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Is there a best practice for naming books that come in a series? What is the best practice keeping things straight?

Dilemma #1: The book publication dates don't match the Chronological order of the action in the story.

Dilemma #2: It sure would be nice to be able to view the books in chronological order (of the action within the series) on my storage device (in my case a Kindle) Note: I am using Calibre for managing my storage.

Example, the Jack Reacher series from author Lee Childs, sorted alphabetical by title:

  • 61 Hours (Jack Reacher Chron Order #15)
  • The Affair (Jack Reacher Chron Order #2)
  • Bad Luck and Trouble (Jack Reacher Chron Order #12)
  • Die Trying (Jack Reacher Chron Order #4)
  • Echo Burning (Jack Reacher Chron Order #7)

(etc... There are more than 20 books in this series...) This just feels clumsy.

What is the best practice for file / title naming scheme here? Is there a "standard" here? What does everybody else do? Is there a way to easily display all the books in a series in the chronological order of the action within?

Many thanks.

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If you are using Calibre, its database is already set to have each piece of information about a book in its proper field (i.e., there will be a field for the title, another for the author, another one for the series and series numbering, and so on), but I'm sure that you already know this.

So, within Calibre, you don't need (and you are not supposed) to change the title by including the series information; you can let Calibre rename those files on-the-fly when you export them to a given ereader by using its tool called Plugboard, that relies on the calibre template language.

Here is, in short, the recipe to use, pasted from MobileRead forums:

I have been playing around with the Metadata plugboards to get the titles on a Kindle 3 to show series information. I used the following template:

format: mobi
device: kindle2
template: {series}{series_index:0>2s| - | - }{title}
destination: title

This works very nicely for books that are part of a series e.g.:

A Song of Ice & Fire - 01 - A Game of Thrones
A Song of Ice & Fire - 02 - A Clash of Kings
A Song of Ice & Fire - 03 - A Storm of Swords
A Song of Ice & Fire - 04 - A Feast for Crows

The process is very easy to do but if you are not used to its workings it is a bit long to explain, so I'm linking some of articles that show you step by step how to do it.

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