PRS-T1 How to "segregate" collections?

[MCSmarties]

Hi all,

Been torturing my brain trying to come up with ways to keep some order in my collections. I know that I can't do any hierarchical organizing, but I would still like to keep collections apart from others. For instance, I would like to keep "nonfiction" separate from "fiction", and "series" separate from "genre" tags. Note that I don't mean just putting the files in a different collection (that's trivial) but to keep a "type" of collection separate from another type. ("genre" vs. "series" for example).

Random thoughts below:

-I thought I could just add punctuation symbols (* or _ for example) to collect a certain type of collection at the beginning or end of the list, but the T1 appears to ignore those. Same with <space>, it will simply get sorted based on the first letter/number, not in front of everything else.

- can I force calibre to sync some book files as "periodicals"? The T1 has this whole separate category, seems like a waste just for the 2-3 different news sources I am likely to ever use. Why not use it to store all nonfiction stuff?

- the T1 displays some built-in collections at the top (unread books/periodicals and purchased books). Can I tweak these to show other things instead?

- of course I can for example just add a 0 in front of all non-fiction stuff (similar to a crude DDC/UDC classification) and a "z" in front of all the series, but is there a more elegant solution?

- finally, from screenshots on this forum I thought there would be a rolodex on the right-hand side. Turns out the T1 dropped this, the rolodex is only present on the older PRS-XXX series . Is there a way to bring it back?

Did anybody else wrestle with this conondrum? How did you solve it?

TL;DR: I want to group some collections together to find them easily on the T1. How?

[bla]

The only things you can do with collections on the T1 is create them,delete them add/remove content, sort the view by date ,title, author, there is no such thing as nested collections or linked collections or any other sort of organization if you are using calibre to manage/xfer books then individual unique tags will become collections, there is no physical analogue to collections they are virtual. given the sort capabilities and the search function I am at a loss to understand why you would NEED such a complex organization as opposed to wanting it as a preference. of course, in either case you are SOL as far as the t1 is concerned

[DuskyRose]

I don't think the T-1 is capable on it's own, to do more than a basic Collection setting. No or have I seen a way to force books into the Periodical Section.

For me, I use Caliber and the Tags column. I always put series info in the Title, since I always want the series books to sort together, inside each collection. Then you get a formula on how to name the Tags so that they'll sort near each other when you look at collections.

But the work all done in Calibre. I have a lot of genres and a lot of fanfic, and so far it's worked pretty well doing it that way.

[Bookworm_Girl]

This thread might help you. The way that you want to organize your collections sounds similar to how I have created mine using the powerful features of calibre.
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=160853

I have mine sorted first by categories (generes) and then by series. There is a photo in this post.
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...0&postcount=82

I explained the learning process of how to use calibre in this post:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...0&postcount=96

Hope that helps!

[doreenjoy]

I put a tilde ~ before the collection name I wanted to be first.

[MCSmarties]

Thanks everybody for your replies, specially Bookworm_Girl for the wealth of information (somehow or other I didn't find your posts before, must have used the wrong words). Will read this carefully now!

Originally Posted by doreenjoy

I put a tilde ~ before the collection name I wanted to be first.

I thought of doing something similar. Do you find that the Sony keeps all the ~ entries reliably before anything else? In my testing, all symbols I tried seemed to be more or less ignored, the order was only determined by the initial position. Maybe I didn't try a tilde though...

[Bookworm_Girl]

Originally Posted by doreenjoy

I put a tilde ~ before the collection name I wanted to be first.

I use special characters before collection names on my Kindle to force the sorting order.

[MCSmarties]

Hmmm... based on Bookworm_Girl's excellent post earlier, I created a custom column for "long" series and used the sony_collection_renaming_rules tweak to prepend "~":

sony_collection_name_template = '{category:|| }{value}'
sony_collection_renaming_rules = {'#main_series': '~'}

The good news is, it works - my "main" series collections are separated from the others. The bad news (or at any rate weird news) is, they appear at the END, not the beginning, of the list!
It's not a big deal, but it did surprise me. I still think that the sony T1 is quirky when it comes to sorting punctuation

Going to play a lot more with these tweaks.

[Bookworm_Girl]

That is interesting that it sorts the special character at the end. You could maybe develop label names like I did (My Tags, Read Tags, Series) that would force the sort order that you want. Maybe the labels could be as easy as Group 1, Group 2, etc.

[soseono]

I also noticed that in the Collections, special characters are sorted at the end. Weird. I haven't tried numbers, though. If 0 (zero) doesn't work, something like aaa might do the trick.

One thing I miss is the built-in Author collections from the past; yes I can create them via Calibre, but that just makes the Collections pages too long. So right now I'm just sticking to the Series collections.

[filmo]

From home page touch on books and see books listed by Title. Top right hand corner of screen to left of magnify glass is icon with down arrow AZ touch this icon to bring up sort by page. Choices are; Date, Title, Author, File Name, Latest Read. I have more than 2000 books on SD card and it changes sorted order in 2 seconds because I set displaying Sort (Author) and Title without covers. Displaying covers with that many books is not practical as it is stuck sorting covers and running down batteries.

[frozennorth]

Originally Posted by filmo

From home page touch on books and see books listed by Title. Top right hand corner of screen to left of magnify glass is icon with down arrow AZ touch this icon to bring up sort by page. Choices are; Date, Title, Author, File Name, Latest Read. I have more than 2000 books on SD card and it changes sorted order in 2 seconds because I set displaying Sort (Author) and Title without covers. Displaying covers with that many books is not practical as it is stuck sorting covers and running down batteries.

Just want to add a bit to that. Once you're in the books section with your preferred sort order, do a quick tap on the bottom where the page numbers are and you get a scroll bar which makes it very quick and easy to navigate to the book you want.

[salines]

Hi,
just use a simple "." at the beginning of the series/collections.