How do you manage short stories?

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

I make no difference between a short story or a novel-length story. And if a short story is part of a series and it's part of an anthology, I'll have the anthology (marked Anthology) and the short story as separate book.

That's what I've been saying. One could extract each story into a separate book to accomplish that but that would be even more time consuming than just making an empty book and it would eat up more disk space. Making an empty book for each short story would make more sense, especially if it could have a link that would open the anthology. Then one could use the anthology's TOC to get to the actual story. I see no point in making it any more complicated than necessary (although it seems geeks, engineers, etc. take great delight in doing so).

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald

Making an empty book for each short story would make more sense, especially if it could have a link that would open the anthology. Then one could use the anthology's TOC to get to the actual story. I see no point in making it any more complicated than necessary (although it seems geeks, engineers, etc. take great delight in doing so).

You're asking the "geeks and engineers" to add a complex feature that links an empty book to a pre-existing book elsewhere in the database (a feature that is not currently found in calibre, a feature that is totally contrary to calibre's existing design structure and one that has no other use I can see) and then you give them a poke in the ribs by saying that they are the ones who delight in complexity?

Personally, I just copy the index of short stories from the anthology TOC/index into the comments. When I search for a title, I always search using the search bar, never the tag browser, and I always just type into the search bar:

"short story name"

never

"title:=short story name"
I avoid looking in the GUI in alphabetical order to find SSs. Doing it this way guarantees I find the anthology that has the title of the SS in the comments. If it's a special SS, I might make an empty record and put the anthology name(s) in the comments.

[travger]

Exept I remember more often name of collection than ss; also, with empty books it is easier to find duplicate ss-s.

I never knew that searching comments like that is possible, made a note of it. Have not lost anything yet but by the time I need to find something I'll surely have forgotten this snippet of useful info. Thanks!

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by travger

Exept I remember more often name of collection than ss; also, with empty books it is easier to find duplicate ss-s.

I never knew that searching comments like that is possible, made a note of it. Have not lost anything yet but by the time I need to find something I'll surely have forgotten this snippet of useful info. Thanks!

You can control what fields are searched by a non-prefixed search in Preferences|Interface|Searching.

I believe the default used to be to search all fields, including comments. I became accustomed to being able to search the comments. Later, IIRC, the default was changed to exclude comments, but it was made user configurable, so I added it back in. I use it regularly.

It's not unusual for me to remember a character name, a genre or something about the plot. All that info is often in my comments. I copy lots of info into comments to make it searchable. A reviewer may state that book 1 reminds them of book 2. If I search for book 2, I like finding book 1, too. If I search for a character name, it's nice to find the book, etc.