EPUB Series Catalog with descriptions only for books in series?

[Moonbase59]

I have a Tolino Vision 5 eReader that doesn’t show the series and series index. I export series into separate folders on the device, to create what Tolino calls "collections". Now—when reading books from a series—I never know which is next in reading sequence.

So I thought I’d create an EPUB "Series Catalog" that only contains "Series" and "Description". It works rather well (I can lookup which book is next in a series and read its description) but creates an enormously large catalog, since all (nearly 1,000) descriptions of all my books are included.

Is there an easy way to only include the descriptions for the books that are in a series (i.e., have a non-empty "series" entry)?

Attached are my current "Generate catalog" settings.

[theducks]

Don't you need a Title since there is no actual Description for Series (in Calibre) and the jumble of many books in a single series would be pretty useless?

Catalog respects the current view.
So series:true should only contain those books
If you don't want Covers, you might consider using the CLI calibredb --list

[chaley]

Repeating what theducks said: search for all books with a series (series:true) then create the catalog.

Alternatively, abandon the catalog and use a plugboard (Preferences / Plugboards) to put the series into the title when you send the book to the Tolino. Something like this

{title} {series:|(|}{series_index:| [|])}

will make the title for the book be

Title (Series [Index])

Put the series first if you want the Tolino to sort by series then Title.

EDIT: Or leave off the series name if they are always in collections.

[Rellwood]

This is how I do it so that the series are all lined up first...
{#second_series}{#second_series_index:0>5.2f| [|] }{title}

(I have a second series column with shortened series names so that they aren't too long in the title, ex. The Dresden Files=Dresden

you end up with "Dresden [01.00] Storm Front"

Having that floating point means you get perfect alignment.

You can put this in the send to device plugin area

[Moonbase59]

Thanks for all the hints!

I wasn’t aware that I could use "series:true"—this is the solution I now use, reducing the catalog from 9.3 to 7.1 MB (I must have too many series!).

So my actual search before creating a series catalog now looks like

series:true and search:"=Exclude books tagged no-transfer"

because I want to exclude books that I don’t usually copy over to the device. (Those have a tag "no-transfer" and are usually text books, manuals and test files.)