[davidfor]

Originally Posted by LivresInOz

What worked for me and didn't, in trying to make sure books were detected as present on the Kobo (Forma) device.

Thanks David for the advice. Sadly the plugboard method you just described in more detail didn't work for me, nor with any of the four combinations I asked about above (i.e varying the device and authors vs author_sort.)

I don't see any "four combinations" in the above posts, so I am not sure what you mean. And it is possible you will need to resend books to solve some of these issues. But, reading the rest of the post I think I know what the problem is.

What DID work, strangely, was simply making sure there was no "and" in the author names.

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EXAMPLES

Did NOT get detected on Forma, even when I used the methods above:

Smith, Johnson & Thomas
Smith & Thomas
("and" gets converted to "&" anyway, even if you write "and")

DID get detected on Forma, even BEFORE I used the methods above:

Smith et al
Smith, Johnson, Thomas
Smith; Johnson; Thomas
Smith + Johnson + Thomas

(NOTE: all included first names - skipped for brevity here)

Based on the above, the problem is that you are using what might be printed on the cover of a book, not the actual author names. And the different systems are interpreting theses in different ways.

For "Smith, Johnson & Thomas", calibre will consider that as two authors, "Smith, Johnson" and "Thomas". Calibre always uses the ampersand as the delimiter between names. When they are first entered it will also use other things, but, after that it will display them using the ampersand. And similarly, "Smith & Thomas" will be two authors, "Smith" and "Thomas". For all of the other examples, calibre will treat them as one author.

When the book is on the Kobo device, the author is split on commas. So, "Smith, Johnson & Thomas" becomes two authors, "Smith" and "Johnson & Thomas". "Smith, Johnson, Thomas" becomes three authors "Smith", "Johnson" and "Thomas". All the rest will be treated as a single author. The sorting will be based on the Surname in the author which is basically the last word. So, "Smith et al" should be sorted under "al" and most of the rest under "Thomas".

You didn't actually give any examples of the problems you had or otherwise my advice would have had some extra things in it. And that is to keep it simple for the authors. Calibre expects the author as the list of authors in "LN FN" format. Having middle names or initials works. You can fiddle with the author sort to achieve other things. But, not having the author like this breaks to many other things to make it worthwhile. Or allow it to work, as you have seen.