Provide iTunes-like explicit sorting fields?

[elysdir]

(New Bookpedia customer; loving it so far!)

There are various contexts in which I don't want books to sort in the place where Bookpedia wants to sort them. There are various workarounds, but I'm wondering if you'd be willing to add explicit sort fields, like the ones provided in iTunes.

The iTunes interface for this isn't great. But it does allow me to make things show up exactly where I want them, without iTunes having to be able to read my mind about sorting.

I haven't used the other 'pedias, but I'm guessing that this feature would be even more useful in CDpedia.

An example of the kind of thing I mean: Ursula K. Le Guin should be listed alphabetically under L. I can make that happen by using an Option+Space instead of a regular space in her last name, but I'd rather use a regular space and put "LeGuin" in a search field.

Another example: I want Madeleine L'Engle to sort as if her name were spelled "LEngle", but I'm not seeing a way to get Bookpedia to ignore the apostrophe. (I guess this is actually another feature request: if you have control over the sorting algorithm, I would say that it should ignore apostrophes, at least in English. In particular, apostrophe shouldn't sort before A.)

(I know there are custom fields; I could build an author-sort-by field myself. But I'd like to be able to click the Author column heading in the library view and get things sorted right, rather than having to also display a custom field (the contents of which may not be very readable in some cases) and click that column heading.)

This obviously isn't a huge problem; just a nice-to-have.

[Conor]

Sort author is a field that is on the books for the next database restructuring (I have obviously been reading the forum in backwards chronological order.) CDpedia has a sort artist and sort title field so you will find your needs meet there. It's Bookpedia that has an overwhelming number of fields that were I wanted to keep the numbers of column options down in the last design.

Consider the apostrophes now ignored in the beta version. Only added for last names as I am already doing some heavy preprocessing before handing it off to the Apple sorting algorithm. This change only adds 2 milliseconds to the search on a 1,000 author names test. It is a 5% increase in time but should be unnoticeable.

Glad you discovered Bookpedia, thank you for the all the feedback.