# Question about Kindle and Calibre's metadata...



## Anso (Jan 27, 2010)

I'm inputting "series" (name of the series plus which book number in the series it is) information on books as I add them into Calibre. However you only see the title/author on your Kindle main screen. Is there anyway of accessing more of the Calibre-inputted metadata so you can see in which order the books are in a series please?

Maybe I have missed something obvious but at the moment it seems like my "series" inputting work is not helping me on my Kindle and I don't know in which order to read my books...

Thanks in advance


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## sleepy6553 (Nov 21, 2010)

I change the title of the book in Calibre to include the series name and series so when I transfer it to my Kindle it looks like this:

Millennium Series 01: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Prey Series 20: Storm Prey
Jack Reacher Series 13: Gone Tomorrow

That way, all the books in the series stay together in order, and I can still see the title on the Kindle. The title is truncated but if you cursor to the book title, the rest of the title shows up on the second line.

Others may do it another way, so you might get more suggestions here.


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## HappyGuy (Nov 3, 2008)

I do the same but try to keep the series name to 3 or 4 letters. For example, the Outlander series was OL1 - Outlander, OL2 - Dragonfly in Amber, etc. I try to prefix the series name so that they sort together in Calibre when I sort by title. Remember - you have to change the metadata BEFORE you copy the book to your Kindle, so I always move books from amazon to my computer then into Calibre. Needless to say, I keep my WiFi off all the time, except for once every couple of months for a day so it can synch to Amazon for any updates and a time hack.


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## Morf (Nov 18, 2010)

Anso,

Like you, I've been using the Series field in Calibre to record book series, in the vague hope that sometime in the future Amazon would add series information to the Kindle.

Your question got me thinking, though, so I went for a look around and as far as I can tell series information is not part of the metadata that the mobibook format supports (see http://www.mobipocket.com/dev/article.asp?BaseFolder=creatorpublisher&File=metadata.htm).

So, it's a forlorn hope I think. Sounds like you can do it on the Sony ("...the series information is automatically turned into a collection on the reader", http://calibre-ebook.com/user_manual/faq.html - maybe we all bought the wrong device ).

There is a sort-of workround in calibre, as described here http://bugs.calibre-ebook.com/ticket/3278 you can set the option "Insert metadata as page at start of book" in conversion (it's under Structure Detection) which will put a page at the beginning of the book with all the metadata from Calibre including the series. At least doing this you could open the book and check which book in the series it is, but it's not going to give us the "list the books in a series in order" that we want.

If you want a whole series on the Kindle in order you'll have to follow the advice of the previous posters and rename the book in some way. Perfectly good solutions, but personally, I don't like doing this so I either only put a couple of the books in a series on the Kindle and send the next ones through as I need them, or I might try the "Insert metadata" approach; failing that, I will have to rely on the "Mark 1 Human Brain" to remember the order of the books!


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## Wisteria Clematis (Oct 29, 2008)

Morf said:


> If you want a whole series on the Kindle in order you'll have to follow the advice of the previous posters and rename the book in some way. Perfectly good solutions, but personally, I don't like doing this so I either only put a couple of the books in a series on the Kindle and send the next ones through as I need them, or I might try the "Insert metadata" approach; failing that, I will have to rely on the "Mark 1 Human Brain" to remember the order of the books!


There are several older threads on this topic. You don't need to alter the title--you can change the publication date in the meta data instead. If you want the series to show up on the kindle with the earliest (no. 1) book first then it needs to have the latest publication date. For example, change the pub. date of the first book in the series to 12/10, the second book to 11/10, etc. If you prefer the series to appear on your kindle with the newest book on top (in descending order) then do a reverse order in the pub. date field--i.,e., 1/10, 2/10, etc. In order for this to work correctly on the kindle, though, you MUST select 'sort by author' for how you want your collection displayed.
Wisteria


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## Anso (Jan 27, 2010)

Oh that's a real shame   So much work for no use...

In the beginning I used to put the series+number before the book title but I just found it a bit annoying (didn't like the look of it on my Kindle for some reason) so I stopped when I descovered the "series" metadata field in Calibre and sat down to make it all nice and organised again. For nothing now it seems though  

How annoying that you can not access that info on the Kindle somehow... Oh well, I guess I'll continue relying on my memory for some series and going to Google to check the order for others.

