Quote:
Originally Posted by kiwidude
Why does Calibre store at book level as well at author level? That I have no idea on. The only reason I can think of as a performance optimisation - compared to the grief it causes I hope it was worthwhile  It drove me insane to find say some books by "Smith, James" sorted under J and the rest under S when this went wrong for me in the early days of my using Calibre (even though both displayed the author as "Smith, James"). |
It isn't performance.
It is mostly legacy. I added the individual author sort values sometime around the 0.7.15. Before that, the book's author sort what all that existed. Authors lists were sorted by author (not the sort), so people who used FN LN order saw the tag browser sorting differently from the library display.
Legacy aside, it can be useful to have a value per book in addition to a value per author. I have had situations where I wanted a book to sort by its second author (often edited books), and I am too compulsive to reorder the authors. In other cases I have had two spellings for the same author (myself included), and wanted some of the articles to sort with one spelling and some with the other. Some people mess with author_sort to get things to work on a specific device; before plugboards the kindle required that sort of thing to deal with its idiocies involving commas in names.
As a side note, I find it rather amusing that LN, FN in calibre is becoming mainstream. Last February when I added the basic tweak almost no one cared (I had one take-up on my first patch), which is why it ended up as a tweak (the very first one) instead of in the GUI. Just goes to show that no good deed goes unpunished.
