I have approximately 16,000 books in my Calibre library, with many more to come. That volume of books also has an accompanying author list of over 6,500 names. The problem lies in that many of these authors are listed by either more than one variation on their name, or they use pseudonyms for some of their other works. For example, in the first case there is E. E. Smith. His books appear with the author credits listing E. E. "Doc" Smith, or Edward E. Smith, or Edward Everett Smith, or any of several other possibilities. That means that I need to support all these variants if I want the metadata to reflect the correct information when I download the metadata. Another example, and there are many authors with similar habits, is Stephen King, who also wrote under the name "Richard Bachman". Again it means two listings for one author. A third example would be Michele Bardsley, who is also listed as Michele R. Bardsley. Again, two listings for one person. Personally, I feel the duplication makes my library unnecessarily complicated.
What I would like to see is some way of adding a custom column to the Calibre library display that would let me list an author by one name, but that would be able to link to a table that would contain the various aliases. This table would allow Calibre to see all variations of an author's name when doing a metadata pull from the various book databases. I probably haven't explained this very clearly, so if anyone has any ideas or suggestions, I'd appreciate the help.
Thanks,
Dan
