Bookpedia sorting enhancements

[Hap]

I have a LOT of books that are part of a series, but may have different collaborating authors. For completely different authors in a setting (i.e. Star Wars) that's fine - I can isolate by designating a custom field. However, there are two situations that are preventing me from sorting like I wish too.

1) When I have a series that has a primary author and different or no supporting authors on the rest of the series, Bookpedia always sorts multiple authors first. This can prevent the series books being listed directly together. I frequently get one or two of a series listed first, followed by books not in a series, then the remaining books of the series. As I'm trying to use Bookpedia to organize my bookcases - this is non-intuitive.

2) When there are multiple authors for any book, Bookpedia always sorts by the author whose last name come first alphabetically, regardless of name order in the author field. There are situations where I'd like to sort by one author or another.
EDIT: Actually this is incorrect, I was trying to rearrange order by dragging the arthor's names into a different order. Dragging wouldn't take. Retyping the author's in different order worked.

Both of these could be solved by a sort author field. I'm assuming if blank, the sort would go by the author field and not the sort author field.

Thanks,
David

[Nora]

2) When there are multiple authors for any book, Bookpedia always sorts by the author whose last name come first alphabetically, regardless of name order in the author field. There are situations where I'd like to sort by one author or another.
EDIT: Actually this is incorrect, I was trying to rearrange order by dragging the arthor's names into a different order. Dragging wouldn't take. Retyping the author's in different order worked.

That's a bug actually - thanks for letting us know. Dragging does work but you have to sort another column and then click on the author column again for it to sort correctly by the new order. This is also happening with other fields when you edit something, it doesn't automatically re-sort itself so we're fixing that for the next version. (It's already in the beta, linked below, if you want to try it out.)

As for the multiple author listings in a series – that was also a bit buggy. We've fixed it now so the sorting is at least correct two authors deep. After that the program simply looks if there is more information and sorts that at the end. So it's not ideal yet but please give the Bookpedia beta a try and let us know if that works for you. If you keep having trouble with that, please give us some more details about a particular series and sorting (screenshots or send us your database).

[Hap]

Thanks for the response! I haven't tried the beta yet as I do have the work around of manually moving the author order and from your response, it may not resolve my other sorting request.

Sorry that it has been a while as I've been working on cleaning up my database (only got to the M's on my paperbacks so far). However, that reminded me of this sorting issue. Below is a screenshot from my database. Note the sorting for Anne McCaffrey (ignore the first one as is sorted under Barbara Hambly).

See that "Sassinak" and "Death of Sleep" are separated even though the are part of the same series because "Sassinak" has two authors, where "Death of Sleep" only has one. Same thing with "Crisis on Doona" and the other two Doona books.

I'd really like for it to ignore the second author in the sort if at all possible, while not perfect, it would get my sorting much closer to ideal. Also, some type of sort indicator in the column header for multiple sorts would be great (in the case below, maybe a "1" indicator next to the sort arrow for author? and so forth down the line?).

Sort order in the screen shot is: Author, Setting, Type, Series, Series #

Click on Screenshot for an image showing all the relevant columns!

[Nora]

If you like, send me your database file so we can check it out here with the beta. It's easier to see with the actual database than on screenshots. You'll find the file in your Home folder under ~/Library/Application Support/Bookpedia/Database.bookpd. Please archive the file before sending it to save space. (Select it and choose 'Archive' or 'Compress' from the File menu. That'll create a new file called 'Database.bookpd.zip' which you can then attach to the email.) You'll find our email on the support page.

[Hap]

Database sent, thanks.