Wrong author sort for brother authors
 

Hi there,

Apparently, in Calibre 3.45.2, using the default author sort (no preference or tweaks modified) when there are multiple authors sharing the same surname (e.g. brother authors), the author sort is wrong.
For example:
Arkadi & Boris Strugatki -> Arkadi & Strugatki, Boris

Expected: Strugatki, Arkadi & Boris
or maybe: Strugatki, Arkadi & Strugatki, Boris

Does anyone know a workaround? Thanks!

P.S. - could this tweak be used?
# Splitting multiple author names
authors_split_regex = u'(?i),?\\s+(and|with)\\s+'

You can correct the default author_sort value by changing "Arkadi & Strugatki, Boris" to "Strugatki, Boris and Arkadi" in Manage Authors. I'm not sure if "B... & A..." would work, try it for yourself.

You can access Manage Authors via right click on Author name in Book Details (right sidebar).

Another instance where one needs to correct author_sort is non hyphenated double barrelled names - e.g. Brigitta Garcia Lopez will default to Lopez, Brigitta Garcia which needs to be corrected to Garcia Lopez, Brigitta.

BR

Why not fill out an author name, completely, for both of them?

Right. It never would have occurred to me that I could leave off the 2nd one's surname and that Calibre should figure out that they're brothers or whatever and have the same surname. There are authors whose name is one word, e.g. Saki.

Since Calibre treats & as a separator between author names it is not surprising that the OP had problems. If ‘and’ was used instead of ‘&’ then the expected result is obtained.

I think it is the ampersand between the two first names that mess it up. It is interpreted as a separator between two full names. Try:

Arkadi Boris Strugatski

Or

Arkadi and Boris Strugatski (I don't know if calibre treats "and" as "&" in the authors field.)

As others have said '&' is the author separator in the author field, so "Arkadi & Boris Strugatki" is interpreted as two authors, "Arkadi" and "Boris Strugatki".

If the authors ALWAYS write together, you could use "Arkadi and Boris Strugatki" which would sort as "Strugatki, Arkadi and Boris".

But I'd recommend just using "Arkadi Strugatki & Boris Strugatki".

Thank you for your replies. Father and son, husband/wife or brothers writing duos are not that rare. Anyway, for those who never heard of A&B Strugatsky, they are the authors of Stalker/Roadside Picnic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkady...ris_Strugatsky

Thank you but having to manually do this I feel somehow it defeats the reason Calibre was created in the first place.

That works, indeed, but that would be really unusual - writing duos sharing a surname are not usually written with both surnames.

"And" does not work because Calibre automatically corrects it to "&". Also, using "and" would mean the author field is no longer language-agnostic - in a multilingual collection one would have different author entries for different languages (e.g. "und", "et") ...

They always write together but "and", as I said, gets changed automatically to "&" and the results is Arkadi & Strugatki, Boris.
I see this rename also mentioned here: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=182678
I'd hate using full names so I guess I will have to disregard the author sort field completely.

Computers are basically stupid and for the programmers to create the heuristics to do what you want is often tricky and rarely perfect. For example, I wrote some software that displayed people's names that it pulled from a database where the names were stored in all caps. I found some code that normalized the names and in the process of translating it to the language I was using learned a lot about names; e.g. with Rip Van Winkle the Van means "of" or "son of", sort of like Johnson, Peterson, etc. and the historically proper way to format it is lower case, Rip van Winkle. But then we had some names in the database that were Vietnamese and Van is surname there so it screwed up with that.

Exception handling :)

I always have though that consistent writing pairs should use a regular pen name for their joint works. I particularly like the one that Earl Binder and his brother Otto Binder used, Eando Binder (as in "E and O").

That made me laugh. So now you get to hear about some names that parents saddled their kids with; Normal Lear, a producer of TV shows named his daughter Chanda (chandelier), a coworker whose last name was Blank, named his son Drew Arthur (Drew A. Blank). Names have always fascinated me because my stupid father gave me a nickname for my legal first name and I'm forever telling people, yes, that's my real name.

Only on a book cover. If you were to walk into a bookstore, their database would have an entry for both Arkadi Strugakti AND Boris Strugakti.

And since calibre is a database, well...

AFAIK : The ability to override author_sort in Manage Authors is provided for the express purpose of dealing with corner cases such as yours, un-hyphenated double barrelled surnames, East Asian names etc etc.

BR

Thanks all, so I guess storing full names should be the way to go.