Question:

Why does my collection numbers and title counts differ?

Answer:

You will often see that the collection numbers on the titles in your collection differs from the title count numbers for the collection.

Collection numbers are not in any way related to a title count, but is designed to be equivalent to a number sticker placed on each title in the collection - once a title gets a collection number, it keeps that collection number, unless you manually change it, or use a reset collection numbers function. This means that if you have a collection of 3 titles, with collection numbers 1, 2 and 3 in your collection, and you for some reason remove the title with collection number 2, because of a sale or damage, you will have collection numbers 1 and 3, but will have a title count of 2.

This way, you can be sure that a certain title will always have the same number, no matter what happens to other titles in the collection - if you consider these equivalent to a sticker, you also would not move the stickers of 299 titles if you have a collection of 300 titles and sell title number 1.

Since collection numbers are part of personal data on the titles, and not a virtual on-the-fly calculated number, the applications does not have an option to handle collection numbers differently, such as a functionality where all collection numbers shift, should you remove a title from the collection, because it would mean that all titles with a collection number higher than the one you remove would have to be changed, in some cases, for users with many titles, meaning thousands of titles which has to be changed and updated in sync between the server and the client, as well as any other client.

There is on latest versions of all clients a "Reset collection numbers" function, which will reset the collection numbers based on the current selected sorting on the client - this functionality will change all the titles, and the process can take some time - it is not intended that you use this function to re-number your collection frequently, but it does give you an option to have the collection numbers reset, perhaps because you would like them set depending on a different sorting, or because you made a larger clean-up in your collection.