Calibre- Authors- Help Please

[ceryta87]

Hi,

I am new to using Calibre and could use some help please. I don't know if I am asking in the section or if this has already been covered. My problem is that I added all my books around 1700, so far so good. But than I noticed in the author column that the names listed different ways. Some of the names were FIRST LAST and others were LAST, FIRST. How do I get them to all go the same way? It is creating two seperate folders for the same author. I click on the authors tab, and than manager authors, and than "copy all author sort to author" but it is not working. thanks for any help.

[travger]

AFAIK you can only do that one-by-one.

1. Install Quality Check plugin and check for Authors with commas. This will show all the books where you have LN, FN.
2. Fix author in Edit Metadata (or in main GUI, if you are confident)
3. In case of several books by same incorrect author, try Manage Authors and check the results. If incorrect author is still present, you probably must fix it in Edit Metadata screen for every book.
4. (If you have some cases with LN FN, you have to find them manually)
5. Don't add any more books until you've fixed things and learned how to avoid those mistakes in the future (like, add books in small batches and always check the results)

How do you know that Calibre has two separate folders? You must have peeked into file folders! (*points accusing finger*). As long as you know not to touch anything there, you are forgiven, but keep in mind that it's the easiest way to break your library.

PS - check out unboggling's thread for new Calibre users, 'How I manage Calibre' or something like that.
And welcome to MobileRead!

[ceryta87]

thank you for helping

[Man Eating Duck]

Originally Posted by ceryta87

Hi,

I am new to using Calibre and could use some help please. I don't know if I am asking in the section or if this has already been covered. My problem is that I added all my books around 1700, so far so good. But than I noticed in the author column that the names listed different ways. Some of the names were FIRST LAST and others were LAST, FIRST. How do I get them to all go the same way? It is creating two seperate folders for the same author. I click on the authors tab, and than manager authors, and than "copy all author sort to author" but it is not working. thanks for any help.

As travger says, you're better off staying away from the folders

For the author sort trick to work, you need to specify 'comma' as the author sort calculation method under Preferences -> Tweaks -> "Author sort name algorithm". Then you recalculate all in Manage authors, and copy all author sort values to author. This will give you "Last, First" in most cases, although it might fail on auhtors with more than two names. You should of course make a backup of the library before doing this (as with all major operations).