How are Titles for transferred Mobi files sorted?

[mkelley]

Folks,

I bought my wife a Kindle Touch for Christmas and I have a number of Mobi files I'd like to transfer to her once she opens it up Sunday morning.  These are non-DRM files on my computer, created in Calibre, and they are part of a series.

I want them to be sorted in the series order when they appear on her Kindle and from the reading I can see they will be sorted by Author and Book Title.  My question is where, exactly, does the title fit into this?  Is it the FILE title?  Or is it in the metadata for the mobi file?  If in the metadata, what, exactly, part of the metadata is it?

In the metadata there is a Book Title (duh), but also a sorting title.  There is also a series and numbering information (too bad the Kindle software doesn't take advantage of that).  I have no problem renaming any of these (or all of these) but I'd prefer to leave alone the ones that make no difference and would rather not experiment if someone here already knows the answer.

TIA for any help (and I can't wait for my wife, an avid reader, to get her Kindle -- right now she's reading books on her iPhone).

[Luvmy4brats]

You'll need to edit the published date.

For example:

Book 1: December 2011
Book 2: November 2011
Book 3: October 2011
Book 4: September: 2011

And so forth.

Once you edit the metadata and put it on your Kindle, change the sort order on your Kindle to author. Then the books will show up in the proper series order.

[mkelley]

Great, thanks.  I already have the published dates in the metadata (using Calibre and the data scraping tools).

And I assume, if the author in question has written more than one series (she has) and these pub dates overlap, that all we need do is put each series in its own collection and this will (forgive the pun) sort things out correctly?

(I'm trying to get this all together so Christmas day everything will be fine for her to get reading).

[Luvmy4brats]

I change the dates for series, too.

For example:

For series A, I'd use 2011
For series B, I'd use 2009
For series C, 2007...

The Kindle only uses the published dates for this sorting, so they don't have to be correct you can make it any date you want...

It does take awhile to get them the way you want. But once you do, it's worth the effort.