Books Help | Contents

Books & lists

If book records are the meat of the Books 3 application, lists are the bones. You use lists to sort and organize your collection. There are two types of lists: plain lists and smart lists. Plain lists are simple lists that contain book records. You can move books from one plain list to the next, and a book will always be contained within a plain list.

Smart lists are a bit more dynamic. Smart lists don't contain books like plain lists, rather they are lists of books that fulfill a set of criteria. By selecting a smart list and hitting the Edit Smart List button, you can customize your smart list.

In the smart list editor pane, you can select whether to build a list that matches all or any of the criteria below. You can select from a variety of fields and select a variety of qualifiers. If you want all books written by Stephen King, you would select Author(s) from the first column, is from the second, and you would type "Stephen King" in the text field. To narrow down the search to his Dark Tower books, you would check that all is selected in the top-most pulldown and enter a second line where the title contains "Dark Tower". After you close the list, Books will update the list to display the books matching your criteria.

If you're entering a book and would like to fetch additional data from another source, you may enter as much as you want and try clicking the Quickfill button. If you've provided enough data for the default plugin to locate what you're looking for, you should see additional fields populated. If nothing happens, that's a likely sign that you have not entered the right data or enough data. You select your preferred quickfill plugin in the preferences.

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