[GUI Plugin] Kindle Collections (old)

[mje2]

Just downloaded Calibre yesterday and have been learning to use it.

I imported the books from my K3 (the one with the physical keyboard. I think that's the k3...)

I installed the collections plugin and created a custom column for the collections.

I imported the current collections from my Kindle then went through my collection and assigned collections to each book - I have no other books than what was on my Kindle.

I then transfered the collections to the Kindle.

I can't figure out how many items I have. Amazon says I have 159 items when I go to the Manage my Kindle page. My Kindle says there are 170 items when I sort by title and Calibre is saying I have 192. Totally confused...

Anyway, I transfered the collections to my Kindle. I have 88 books that did not receive the collection information even though I have it in Calibre. I tried twice with the same result.

yes, I did reset the Kindle after copied the collections to my Kindle.

Any idea why my number of books doesn't match? (I know that really belongs in another thread but didn't know if it might be a related problem)

Any idea why the collections might not be transfering?

Thanks!

[KindelFan]

I would like to enhanche this good plugin with a function that does not copy the hand made colletions from Autors if there is a series Tag in the books.

Now it is like this:

Autor1 Book1 (no series)
Autor1 Book 2 (no series)
Autor1 Book3 (no series)

Get me:

Collection Autor1

But this:


Autor1 Book1 series1
Autor1 Book 2 series1
Autor1 Book3 series1

Gets me this:

Collection Series1
Collection Autor1

As it is, i dont want the collection Autor1 if all the books from him are also in a Series collection.

Also i cant deactivate the autors collections cause all the books from the same autor with no series should be getting in there.

Unfortunatelly i lack the programming skills to acomplish this. It should be easy i guess there is only a buton needed "dont do Autors collection if the books are in a serires collecion as well"

Could someone implement this?

Thanks

[Vaesse]

I'm doing that with a custom column that lists series where there is one and author when there is no series. Then I make the collections based on the custom column, not the author and/or series.

I'm not able to get to the settings now, but if no one else gives you the details on how to do this before I get back to Calibre, I'll post them when I can.

[astmario]

Is there way to sort books by order in series? By default everything is mixed together and I cant know by what order should I read the books in collection. All books have edited metadata, series, order in series, but when I transfer them to Kindle I cant see that info. Any help?

[kiwidude]

Originally Posted by astmario

Is there way to sort books by order in series? By default everything is mixed together and I cant know by what order should I read the books in collection. All books have edited metadata, series, order in series, but when I transfer them to Kindle I cant see that info. Any help?

Are you using a metadata plugboard to set your book titles when they are transferred to your Kindle to contain the series information? See this sticky. Then it is just a case of setting your Kindle to sort by title within a collection.

Alternatively you can set to sort by Author, in which case the display is reverse published date, which you can fiddle with in calibre so that also reflects series order. Assuming a Kindle 3 this trick works, which your profile shows.

Or do both - set metadata plugboard up, change your pubdate column values to reflect order you want, then sort by author within collections. That way you can read all books by an author in the order they published (just remember their oldest books are at the end of the list).

[KindelFan]

Originally Posted by Vaesse

I'm doing that with a custom column that lists series where there is one and author when there is no series. Then I make the collections based on the custom column, not the author and/or series.

I'm not able to get to the settings now, but if no one else gives you the details on how to do this before I get back to Calibre, I'll post them when I can.

Thanks. It would be very nice if you could post the settings....

Will the custom collum be in calibre or only in the plugin ?

Thanks again

[Vaesse]

KindelFan, the custom column would be in Calibre, and referenced by the plugin. What I have is:

Column built from other columns
{series:'test($,re(re($,"(^.*?)\.+?(.*)","\1 & \1.\2"),"\.+?"," - "),field("author_sort"))'}

And I now remember there's a slight complication to mine that I'm not sure how to remove... I have it looking for "sub-series" so that I can have my books show both in "Doctor Who" and "Doctor Who.1st Doctor" (as Doctor Who - 1st Doctor). If you don't use sub-series, and have no "." in series, there's no reason my settings wouldn't work for you, though it's more complicated than necessary. If you do have periods in your series, you'll either need someone more knowledgeable about the language than me to remove the complication, or wait until my brother visits (should be later tonight), and I'll try to get him to uncomplicate.

