I need some help 'cause

[free_bird]

I don't have a clue as to how to do what I want to do. I'll keep it brief:

One of the things I really like about my droid is the Touchscreen feature.
What I wish to do is set set a table for a given series such that:

I can tap on the series name, and then the elements of that series would be displayed and i can tap on the book i want to read, instead of hunting for the book, ex:

Series Name ___________________
Book #1
Book #2
Book #3

So, if the series was Twilight, then each book under the series name could be accessed just by tapping it. I know Kindle for PC can set up Catalogues which can be accessed with a mouse, but you can't see the entries untill you click on the main catalogue. I hope this is the right section of this forum. Other than that, really great program

[wodin]

free_bird,

Welcome to Mobile Read.

You might have better success in the Android forum. That being said, it is not something I do, so I don't know the answer, but I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't an app for that.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by free_bird

I don't have a clue as to how to do what I want to do. I'll keep it brief:

One of the things I really like about my droid is the Touchscreen feature.
What I wish to do is set set a table for a given series such that:

I can tap on the series name, and then the elements of that series would be displayed and i can tap on the book i want to read, instead of hunting for the book, ex:

Series Name ___________________
Book #1
Book #2
Book #3

So, if the series was Twilight, then each book under the series name could be accessed just by tapping it. I know Kindle for PC can set up Catalogues which can be accessed with a mouse, but you can't see the entries untill you click on the main catalogue. I hope this is the right section of this forum. Other than that, really great program

I am not aware of an app for Android that will do that but you could use the filesystem itself to perform this function. Some applications cannot use the filesystem directly but cool reader can. You can organize the books using the series name as the directory name and then put the books inside the directly. You can then easily traverse to the one you want. There is also things like file expert to create and arrange the files the way you want them. File expert will even allow you to click on a book and automatically open Cool Reader (or some other app) to read the book. Both cool reader and file expert are free downloads.

Dale

[Jabby]

I use Calibre to do this. I set up Calibre to transfer the ebook in the following format:
author-#-title.extension

The file name looks like this:
Biggers-2-Chinese Parrot, The.epub
Biggers-5-Charlie Chan Carries On.epub

If you are not familiar with Calibre, there is an active forum here on mobileread, complete with an online manual.

Regards - John

BTW, I found all six of the Earl Derr Biggers Charlie Chan books as text files and used Sigil to convert them to epub. If anybody would like to read them I can post them some where (1.35m zip file).

[=X=]

Originally Posted by free_bird

... I'll keep it brief:...

One of the things I really like about my droid is the Touchscreen feature.
What I wish to do is set set a table for a given series such that:

I can tap on the series name,

Hi Free bird,
welcome to the MR fourms,
I think you made it to breif since you did not mention an App .
Are you asking for a function in an App or asking for an app that has that feature?

If you are asking if the Kindle for Android does that, the answer is no.

If you are asking for apps that have that feature, the answer is yes, there are several. These app use a concept called "Tags" where a book can have several tags associated to them like the genre and series. Filtering on the series name will show all books in that series

Some apps are
Moon+
Mantano
Aldiko

Originally Posted by Jabby

BTW, I found all six of the Earl Derr Biggers Charlie Chan books as text files and used Sigil to convert them to epub. If anybody would like to read them I can post them some where (1.35m zip file).

If the books are in PD you can put them in the MR library

=X=

[FatDog]

Let me re-phrase your question to make sure I understand:

You want reader software (not just a database) that lets you group your books by series, then shows the titles in series order, not just alphabetical.

This is a nice feature but no reader software that I know of supports this. The best you can do is an author sort to group books, then you have to have a sub-field like TAGS to sort on where you can put series numbers like this:

JR01 - The Surgon
JR02 - The Appretence
JR03 - The Sinner

(This is how I have had to tag the Rizzoli and Isles books - JR is because some of the books are sub-titled "Jane Rizzoli - Book 3")

You might try downloading a copy of "Calibre" and adding a few of your epubs to it. There are some YouTube videos showing you how to do this.

Then you can see that:

* Calibre goes out to try and get various book information from Amazon and other sources
* The Calibre software lets you see this internal information and edit or re-arrange it.
* You can add your own text to the "Genere" or other fields to do what you want

But Calibre is NOT a reader software, but ebook management software. The idea is that you do all your database work from a PC (the keyboards and screen sizes are much better), but then you send the books to some device for reading. This tends to mean the next 2 books in a series.

This is not exactly what you want - but what you are asking for takes a lot of thought and organization and editing because "Novel X of series Y" is not standard fields in the epub record.

I did a lot of investigation a few years back to try to find some XML or structure that could organize books. (Take a look at the Project Guttenberg XML schema for example.) While some were good - they would only work with software designed for that schema.

Right now - the epub record structure is the closest thing to a standard we have so we have to find ways to use the "Notes" or "Genere" fields to do things we want.

Try Calibre - you will see that you have to make a lot of decisions on how to name series - but I might make different decisions. Both will work and both will be 'right' and ... both will be 'wrong' if we try to use each others information.

[Ken Maltby]

Calibre makes it a point to remind users that it is a "Book Manager" not a "File Manager".
It can be the answer to this sort of issue. But there is the fact that most reading
programs, will have to construct their menus based on, no more than the file name and
any "Metadata" that it can find and read. Not all formats provide metadata that a
particular ebook reader can use. Not all formats provide metadata.

So, your eReader (app, software, or firmware) will often have just file names to work
with - along with any FILE management/structure that it can make use of. Which
introduces another major varable - the extent to which the device allows the user to
access the device's file handling system.

If the device allows you to define the file system's structure, allowing you to create
folders and sub-folders, there is still how the menu program treats those folders and
how it deals with file names. For example; Calibre takes advantage of how many
devices use a special character, in a file name, to mark the separation between the
"Title" and the "Author". Some eReaders will favor any metadata for that data, over
the file name.

Since we are in the "Android Devices" forum, and you list "Kindle" as your device I am
not sure how we can be of much help.

Luck;
Ken

[thafrogggg]

But the OP also states in the opening sentence that they like the touch screen feature of the Droid.

I think the OP is citing the kindle as it does something that would be great to have on the droid and is asking if we know of any way to get a catalog like feature using an android application.

I use Aldiko to manage my Ebooks on my Android tablet. It has a great feature called collections.

What I did was copy all my books onto the SD card in my tablet then I opened Aldiko and imported them.

Now I had about 300 books that were all sorted by title.

What I did next was go in and rename each book by adding the series prefix to it. Eg. 01 - (Book title).

Now I had a bunch of book that were again sorted by book title. so I had a lot with 01 - (book title), 02 - (book title), etc.

Lastly, what I did was open the collections function of Aldiko and created a collection for each series, Belsarius Saga, LiveShip Traders, etc, and then assign the books to their respective series.

Now when I open my bookshelf, I can go to the collections section and see my series, tap on it, then tap on the book in that series I want to read, and they are all listed in series order.

The way I did it might not be the fastest or easiest, but it does exactly what I want it to do and I think the way I am doing it produces the results you are looking for.

I will see if I can get some screen shots of how it looks on the tablet and post em.