Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

When I go to my books and click on a category like "to read" then I click on "title" to alphabetize them, they aren't alphabetized anymore (whether it's frontwards or backwards). I'm wondering if it's because of combining editions or something. Like "Water Song: A retelling of the Frog Prince" is in between my titles that start with "F" and "G." I'm wondering if that's because someone just has this story as "The Frog Prince." There are other titles like this too where it's only alphabetized under the subtitle. Any way of fixing that? Sorry, I'm Obsessive Compulsive when it comes to alphabetizing!

Hmmm...I'm seeing the same sort of thing. It looks to me that there's been some attempt to improve alphabetization, but the results are rather inconsistent. On one of my shelves, "The Ancient" comes first (clearly, sorted by A). Then a few are just normal title sorts. Then there's "Wrath of a Mad God (The Darkwar Saga, Book 3)" which appears to be sorted by "Darkwar".

A whole bunch of other books are in odd places (although explainable through some part of the title).

There's no consistency, however. Some are sorted by first word, some are sorted ignoring unsorted phrases ("A", "The"), some are sorted by series title in parentheses, while others are not. A few are sorted by subtitle (e.g., "XXX: YYY" are being sorted by the Y's.).

The lack of consistency is very odd and not particularly a desirable behavior.

Yikes that didn't work at all - will roll back right away :)

Thanks for fixing it!

I also have an obsessive streak when it comes to alphabetizing (comes from being a librarian in real life, I suppose - or is why I am one). My problem is that several authors just WILL NOT alphabetize properly: Lloyd Alexander and Bruce Alexander. When I sort by author, these two are intermingled, with no apparent reason. I have tried to fix this by reentering the names, combining editions, etc., but nothing has fixed this problem. Any suggestions?

It's a known bug which has been pointed out at least two or three times.

Ah. Thanks. I will just try to stop obsessing about it then :)

It doesn't hurt to keep point it out, since it could easily fall off the radar or drop down the bug list.

Michael is right - we appreciate the friendly reminders :)