Question regarding 'related titles'

[kjdavies]

My biggest library is full of RPG material. Many of these books have supplementary files (web enhancements, errata documents, FAQs, etc.).

My technical library is similar: Python book has one or more related code decks, and so on.

Conceivably I could have multiple editions of the same book.

Is there a good way to associate two titles? The first option that comes to mind is a tag field for this purpose. Part of me thinks I want an explicit "this title is connected to that one", but I suppose a tag that says these titles are connected somehow will be sufficient.

(IOW, I see a way to do it, I wonder if there's another way.)

[Karellen]

Could you group them in a Series?

[BetterRed]

I use calibre://book-details & show-book URL's in a long text column (#links/Links), if Books A, B and C are related:

Book A would have a show-book link to itself, and book-details links to Book B and C
Book B would have a show-book link to itself, and book-details links to Book A and C
Book C would have a show-book link to itself, and book-details links to Book A and B

Example: I link Shakespeare's The Tempest and Huxley's Brave New World. As well as the calibre://URLs, the Links columns for the two books have Miranda's:

O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't.

See The calibre:// URL scheme

BR

[theducks]

That seems to make them part of a series.
If the relate to a particular volume, the the series index would be vol#.2
If it just belongs to the entire series 0.2
I picked .2 to allow for normal between releases

[kjdavies]

Originally Posted by Karellen

Could you group them in a Series?

I hadn't thought of series.

Pondering...

What would it look like if they were in series, particularly if there is no particular order to them? If they were different versions/editions of a book I can see it, but if it's something like a student book and an answer key -- clearly they are related, but I don't see an index that likely should apply, unless there is a convention applied (# = base book, #.1 is supplementary material, #.9 is the key).

I'll think about it. I'm still leaning toward a specialized tag, since 1. not all related books have an inherent order, and 2. it is conceivable I'd want books to be linked in multiple ways and a title can be part of only one series (in that field, at least).

[kjdavies]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

I use calibre://book-details & show-book URL's in a long text column (#links/Links), if Books A, B and C are related:

Book A would have a show-book link to itself, and book-details links to Book B and C
Book B would have a show-book link to itself, and book-details links to Book A and C
Book C would have a show-book link to itself, and book-details links to Book A and B

Example: I link Shakespeare's The Tempest and Huxley's Brave New World. As well as the calibre://URLs, the Links columns for the two books have Miranda's:

O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't.

See The calibre:// URL scheme

BR

If I'm not mistaken, the calibre links depend -- reasonably so -- on their ID. That seems pretty brittle, unless you never move a book from one library to another, and never merge.

I like the idea, and I admit I wasn't aware of that facility, but I don't think it'll work the way I need it to for my use case. I move files between libraries quite a bit... though that might settle down as I get my libraries cleaned up.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by kjdavies

If I'm not mistaken, the calibre links depend -- reasonably so -- on their ID. That seems pretty brittle, unless you never move a book from one library to another, and never merge.

I like the idea, and I admit I wasn't aware of that facility, but I don't think it'll work the way I need it to for my use case. I move files between libraries quite a bit... though that might settle down as I get my libraries cleaned up.

In my case, once a book is in its target library it doesn't move; a) the reason I have multiple libraries is because they contain different content types (books, media clips, periodicals, etc) with disparate custom column requirements; b) before a book reaches its target library I jump though hoops to get its Title and Author spot on.

And in 12 years of using calibre I have never had to rebuild a library from scratch, not even my Test library which is a dogs breakfast metadata-wise, and a shambles content-wise.

Initially I used a home grown linking regime via the server and http:// links containing author names and titles. When Kovid implemented calibre:// links I switched immediately.

BR