Thanks for all the replies


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## bashfulreader (Jan 29, 2011)

While this doesn't exactly answer the original question, sometimes I just like to be able to see the list of all the books in a series, in order - especially if I don't have all of them on my Kindle.  So, for some of the larger series, I just create a text document with all the titles in order, and send it to my Kindle (or just copy and paste from someplace like fanfict.com).

For the books themselves, I'm thinking of trying the above-mentioned method.  For now, I've just been adding a number to the end of the title.  (My titles look like:  Outlander #1, Dragonfly in Amber #2, etc.)  They don't sort correctly, and with the longer titles, you have to put the cursor over them to even see the number, but at least it's there.  It seems to work for the shorter series that I'm pretty familiar with.  But for the really long series, I'll probably have to resort to putting the series name and number at the beginning of the title.


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## tlrowley (Oct 29, 2008)

Calibre added a "plugboard" system a few versions back. Using this plugboard, you can change the behavior of the metadata as the book is written/sent to the Kindle.

This means that I can keep the title of the book as "Outlander" in the Calibre library, but when I send the book to my Kindle, it will set the title field to "Outlander 1 - Outlander", for example, and that's how it will show up on the Kindle.

This feature is highly customizable. Although it might seem overwhelming at first (especially for non-techies), the folks at mobileread (and here, of course), are great about helping out.

The thread introducing plugboards is here

On a different note, there is now a plugin (not the same as plugboard!), that will create collections on the Kindle based on tags/authors/series. It's still in beta, and I haven't tried it yet, but I'm excited for the development!


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## Morf (Nov 18, 2010)

Good spot tlrowley, I was wondering if there was some way to do that in Calibre but hadn't spotted these plugboards. This is probably the best solution available, since it means you keep the correct data in the correct fields in Calibre but still get the Kindle title showing the series.

I'm just starting to get my mind round regular expressions for renaming books as I import them, as you say this might cause a few headaches but the examples in the page you link to seem to make sense!


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## tlrowley (Oct 29, 2008)

The plugboards work really well (once I figured out the expression I needed)  You're spot on as to why I like them, I'm anal about my data, but don't want to rename the books in Calibre, it already has the series info.  It's only on the Kindle itself that the extra data in the names is needed.

Have fun, and don't make the same mistake I did - ask for help if you need it!  My problem, that I had been fighting with for ages, was solved in an instant when I asked.


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## kenziesgrandma (Apr 27, 2011)

bashfulreader said:


> While this doesn't exactly answer the original question, sometimes I just like to be able to see the list of all the books in a series, in order - especially if I don't have all of them on my Kindle. So, for some of the larger series, I just create a text document with all the titles in order, and send it to my Kindle (or just copy and paste from someplace like fanfict.com).


This sounds like a better idea than putting a longhand list inside my cover, could you please tell me where I would put a list like this on my kindle? Like if I copy and paste from fanfict.com where do I paste it to?
thanks in advance for your help
Kathy


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

Kindle can read basic text files just fine. So if you have it as a text file, just copy it to the 'documents' folder of the Kindle. Or even send it wirelessly, which will convert it to kindle format. Though if it goes via 3G you may be charged.

There's also an active "app" called Notepad. It is possible to import a text file into this app. That way you can have all the lists in one place rather than multiple 'books' each with a series list.


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## bashfulreader (Jan 29, 2011)

kenziesgrandma said:


> This sounds like a better idea than putting a longhand list inside my cover, could you please tell me where I would put a list like this on my kindle? Like if I copy and paste from fanfict.com where do I paste it to?
> thanks in advance for your help
> Kathy


Ann answered your question (probably better than I could), but I just thought I'd add... yes, there are several ways to get your own text document onto the Kindle. Some work better than others. I made these lists before Notepad was available, but I will probably start putting them on Notepad now. It's a really great little program, and so worth the .99 cents.


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## kenziesgrandma (Apr 27, 2011)

Thanks for your help.  Notepad sounds like a good idea but I think it's not available in Canada yet.  How do I send it wirelessly?  It sounds like a good idea to have it converted to a Kindle document.
Kathy

I tried making a list of each series with Notepad on my computer and dragging it to the Documents on my kindle and it worked great!  I just put a - in front of the name of the list and that keeps it on top of the list of books in the collection on my kindle.  
thank you so much for your help
Kathy


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## Steph H (Oct 28, 2008)

Ann in Arlington said:


> There's also an active "app" called Notepad. It is possible to import a text file into this app. That way you can have all the lists in one place rather than multiple 'books' each with a series list.


And you can just simply edit the file when a new book is added to the series instead of having to send a new list to your Kindle!


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