OPDS ordering and categorizing

[anarcat]

OPDS entries are ordered. For example, in the main link from the first OPDS feed (All standard ebooks), we see the following first few books:

The Moon Pool
30 octobre 2017 18 h 17
A group of adventurers search for their friends, who were lost while exploring the otherworldly secrets of a monument discovered on a chain of island ruins.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles
13 novembre 2017 19 h 34
Hercule Poirot solves the mystery of a murder in an English country manor.

The Secret Adversary
29 octobre 2017 23 h 13
Tommy and Tuppence try to solve a mystery, only to find themselves embroiled in schemes of murder, millionares, and diplomats.

That's all fine and dandy, but notice how the dates are completely out of order?

It would make much more sense to order those by date. This way this entry could reflect the sort order in the main webpage: by date.

Or we could sort the entries in alphabetical order. This could be a separate feed too.

Another feed could categorize entries by author: the first level would list authors and then books would be listed after.

For example, the Gutenberg OPDS feed offers to sort by popularity, "latest" or "random". The Manybooks OPDS feed is even better organized; you can see "New titles", "Authors", "Titles" and "Genres" categorizations.

[acabal]

The feed is sorted by the SE "identifier" which looks like: abraham-merritt_the-moon-pool and miguel-de-cervantes-saavedra_don-quixote_john-ormsby. So it's kind of a naive sort. However I don't think the OPDS spec requires that entries be sorted in any particular way; and indeed, a good client (which never assume that its input looks like what its desired output looks like) can simply sort the feed for display however it pleases, after ingesting it.

If I'm wrong about the OPDS spec please let me know!

[acabal]

BTW I do eventually want to have more detailed subfeeds, like ebooks by category or ebooks by author, but our catalog is too small at the moment for that to make much sense.

[eshellman]

There are different applications for OPDS. The NYPL ingest doesn't care about order, but reader apps do.

There is a team of students from Stevens Institute of Technology working on the gitenberg website - one of their goals is have links to Standard Ebooks versions alongside other versions derived from PG. I've been asking them to think about OPDS, so maybe that would be a good place to offer a more fully featured OPDS feed.

[anarcat]

So it's kind of a naive sort. However I don't think the OPDS spec requires that entries be sorted in any particular way; and indeed, a good client (which never assume that its input looks like what its desired output looks like) can simply sort the feed for display however it pleases, after ingesting it.

Okay, cool. So it's sorted by author first name? :)

I guess what I am arguing for here is to have other OPDS entries that sort the books differently. And I would argue that, at 11 pages in the library browser, you are at that point where the catalog is big enough. I understand it may feel really small to you, but for a newcomer, it is quite big (and impressive) so kudos for that. ;)

And to clarify, my use case is using OPDS in the Koreader ebook reader, which does care about the order.

[acabal]

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