sort or arrange books in calibre manually (up, down, and drag)

[mgbsher]

Just an idea to be implemented, what about adding any option to sort or arrange books in calibre manually?
like selecting several books in a raw or randomly selected and move them to top or bottom or drag it to any other place in the list of books inside calibre.
also, maybe something like a right click and move up, move down, move to top, move to bottom, or manual drag it where person wish, as each one of us has a very different perspective.
That is in case there is any option already like that and I am not aware about it.

[DNSB]

That option is not present and is unlikely to be implemented. You can already arrange the books in a calibre quite a few different ways. Personally, with a library over 15,000 books, there is no way that I would consider being able to drag the books into a random order to be useful.

That question has been asked many times over more than a decade. See Rearranging order of books stored in Calibre for an example from 2012.

[BetterRed]

Moderator Notice
See ==>> PLEASE READ BEFORE POSTING HERE - Purpose of Development subforum

I'll move this to the Library Management subforum

The Reading List or User Categories plugins in combination with a Virtual Library might provide a solution, dragging things up and down the list won't survive sorting the list.

BR

[mgbsher]

The reason for my idea was as follow:
(If you have a better option to help me with my workflow that would be awesome).
I am downloading many books from a public domain, and it is not titled correctly, and some has only the numbers of isbn or author name, but all has a cover of the book.
So, I am getting confused of which copies to keep in my library.
So, I add them all to calibre, so I was just scrolling manually and use the book folder link to get a pdf copy and then sort it externally.
So, my idea was to just scroll books visually in calibre and then group each set of books according to the cover.
The other reason for doing so is that sometimes some copies have missing pages, so I compare visually and select the most appropriate ones.

[mgbsher]

-later edit-
I do not mean to argue that I want to have this feature, but I mean if you have a better way for the workflow, I do to achieve best results efficiently in a short time and few steps.

[DNSB]

My workflow is to import the books into calibre into my Intake library. At this point, I edit the metadata individually for the books which would include correcting title, author, series, cover image, etc. Once everything is cleaned up, I use the Find duplicates plugin to check that I do not have any duplicate books between the two libraries. Once I am happy with the books, I move them to my Main library.

I gave up on using Edit Metadata in bulk since I got a lot of garbage results and all too often, I managed to get blocked from web sites for too many requests.

[theducks]

I use the same exact workflow as David (EXCEPT mine is called intake2 . Intake was for an older Library structure that I have since abandoned)

And I have the same reason for NOT using the Bulk get metadata.
I may fire off a Ctrl-D on a group of books, but I use the Review button on each. Some get rejected outright (wrong book), Some I use MY version of some fields and frequently trim the details/comments of fluff and cruft

[BetterRed]

My workflow is similar, I borrowed it from @theducks. Add books to an Intake library, get the metadata right, before moving to the target library. Most of the 'books' I add are not commercial books, they're reports from governments, think tanks, qangos, etc. -- so no download of metadata.

BR

[mgbsher]

What are these items titled intake & intake2?
I am sorry that I do not follow.
Is there any videos I may learn from?
What search keywords I may use to find such details on YouTube?

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by mgbsher

What are these items titled intake & intake2?
I am sorry that I do not follow.
Is there any videos I may learn from?
What search keywords I may use to find such details on YouTube?

I use 2 physical libraries. One is called Intake, the other is called Main. theducks has a similar structure save that their intake directory is called intake2.

Basically, I have a directory in my Windows user directory called calibre. Inside that directory, I created two directories call Intake and Main. I then opened calibre and used the Switch/create library tool to create two libraries using those two directories. See the attached images.

I then copied the contents of my old calibre library into the Main library and removed the old calibre library. When I add books now, they get added to the Intake library where all needed cleanup/editing is done. Once I am happy with the books, I use the Copy to library tool with the delete after copy option to move them to the Main library. The Intake library seldom has more than 15 books in it.

[fidvo]

What you're trying to do is use the order of the books to store information about which group each book belongs to. I suggest going the opposite route: Store the information about which group each book belongs to, and have Calibre use that to determine the order of the books.

I'll admit that this method takes a bit of work to set up, but once you do, it should be almost as fast as manually rearranging the books.

Step 1: Create a custom field for the group. It should be just an ordinary text field.

Step 2: For the first book in each group, you'll need to fill in the name of the group manually. Because this is based on the cover, I assume all books in the group have the same title, so name each group after the title. (This is arbitrary; you can use any naming convention you want)

Step 3: Once you have a book in the group, the group's name will show up under that field in the tag browser. For subsequent books in the group, you can just drag them from the book list onto the group's name in the tag browser. This should be no more work than what you were wanting to do: drag and drop to reorder the books.

Step 4: Periodically click on the header for the group field in the book list to re-sort them by group. This makes Calibre do automatically what you were trying to do manually.

Not only does this accomplish what you're trying to do (put books in the same group next to each other in the book list), but it also allows you to easily get your sorting back if you need to temporarily sort on different criteria.

[skil-phil]

Thanks DNSB and theducks for your comments. I have been using a similar work flow but doing it all externally.
Import to 'raw'. Terminal for convert, editor to clean up, import to calibre and then fix metadata.
It makes sense to do it all in one app.
I tried it today on a few books and it is a lot smoother. No switching.
Only thing that I think would make it even better would be the ability to save the cover image to the metadata cover without having to save externally and then browsing in metadata for the cover. Not a deal breaker but a nice to have.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by skil-phil

Thanks DNSB and theducks for your comments. I have been using a similar work flow but doing it all externally.
Import to 'raw'. Terminal for convert, editor to clean up, import to calibre and then fix metadata.
It makes sense to do it all in one app.
I tried it today on a few books and it is a lot smoother. No switching.
Only thing that I think would make it even better would be the ability to save the cover image to the metadata cover without having to save externally and then browsing in metadata for the cover. Not a deal breaker but a nice to have.

Do you mean updating the cover in the ebook to match the downloaded cover? ModifyePub (ePub only) and Polish (ePub and azw3) can do that.

[skil-phil]

Thanks will give those a try.
Phil