[davidfor]

Originally Posted by nikev

However, I am still confused about what the plugin does and how it interacts with the reader.

When you open the menu for the plugin, the functions available depend on the list you are looking at. Most act on the books on the device. But, those that need books in the calibre library are only available when looking at the library list. Those that only act on books on the device and don't need the book to be in calibre are only available on the device list. There is some overlap and some functions that are on both, but might behave a little differently.

The metadata update only works for books that are in the calibre library and on the device, hence it is only available when looking at the library.

What I am trying to do is fix a bunch (quite a lot) on my reader where the author's first name and last name are mixed up. I am not sure how this happened in the first place; looking at the Calibre files, probably it's because some used the format for author as

last name, first name

while others use

first name last name

Also there was no consistency in Calibre files in the format for author sort.

I have now fixed the metadata in Calibre so all use the author field in the format "first name last name" while the author sort key is in the format "last name, first name"

I'd now like to push these over to the device, so sorted author lists make sense.

I used the "update metadata on device" function, and it seems to have worked on some books but not on others.

Is there some other way to fix this, short of wiping my library, or removing the problem books, and side loading them again?

The update is updating the database on the device. When doing this, it compares the values in the library and on the device and only makes a change if they are different. It should work, but it won't surprise me much if there is a case where it fails. I would need to see some examples where it failed to have an idea of why. The best way to do this is to run calibre in debug mode, run the function on the ones that failed and post the log for me to look at.

Unless the sorting problem is with books that have multiple authors. In this case, the default way that calibre populates the author doesn't work well. The device expects the authors as "FN1 LN1, FN2 LN2". Calibre is more likely to use "FN1 LN1 & FN2 LN2". Because of this, I recommend using the following metadata plugboard to set the author:

program: raw_list('authors', ', ')