Sort by Series

While reading the new blog, I though of something that can be useful for organizing books. Sort by series. You see, I sort by books in that way, but instead of a series option, I sort by publication date. I don't know why, but the series of a book is clumped together, but they are mixed up. So maybe it will help if the series option will link directly to the series order, and not the date it was published, because that can sometimes be unreliable. And then for other series and stand alone books, there it will sort those by the publication date of the first book. How does that sound?

yes, please!

I think what you're encountering is that you don't necessarily have the same edition of each book in your series -- so if, say, you have a first edition of books 1 and 3, but a later edition of book 2, sorting by publication date won't sort by series order.

Many people have requested this, and it's sensible enough, but it's hard because a book can be in multiple series, and there's no obvious way to pick the "right" one to sort by -- I don't relish the edit wars from people endlessly swapping the order on the CK page of publication-order vs. internal-chronological-order series to get the "right" one to the top. A lot of people, myself included, use tags to achieve a series sort.

Being able to sort by Original Publication Date might work, but it still has the problem of picking which of possible multiple values (personally I don't think the OPD field should allow multiple values).

> 4: Being able to sort by Original Publication Date might work, but it still has the problem of picking which of possible multiple values

Couldn't it be made so it always picks the earliest one? Just asking.

personally I don't think the OPD field should allow multiple values

I do see your point, but personally I quite like the fact that it sometimes gives some bibliographical information.

I put series information into the Comments field for just this. That way I can pick whichever series and sequence I think is right, and can sort my series the way I want to see them. It does take some time, copying stuff from CK:Series to Comments, but I do it as part of entering the book and it's not too bad. I have a view that has both of those fields visible, so it's easy to see which books need the data transferred (I retype it, copy-and-paste would be more of a pain than typing).

I have my series in the beginning of the Publication field (well - some of them anyway) . Makes the sorting easy enough if needed.

The problem is when you import a lot of books and the series information added during the import doesn't allow you to sort by series and then volume. Seems like an obvious feature and it still isn't present in 2022

>8 wperume: So how do you sort when a book is in multiple series and what does this have to do with 2022? :)

>8 wperume: Well, if you are adding the series information as tags, then you can sort by tags. If you are adding it as part of the title, you can sort by title.
Series is not part of the CK fields any more and really isn't a part of the universal import file.

>4 jjwilson61: "personally I don't think the OPD field should allow multiple values"

Original Publication Date is localisable to the various language sites, in some of which multiple values are appropriate. So for example, the French site might give an OPD of 1864 for Journey to the centre of the earth, while the English site might say "1864 (French original) / 1871 (English translation)", and the German site the German for "1864 (French original) / 1873 (German translation)".

>11 Cynfelyn: I think that this was the point from 11 years ago: The translations dates are per translation - adding the date of every single translation in the language is a lot of data. And the first translation may not be the one people want - you allow one translation, why not all? What about multi-country languages? It is nice to know the first translation for that country, right?

The work was published for the first time once, in its original language. Everything else are editions. I won’t remove the data if I see it in the field but I tend to agree that original title/language/date should have a single value (maybe with an exception for the title for languages that have more than one alphabet). :)

Original Publication Date means what it says. The OPD in Swahili isn't the OPD.