[GUI Plugin] Kindle Collections (old)

[meme]

hrynkiw,

Great to hear its working well for you - thanks for the feedback.

[brewjono]

I have been dreading this plug-in as I was a staunch supporter of the Kindle Collection Manager and was hanging out for Adrian to do an update.

Last night I bit the bullet and installed it without a drama using Author Sort for all my colelctions.

I even managed to work out the "Never Delete" for 2 collections I had made up of bookclub recommendations that had individual authors.

I've also installed your Plugin Updater.

Thankyou very much for a job well done and Karma has been sent your way.

Brewjono

[meme]

Glad to see the plugin has worked for you. Always good to hear.

The Calibre team has made it a very easy to add plugins. And code from other collection programs along with kiwidude's examples made getting started possible. This isn't the only way to manage collections so I hope the other programs not requiring Calibre continue to develop.

As for the great Plugin Updater, that's all down to kiwidude so he's the one that deserves the thanks

[jegorah]

What do I do if I have calibre version 7.50? I don't know where to download the old version of calibre

[theducks]

Originally Posted by jegorah

What do I do if I have calibre version 7.50? I don't know where to download the old version of calibre

Go to the Download page, there is a link to older versions in the text there.

You have an older Device (firmware) that Calibre no longer supports?
O/S version limitations?

[Liesse]

Meme, thank you for your post in the Kindle Collection Manager thread. I've been afraid to try your plugin, for exactly the reasons you mention. I don't want to worry about tags, I just want to be able to sort my books by author or series or theme and make a collection for them by dragging and dropping.

I DO use calibre, but mainly for converting and storing my library and updating metadata. Much of its advanced functionality is scary.

Your post made me go and try it out. Hooray!

You CAN use the plugin to just create collections on the fly. Getting your books into them is a little cumbersome for those of us who like drag and drop, but selecting the collection in a dropdown box and ticking a box next to the title you want in the collection works ok. I really hope you continue to work on this aspect of the plugin for us Fraidy Cats who like to do it the non-automated way.

I like the way you can see whether a title is in a collection and how many it is in represented by the number.

I've just restarted my Kindle and all the changes I asked for are there.
Thank you very much for all your hard work.

Maybe I'll get around to playing with author sort. Though it sounds sort of scary....

[meme]

Originally Posted by jegorah

What do I do if I have calibre version 7.50? I don't know where to download the old version of calibre

Version 7.49 or later is okay for the plugin. I'll update the first post

[meme]

Liesse,

The Edit Collections feature was mainly put in to allow you to edit collections on the Kindle that you didn't manage by Calibre - e.g. like a Currently Reading list you want to update on the Kindle and via the plugin. But it can be used to manage all the collections. Not exactly what was intended, but if it works for you great

You can use the Preview mode to see what collections will get created without causing any changes to your collections. Play with the customizations and then hit preview. And if you do save the collections and change your mind you can restore the old collection file (but only the most recent one). You can also manually make a backup of your system/collection.json file just in case as well.

Tags really are pretty useful - and designed exactly for what you want. But I know a lot of books bring in their own tags which can make things a bit confusing, although there are ways around it. One step at a time. The main Calibre forum and Library Management subforum are always open for help and tips

Glad to see you like the collection count for books - I figured it would save a lot of looking around for books not in a collection. I'm working on improving the View Collection report to show books in collections and not in collections, and also making sure all the books in the Edit collection window have a Title and not a path name in some cases. Periodicals have been the biggest challenge, but I think I've got a handle on how to count them and identify how many Periodical Back issues there are. Its not really needed, but I'd like to be complete Shame we can't see Archived titles or the names of the internal Kindle files.

[TheD0ct0r]

Is there any way to add the Author to the plugin when editing collections directly on the Kindle? I have a DX, if it matters.

[meme]

Do you mean create a collection named by the Author - if so, just type the author name in the box and click + to add a new collection.

If you mean display the author's name next to the title in the list of titles, then yes I should be able to extract that tag from certain files and display it.

[TheD0ct0r]

Yes, I mean display the author's name next to the title. It would make it a lot easier to create collections by author.

Would that be a difficult change?

