Calibre makes collections by series & tags. With series, you can set an order, but a book can only be in 1 series at a time. It can also be in multiple tags, but they're not ordered.

[ahi]

Originally Posted by gwynevans

Calibre makes collections by series & tags. With series, you can set an order, but a book can only be in 1 series at a time. It can also be in multiple tags, but they're not ordered.

Are tag-based collections useful for anything than?

I cannot think of any kind of collection, no matter how short, where random sorting would be acceptable to me...

[pepak]

Originally Posted by ahi

I would like to manage my collections more manually than either the Sony Library or Calibre enable me to. Is there a tool that lets one do so?

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=29217

You can either use the tool directly or use its source code as a basis for your own tool.

[gwynevans]

Originally Posted by ahi

Are tag-based collections useful for anything than?

I cannot think of any kind of collection, no matter how short, where random sorting would be acceptable to me...

Browsing by genre, maybe? e.g. SciFi, StarTrek, Thriller, Classics, Java, Python, Library.

[ahi]

Originally Posted by pepak

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=29217

You can either use the tool directly or use its source code as a basis for your own tool.

Thanks, Pepak! That looks more like what I need.

Does your program let (1) arbitrary playlists be defined, and (2) books to appear in more than one playlist?

- Ahi

[pepak]

Originally Posted by ahi

Does your program let (1) arbitrary playlists be defined, and (2) books to appear in more than one playlist?

1) Not sure what you mean by "arbitrary playlist", but the answer probably is "yes". You can use two types of playlists, either list-based (you provide a list of files which belong to a particular collection) or regular-expression-based (you provide a regular expression and tell the program which part of it should be considered collection title).

2) With list-based playlists, yes.

[pepak]

And you can always modify the source to suit your needs.

[ahi]

Thanks, pepak! That's what I'm looking for.