[DNSB]

Originally Posted by tamhas

My wife would prefer that the file name of a book in Calibre be composed of author + title rather than title + author. Is there a way to change that? This is in the context of my inputting a book in Amazon format and then converting it to epub for her reader.

If you are looking at the books internal to the calibre library, no. In fact, stop looking at those files and consider them a black box. When you send a book to her reader, you can use a device template to set the name.

The default template may look something like this:

{title} - {authors}

You could change it to:

{authors:sublist(0,1,&)} - {title}
or
{author_sort:sublist(0,1,&)} - {title}

The :sublist(0,1,&) says to use the first item in the list so if you have more than one author, only one author name will be used. Author is generally stored firstname lastname while author_sort is lastname, firstname.

I've attached an image of the save template I use with my Kobo ereaders.

Elib/{author_sort:sublist(0,1,&)}/{title} - {authors:sublist(0,1,&)}

Basically, this uses a directory called Elib in the root of the Kobo's exposed storage followed by a subdirectory based on the first entry in the author sort and then the ebook filename based on the title followed by the first entry in the author list. The sublisting is done to reduce the number of characters in the filename/path when you have multiple authors. The reason for using the Elib directory is that the root directory of most volumes have a limited number of filenames.