Sorting ebooks
My friend Stephanie recently posted about her desire to move over to ebooks primarily. One of the problems she said she has is with sorting the books. Rather than displaying the books in a series alphabetically, why not display them in reading order?
My ebook collection is much smaller than hers, mostly consisting of just the Dresden Files books by Jim Butcher. However, I had that same concern. I'd prefer if my ebooks were displayed in reading order rather than alphabetically. Fortunately, since I use iTunes to organize my ebooks, I make use of the Sorting Name metadata.
I'm not on my home machine where my ebooks are stored, so my examples will make use of music, but the principle is the same and will carry over. Let's pretend that the album Audio by Blue Man Group is a book series (such as the Dresden Files) and that each track is one book in the series. If you sort by album, the tracks appear in listening order. This is because music has track information in its metadata.
Screenshots are under cuts, since a couple are fairly wide.
Because this track data is present, when you sort by album, iTunes will list each track in listening order per album, and then list each album alphabetically.
Note at the bottom of that screenshot the first two tracks of the next album listed. The album is alphabetically after Audio, and the tracks are listed in listening order.
On the iTunes metadata window, however, there's a handy tab labeled "sorting" that often gets overlooked.
If you look at the top right of the window with sorting tab selected, you will see a field named "sort name." This is the name that will be used when you sort by name. For my Dresden Files ebooks, I set my sort name like Dresden01 for Stormfront, Dresden 02 for Fool Moon, etc. For the short stories that take place between novels, I will name them, for example, Dresden 09.5 if it takes place between books 9 and 10. For my example with Audio, I'm simply naming each track in listening order Audio01, Audio02, etc.
The result is that when I now sort by name, all of the tracks in the Audio album will appear in listening order instead of in alphabetical order. That's because when iTunes lists by name, it will list by sorting name, if it's defined, and then by actual name. In my last screen shot, you can see that the next album listed, The Complex, has had its tracks sorted alphabetically only (including one being listed above all the tracks from Audio).
I'm not saying that this is a perfect solution. It works for me primarily because my ebook collection is fairly small. The initial setup for this solution would be quite time consuming for a large collection of books. However, maintenance afterward shouldn't be too difficult.
I can foresee some other problems with this system on a larger scale, though. Once you have dozens of authors, some of them with multiple series', what kind of naming scheme do you put in place to keep them easily identifiable? When you're sorting by name using the "sort name" field, how can you tell what series they're a part of unless you know the series titles by heart? For that last question, you can actually add the "sort name" column to your view along with name, genre, artist, etc. That will definitely help with that. The naming scheme can still be tricky, though.
My ebook collection is much smaller than hers, mostly consisting of just the Dresden Files books by Jim Butcher. However, I had that same concern. I'd prefer if my ebooks were displayed in reading order rather than alphabetically. Fortunately, since I use iTunes to organize my ebooks, I make use of the Sorting Name metadata.
I'm not on my home machine where my ebooks are stored, so my examples will make use of music, but the principle is the same and will carry over. Let's pretend that the album Audio by Blue Man Group is a book series (such as the Dresden Files) and that each track is one book in the series. If you sort by album, the tracks appear in listening order. This is because music has track information in its metadata.
Screenshots are under cuts, since a couple are fairly wide.
Because this track data is present, when you sort by album, iTunes will list each track in listening order per album, and then list each album alphabetically.
Note at the bottom of that screenshot the first two tracks of the next album listed. The album is alphabetically after Audio, and the tracks are listed in listening order.
On the iTunes metadata window, however, there's a handy tab labeled "sorting" that often gets overlooked.
If you look at the top right of the window with sorting tab selected, you will see a field named "sort name." This is the name that will be used when you sort by name. For my Dresden Files ebooks, I set my sort name like Dresden01 for Stormfront, Dresden 02 for Fool Moon, etc. For the short stories that take place between novels, I will name them, for example, Dresden 09.5 if it takes place between books 9 and 10. For my example with Audio, I'm simply naming each track in listening order Audio01, Audio02, etc.
The result is that when I now sort by name, all of the tracks in the Audio album will appear in listening order instead of in alphabetical order. That's because when iTunes lists by name, it will list by sorting name, if it's defined, and then by actual name. In my last screen shot, you can see that the next album listed, The Complex, has had its tracks sorted alphabetically only (including one being listed above all the tracks from Audio).
I'm not saying that this is a perfect solution. It works for me primarily because my ebook collection is fairly small. The initial setup for this solution would be quite time consuming for a large collection of books. However, maintenance afterward shouldn't be too difficult.
I can foresee some other problems with this system on a larger scale, though. Once you have dozens of authors, some of them with multiple series', what kind of naming scheme do you put in place to keep them easily identifiable? When you're sorting by name using the "sort name" field, how can you tell what series they're a part of unless you know the series titles by heart? For that last question, you can actually add the "sort name" column to your view along with name, genre, artist, etc. That will definitely help with that. The naming scheme can still be tricky, though.