[scifantasy]

Hi all.

I recently updated to an 11th Generation Kindle Paperwhite (it was the USB-C that finally got me), from a...oh, maybe 7th or 8th gen, which I had steadfastly not been updating with firmware. As a result, I jumped several generations of Amazon mucking with Kindle design.

Some of the changes I quite like. Others are...tolerable. But the one I'm curious about is changes to author_sort.

I've always used "use author_sort for authors" and had the plugboard that creates the semicolon-separated list that Kindles used to like, but it seems that as of the latest firmware, that no longer works. Further, while formerly this setup would let the Kindle sort by last name but display firstname and lastname in standard order, now my author entries on Kindle are "lastname, firstname"--and, as I said, semicolon-separated.

Additionally, I've found that it is sometimes inconsistent whether a mobi file, especially one not gotten from Amazon, will actually get author_sort correctly when I USB it to my Kindle. If not, I find I have to do quickly convert mobi to mobi (or, I guess, azw to azw, but that doesn't come up) and that fixes it. I can't tell, however, what the difference is, because I look at the metadata of the before and after as best I can and I can't see any difference.

Relatedly, it looks like Kindles finally sort by title within an author, but the author_sort ordering can cause some remarkable weirdness...a book that Calibre has as "Keith R.A. DeCandido & Peter David & Sarah Shaw" (with appropriate author_sort in Calibre) will show up in the middle of my collection of Keith DeCandido's books, but with Peter David's name first. See attached.

None of this is a dealbreaker, or even a huge problem, of course. But I'm curious--what changed? Is there a way to get the author_sort field to operate like it used to? What's up with the sometimes-working-sometimes-not author_sort loading? What have I missed?

Thanks!