[meme]

Well, the easiest way to create collections by author is just to go to Customize and select Create for Author (or Author Sort) and remove Create from Tags (change it to blank). Then you can run Preview to see what happens - it should leave any Kindle only collections you created alone (unless they match the Author name) and create collections using the Author's name automatically.

But adding the author name to the title should be straightforward once I finish the other updates.

[pspringett]

Hi,

Just found this plug-in and have installed it and given it a whirl. My main reason for wanting it is to be able to put all my peridicals in a collection (I download The Economist through callibre). I actually manipulate the meta data of each downloaded edition so it shows up as I want it (tweaking the the name and the tag, and then download that version to my kindle via calibre.

Your overall help explains that there are dificulties with periodicals/news and collections. But I think you are saying that you will make this process easy from the next version (I've got 1.4.3). Have I read that correctly?

Meanwhile, I've tried to follow the instructions for tweaking the file type of the periodical, but I'm obviously missing something. I want to be able to put all my currently downloaded editions into a collection. Your notes seem to showing you how to tweak calibre so that all new downloads have a new tag which will automatically mean that the periodical can be put into a collection.

I don't understand how you use the steps below to tell calibre that books with a specific tag (a personal doc tag) should have their type updated. And what is the significance of the MOBI personal doc tag? Is the value of that used somewhere to manipulate the file type?

Apologies if I've missed something obvious.

If this is all going to be resolved in the next version that I'll happily wait, but as a software engineer I'm eager to know what's really going on here!

Phill

[meme]

When I wrote the original periodical information I didn't know much about periodicals (I probably still don't ) having only downloaded a couple to try.

After noticing that my list of book titles in the view collections report was showing the wrong number of titles for periodicals I did a bit more investigating (my Kindle files are a mess now and I'll have to remember to unsubscribe from the 14 day trials I signed up to ). After quite a few blind alleys I've found that the mobi files actually have 2 places where they encode the type of a file (fairly obvious if you look at the mobi format wiki here on Mobileread but I tend to jump in and try it to see what happens first ) (Looking at the wiki also helped me find that some files were in an old mobi format called palm doc which is why titles weren't showing up in the Edit list so I've been able to fix that).

I was originally using the cdetype in the extended header to tell if something was a periodical, but it turns out that the Kindle is mainly using the main type in the mobi header. This means it is not necessary to play around with cdetype/[PDOC] for Periodicals. (Its still necessary for Catalogs and News Feeds). And its not necessary to edit/delete Periodicals to put them into collections. But for 1.4.3 I'm blocking you from doing this because it looks at the wrong type when checking if you can put it into a collection.

So with the next version you should be able to just select the periodical and put it into a collection using Edit. Or if you import it into Calibre, just use create to put it in a collection, though I need to see what happens with the old file. Duplicate codes and titles confuse things - so I've added a section to the report to identify these for checking (along with invalid extensions) - sort of a quality check on what's on your Kindle.

With the right type field being used, and figuring out what files and cdetype's the Kindle ignores I can now identify which periodical should be listed in the main title list, and which should be in the Periodical Back Issues list (just to make the report look more like the Kindle's view). Can't figure out how the Kindle sorts books by most recent though - it stores some of this internally and some in mbp files - but that's not important to most uses.

Since the Kindle deletes older periodicals unless you save them though, if you put a periodical in a collection and the Kindle deletes it, you're left with an entry in the collection that has no file. I do highlight these in the report and Edit for cleanup - but since dictionaries and some other Kindle books have no files in the filesystem either, its difficult to tell what should be removed or what should be left except by looking at the collection on the Kindle for the title and comparing.

Oh, and so the answer to your question is, best to wait for the next version for the periodical stuff

[pspringett]

Thanks for the information though, and of course, the plugin!

Aah I see now. From looking at the mobi document using Mobi2MobiGui I can see that The Economist download has a mobi_type of 259 - News Magazine, and in fact it looks like it doesn't contain the cdetype in extended header.

Do you happen to know whether the kindle uses this field to stop it being put into a collection? And will your next version allow a MOBI file of type 259 without a cdetype to be added to a collection?

(Personally I don't care about the periodical back issue stuff - I'd be much happier controlling that myself rather than letting the kindle do it for me).

Phill