[Enhancement]: Support multiple series ordering (ie. Publication Order + Chronoligical Order)

[teotikalki]

Type of Enhancement

Web Interface/Frontend

Describe the Feature/Enhancement

There are a lot of series which expand over time to include books/sets at various points in the series chronology. There are often heated debates amongst fans about whether the Publication Order or Chronological Order should be used as a reading order, often with differing opinions on first and second reads.

Currently, the only way I can see to to this is to create a second series (ie Honor Harrington: Publication Order + Honor Harrington: Chronological Order) in the UI, which is clunky.

Ideally, the series should exist only once and there should be the option to add multiple orderings (ie. Publication, Series).

Why would this be helpful?

My library is currently rather small but I have already run into this issue multiple times (Honor Harrington, Star Wars Legends, Dragonlance, the clusterf**k of subseries in C. J. Cherryh's Alliance-Union Universe).

If I'm willing to do the work to initially set the metadata for both orderings I would very much like to be able to look at a series, have it show my currently selected ordering, ie. 'Ordering: Publication Order' (where 'Publication Order' is my arbitrarily supplied string), and be able to click on that to switch to my other entered orderings (ie. Chronological Order).

Future Implementation (Screenshot)

I... have a completely non-visual mind. I believe that I described my vision in the above box.

Here is about as visual as I get:

Audiobookshelf Server Version

2.17.1

Current Implementation (Screenshot)

[nichwall]

People usually use Collections for alternate orderings of books in a series or universe.

[teotikalki]

Your own documentation describes Series and Subseries (https://www.audiobookshelf.org/guides/subseries) with one of the examples that will eventually end up in my personal library (I loved the Foundation books when I was younger).
I believe that the ordering of subseries will rarely ever be ambiguous. The ordering of the Series, however, is.
Perhaps my issue is somewhat semantic. I believe that you are suggesting to:

1. Pick a 'main order' and use it for the Series order.
2. Make a Collection, which is sort of a fancy playlist, with the 'alternate' order
   The semantic issue is this:
3. In my mind, all of these books are part of one 'Collection'. There are simply two ways of ordering that collection.
4. Series has an order, but only one, even though there is often not a clearly accepted order for a series. This makes the idea of 'primary order' and 'alternate order' feel very wrong. 'Publication order' and 'Chronological order'
5. Official documentation describes using Series and subseries for organization in a way that seems perfectly logical and covers every need EXCEPT alternate orderings, so if there is only one ordering then these books will be represented perfectly by one Series, several subseries, and exactly zero Collections. This strongly suggests that Collections are not how such a thing should be organized.