[Isherwood]

I had a number of books in Calible from Baen free library that had bad author data or even no author data when pushed to the Kindle. Even after updating meta data in Calibre it wasn't right on the Kindle. The problem is that the Calibre metadata isn't used by the Kindle, it uses the author field in the MOBI file. Its author sort uses expects the string to be in the format "lastname, firstname" (not the space after the comma needs to be there).

I tried using Calibre to convert my books from PRC to MOBI and that helped the ones with no author at all on the Kindle but now the sort order was wrong. I had the Calibre author name set as "Firstname lastname" and author sort as "lastname, firstname". The trick was in checking what was in the MOBI files using the reader window in Calibre and viewing the book properties. It had the MOBI author field as "firstname lastname".

I then re-ran the conversion to MOBI and set the "Use author sort for author" checkbox in the mobi output properties. This caused the MOBI file to have "lastname, firstname" for the author property in the MOBI files and now they worked on the Kindle.

Kindle will take a MOBI book with author set to "lastname, firstname" and show it in the list as "firstname lastname" but still sort by lastname.

I then discovered that the Baen files that came as MOBI format were not sorting to the same location as the converted files. Checking these I found the author in the wrong format. You can select files in calibre and tell it to convert to the format they are already in. You get a warning but it will do it anyway. I ran all the rest of my books through this and now all the single author books sort correctly on the Kindle.

FYI, you can mass edit the meta data and check to the 'automatically set author sort' field to get the standard name conversion.

The last problem is with multiple author books. The auto set author sort above was converting "David Weber & Eric Flint" to "Weber, David & Flint, Eric". This would sort properly on the Kindle but the display on the book list would show "David & Flint, Eric Weber". I.e. it was expecting a 'lastname, firstname' format, finding the comma and switching the two substrings around. To get around this you can manually change the author sort from "Weber, David & Flint, Eric" to "Weber, David" but that is all that will show up on the Kindle. I haven't figured out a way to have multiple authors show up correctly and sort correctly.

FYI, after pushing the modified MOBI files with the proper author names I had to reset the Kindle to get them to work right. I guess the Kindle caches book information on startup and needs the reset to force it to re-read that.