Kindle + Calibre = Issues with Series Management

[Ivy]

Hi all,

I had my books wonderfully organized in Calibre with title, author, series, tags, etc. I use Kindle Paperlight for reading and I was having issues with series management on the device itself.

The solution I had found for that was renaming the books as they get sent to my Kindle. I created an order to name the books: Series [XX] Title

That works well enough for Kindle, but ... now those books are renamed in my Calibre library, as well.

1. How do I stop them from being renamed in the library, and keep the renamed version just on Kindle?
2. Is there a way to automatically name them back to their old form, keeping in mind these are many books from different authors and different series now?

Thanks in advance for any advice you may have.

[theducks]

They show that way in the Library view? How did you FIX them originally? (FWIW Kindles do not DISPLAY file path naming from the device driver template)

I use the metadata PLUGBOARD (Device set to Kindle so as to not mess with my Kobo metadata)

I shove {series} {series_index}-{title} into the Title field

(the image is a bit weird as it shows as a Edit (existing. the pattern is the for the current selection)

[Talking Yogurt]

Hello ! Long time reader, first time poster.

On my Kindle, going the "Series - Number - Title" way is often awkward when the full title ends up larger than the screen, however the author's name (in a smaller font) takes up very little space.

I've crafted (with the help of another post in this very forum, sadly I don't remember whose...) a very ugly plugboard for the authors field that seems to work for most author/series numbering combinations :

{author_sort:list_item(0,\,)}{authors:re(^[^&]*,)| |}{series:| - | - }{series_index:'contains($,'\.',format_number($,'0 5.2f'),format_number($,'02d'))'||},{author_sort:re (^[^\,]+\, ([^&]+).*,\1)}

(told you it was ugly)

It leaves the title alone but changes the author into (brackets meaning only if applicable) :

"First author's last name[ other authors][ - Series name[ - Number]], First author's given names"

Examples:

Donaldson - Thomas Covenant - 07,Stephen R.
Taylor - St Mary's - 08.50,Jodi
Pratchett & Neil Gaiman,Terry

This completely mangles the on-device metadata BUT it appears correctly on the list (First name Last name - Series - Number) and it sorts by author's last name first, then by series, then by number.

I'm sure the plugboard could be improved, but the principle seems sound to me -- and it is the only way I've found that allows proper sorting by title OR by author on a Kindle.