[Manichean]

Originally Posted by dkritso109

i have literaly thousands of books in that format, we are talking like a month's work of copy and pasting. i have gone over the tutorial with no avail.

I'm not talking about copying and pasting, I'm talking about the search & replace in bulk metadata editing. If you import your books with lastname, firstname in {authors} and then do a bulk metadata search & replace on {authors}, searching for

(.*?),\s(.*?)

and replacing it with

\2 \1

you should be fine. (Caution: I haven't tested that expression, but it should do the trick if the fields are the way I assumed in this post.)