Found this while digging for something similar. The closest thing I have found was while trying to get books to sort by series on my Kindle. Kindle only natively supports series grouping for Amazon-purchased books. For instance, if you buy all the Harry Potter books on Amazon, they’ll all show up under a single “Harry Potter” group. I was trying to find some way to do the same thing with Calibre, or at least be able to sort the books by series.
You can have Calibre automatically append the series name and book number to the title when you export to an e-reader. I set up some custom columns to grab the Series and number, and do some regex magic to automatically convert them to more friendly/usable names. For instance, there’s a column that strips things like “the” and “a” from series names. So The Witcher series will export simply as “Witcher”.
There’s another column that just grabs the first letter of each word, so the A Song of Ice and Fire series exports as “ASOIAF”.
Lastly, there’s a column that condenses long single words, so Frankenstein (not really a series, but just a long word I picked at random to use as an example) turns into “Fra…ein”. Then it appends the series number, so they sort automatically by book number.
Finally, there’s some more regex that happens during the export, to automatically decide which of those three columns to use for the series name, based on which one is the most reasonable length
So for example, A Clash of Kings (Book 2 of the A Song of Ice and Fire series) would export to my Kindle titled “ASOIAF [2] - A Clash of Kings”. As another example, Baptism of Fire (book 3 of The Witcher series) would export as “Witcher [3] - Baptism of Fire”.
This means sorting alphabetically will automatically put books in series order, since it sorts first by series name and then by book number. It doesn’t actually tie the series to the epub metadata like you’re hoping, but (if your circumstance is like mine and you just want to be able to sort by series in your e-reader) then this may be the next best thing. If you want to know more about the regex I used, I’ll be happy to share it; It’s long enough that it probably deserves its own comment.