Troubleshooting KINDLE 3 ORGANIZE SERIES

[kams13]

Kindle's biggest downfall is easily its inability to organize - big shocker there - everyone knows this already.

I use a Macbook Pro, Calibre, and I have a Kindle 3. My quandry is this - I can't seem to get the books to organize themselves on my Kindle 3. For example - I read several series - the one I'm having trouble with right now is the Vlad Taltos series by Steven Brust. I edit the metadata in Calibre for the series and then transfer it and most of them stay in the correct order (so when i sort by author - they come up in the series order) except for ONE BOOK. it always ends up at the end or in some random place amongst my other books.

When i put the books in collections it doesn't organize it self properly either. All the other series that I have thus far put on have stayed in the correct order. I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.

I do not want to put number and the series name in front of all my titles.

Does anybody have any other solution??

[abookreader]

hmmm -
well when you say that you "don't want to put the series and number in front of the title" do you mean that you don't want to go in and manually fix your book titles to be that -- or that you don't want it to display that way on your Kindle?

I use the Calibre Plug-Board method myself so that when I open a collection my books display the No, Series and Book Title on the Kindle screen. You can read about it up in the Calibre Forum but it doesn't require actually changing the title of the book in Calibre. It just combines the fields before sending the info over to the Kindle. This is how a book displays on my Kindle Screen. When arranged by Title they then sort by series and then number...

Earth's Children - 01 - Clan of the Cave Bear Jean Auel
Earth's Children - 02 - Valley of the Horses Jean Auel


I really don't know of a way to make them properly sort on the Kindle without that. Also, if you don't display the Series then Author Collections that contain more than one series are extra likely to get all mixed up.

[StickMaker]

similar gripe here. I finally started a txt file on the 'puter and every time I add or delete a book, I manually edit this list. I save the list on my 'puter's desktop and in the Kindle "documents." Not very efficient but it works. I show title, author, file-size.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by StickMaker

I finally started a txt file on the 'puter and every time I add or delete a book, I manually edit this list. I save the list on my 'puter's desktop and in the Kindle "documents."

Does typing two less characters really save you that much time when writing about a "computer?" Don't read too much into my criticism, but 'puter is probably one of the silliest looking (and sounding) clusters of letters I've ever witnessed. How about comp. or PC, or something?

[chilady1]

Originally Posted by abookreader

hmmm -
well when you say that you "don't want to put the series and number in front of the title" do you mean that you don't want to go in and manually fix your book titles to be that -- or that you don't want it to display that way on your Kindle?

I use the Calibre Plug-Board method myself so that when I open a collection my books display the No, Series and Book Title on the Kindle screen. You can read about it up in the Calibre Forum but it doesn't require actually changing the title of the book in Calibre. It just combines the fields before sending the info over to the Kindle. This is how a book displays on my Kindle Screen. When arranged by Title they then sort by series and then number...

Earth's Children - 01 - Clan of the Cave Bear Jean Auel
Earth's Children - 02 - Valley of the Horses Jean Auel


I really don't know of a way to make them properly sort on the Kindle without that. Also, if you don't display the Series then Author Collections that contain more than one series are extra likely to get all mixed up.

abookreader - I am using the metadata plug board (assuming that is what you are using) and quick question to you. Does your series end up in order in the Collections,meaning:

Book 1
Book 2
Book 3, etc.

I am using the following as a metadata plug board:

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

My books are ordering in the following manner:

Book 3
Book 2
Book 1

Don't understand this and it is very confusing why the books order this way within my Collections. Any thoughts??

[kams13]

Originally Posted by chilady1

abookreader - I am using the metadata plug board (assuming that is what you are using) and quick question to you. Does your series end up in order in the Collections,meaning:

Book 1
Book 2
Book 3, etc.

I am using the following as a metadata plug board:

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

My books are ordering in the following manner:

Book 3
Book 2
Book 1

Don't understand this and it is very confusing why the books order this way within my Collections. Any thoughts??

I finally got the vlad taltos series to order it self correctly - im not sure what exactly i did though....

but now, on the terry goodkind series, my books are also ordering 3, 2, 1. it is extremely confusing

I'm not sure what the plugboard thing is - i might have to look it up

Also - to answer an earlier question - i just didn't want it to display that way on the kindle. I'm sort of OCD that way - i like everything to look the same for all my books... I may not have a choice though.

and thank you PhillipA82 for welcoming me to the forums!

[abookreader]

@Chilady -

My first guess is that on the top line where it shows how you are sorting you have it saying "Most Recent First." Change that to sort "By Title" to get it to alphabetize.

[kams13]

FIXED IT

I don't know why...


Ok... so after loading and reloading and trying this way of sorting or THAT way of sorting... I finally got it to work...

1) all my ebooks are in the same format
- i originally converted all my books to mobi, then manually moved the mobi files out of the calibre library folder and into the folder where i store my ebooks. I then deleted the books from calibre and reloaded the mobi books

i don't know if this made any difference what so ever - but just to be SURE this is what i did. I also know that if you select the books and click "edit metadata bulk" you can choose to delete other formats

2) I edited all the meta data so it reflected what i wanted (i put in the series, and put them in the correct order 1, 2, 3 etc)

3) I changed all the "publication dates" to the same date. I chose dec 21 2008 just because that was the first one i came across (although not the original publication date of the first novel).

I'm not sure how much of a difference this made - but i do know that i hadn't tried this before and it wasnt working - and after doing it it DID work.

4) Helps if alot of the other information is deleted too (ie summary, who publishes it, tags)

Good luck to anybody else out there!

[kams13]

Originally Posted by abookreader

@Chilady -

My first guess is that on the top line where it shows how you are sorting you have it saying "Most Recent First." Change that to sort "By Title" to get it to alphabetize.

As i said in my original post - i tried sorting it by every way (by author, title, collections etc) and it wasn't working. But as per my above post - i fixed it!

[chilady1]

Originally Posted by kams13

FIXED IT

I don't know why...


Ok... so after loading and reloading and trying this way of sorting or THAT way of sorting... I finally got it to work...

2) I edited all the meta data so it reflected what i wanted (i put in the series, and put them in the correct order 1, 2, 3 etc)

3) I changed all the "publication dates" to the same date. I chose dec 21 2008 just because that was the first one i came across (although not the original publication date of the first novel).

Good luck to anybody else out there!

I use to do this also, but with the Calibre metadata plugboard, the goal is not to have to do all this manual work to get the series in the correct order. I have to just play with the plugboard to get the series to appear in the right order, i know it is something small.

UPDATED: I was sorting by Most Recent First not Title, therefore, they showed up in reverse order. Now, having them sort by Title, all books are lined up in order from 1 thru X. So happy that someone pointed this out to me. It's the little things. Good luck Kams13, highly recommend you going over to the Calibre section of MobileRead and checking out the Kindle Collections plug-in. It cuts down on all the work you have to do to add Collections to your Kindle.