[KindelFan]

Originally Posted by Vaesse

KindelFan, the custom column would be in Calibre, and referenced by the plugin. What I have is:

Column built from other columns
{series:'test($,re(re($,"(^.*?)\.+?(.*)","\1 & \1.\2"),"\.+?"," - "),field("author_sort"))'}

And I now remember there's a slight complication to mine that I'm not sure how to remove... I have it looking for "sub-series" so that I can have my books show both in "Doctor Who" and "Doctor Who.1st Doctor" (as Doctor Who - 1st Doctor). If you don't use sub-series, and have no "." in series, there's no reason my settings wouldn't work for you, though it's more complicated than necessary. If you do have periods in your series, you'll either need someone more knowledgeable about the language than me to remove the complication, or wait until my brother visits (should be later tonight), and I'll try to get him to uncomplicate.

Hello Vaesse,

Thanks for the help. Unfortunatelly i do have . in my series and i belive i have some sub series as well. Could you be of any help with that ? That regexp is just too much for me.....

[cooldude]

I've recently change from the Kindle4 to a Kindle Touch and found I can no longer use the "kindle collections" in Calibre to manage my collections.

I was gutted, but following the suggestion at the beginning of the forum, I sent an e-mail to Amazon, imploring them to enable this ability on the Kindle touch..........

Well from the response I got back, I wonder if the support staff have ever used a Kindle or if they are even aware that you can buy content from any other source other than Amazon........... they were absolutely useless and not interested.

[kiwidude]

@cooldude - yep it is reason enough to not bother buying a 4th gen Kindle for me personally. If you go looking in the Kindle forum on MobileRead you can see what people are doing as alternative ways of managing their Kindle collections. We are trying to keep this thread focused on the Kindles the plugin *can* support and as mentioned in the first post of this thread the K4 Touch & Fire are not possible at this time.

[Casseres]

I'm not familiar with the formating for the custom column templates, but based on Vaesse's template a few posts earlier, I have:

{series:'test($,re(re($,"(^.*?)\.+?(.*)","\1 & \1.\2"),"\.+?"," - "),field("authors"))'}{series:'test($,re(re(" - Series","(^.*?)\.+?(.*)","\1 & \1.\2"),"\.+?"," - ")," - Author")'}

Which gives me either "SeriesName - Series" or "AuthorFirstLast - Author".

What I would like is "AuthorFirstLast - Author" to appear if there are only 3 or more books by that author that are not in a series. I feel that it would be silly to have a collection for an author if that author only has one book.

If someone could point me to a better explanation rather than http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/template_lang.html - that would be great because it is a bit confusing for me.

Thanks in advance for any insight.

EDIT

I've found some other code which is a little more simple:
{series:'ifempty($, field("authors"))'}{series:'ifempty(" - Series", " - Author")'}
except the second part always gives me " - Series".

[Vaesse]

Sorry I didn't get back to you... one at a time, my whole family has been coming down with bad week-long head colds... my son was just diagnosed with pneumonia. I'll try to get back to this when we're all feeling better.

[affa]

ok, I'm new to kindle collections.

Here's my problem -- I've set it to auto-create collections based on Series (which i painstakingly fixed for all my books). However, I use a metadata plugboard and email my books to my kindles.

This creates a problem, because I'll end up with a book title like

The Bone Collector
in Calibre

vs.
Lincoln Rhyme [1] - The Bone Collector
on my kindle, and Calibre does not realize they are the same book.

And since Calibre doesn't recognize they're the same book, no collection is created.

I'm sure someone has a solution for this?

[Casseres]

I'm sorry to hear Vaesse. Take your time; family first. I'll be here when you're ready. Thanks.

[affa]

Originally Posted by affa

ok, I'm new to kindle collections.

Here's my problem -- I've set it to auto-create collections based on Series (which i painstakingly fixed for all my books). However, I use a metadata plugboard and email my books to my kindles.

This creates a problem, because I'll end up with a book title like

The Bone Collector
in Calibre

vs.
Lincoln Rhyme [1] - The Bone Collector
on my kindle, and Calibre does not realize they are the same book.

And since Calibre doesn't recognize they're the same book, no collection is created.

I'm sure someone has a solution for this?

Okay, I asked about this in it's own thread (since it isn't specific to this plugin) and...

it turns out that it's because books are transferred via email + plugboard, and... well, it basically means there's no (current) solution. i can either have 'on device' work (email without plugboard) or I can have my series work correctly (email with plugboard), but i can't have both.

it's unfortunate, since that basically renders this awesome plugin useless to me, since as soon as i plugboard my series titles in, it loses the 'on device' and can no longer recognize series info.

it would work fine via USB, but that's simply not an option for me. if we were able to affect the name matching for 'on device' somehow (like, tell it to ignore the series info via a regular expression) i could get around it, but that's currently not exposed.