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DrJanet · 01-05-2010, 11:05 AM

Hi,

Thank you for Calibre - it's like iTunes for ebooks; you've done a great implementation. Unfortunately, the actions of the Author Sort field is severely limiting the app's usefulness for me. I have read in earlier posts that it cannot be deactivated (too bad), but, is there any way to modify or over-ride it? Or, can we just chose to sort on the authors field directly?

Here's the problem: I have imported over 2500 books, with a few thousand more to go. The file names all had the format of AuthLastName, FirstName & 2ndAuthor - Series - Title. So they alphabetized by the authors' last name.
ex. Bradley, Marion Zimmer & Ross, Deborah J - (Darkover Clingfire Trilogy 1) - The Fall of Neskaya (.rtf v1.0).rar

When imported, Calibre correctly breaks the filename down to put the authors and series into the author field and the title into the title field, which is fine. (Of course I would love to be able to set - as a delimiter and direct Caliber to put the series, and series order into other fields, but that's for the future wishlist; see the MS Excel UI for this ;o) So I end up with the author's name looking like this: Bradley, Marion Zimmer & Ross, Deborah J - (Darkover Clingfire Trilogy 1).

Author Sort seems to assume that the text string following the last space is really the authors' last name, and that the rest is the FirstName, so it ends up as 1), Bradley, Marion Zimmer & Ross, Deborah J - (Darkover Clingfire Trilogy totally screwing up the alphabetizing order which was correct to begin with. Checking the Swap author firstname and lastname box in the Add prefs seems to have no effect on this behaviour. Worse, when I edit the metadata by hand (which isn't really viable with this many books, anyway), and paste the authors name into the author sort field, it reverts back to the original incorrect entry. The only fix is to remove everything from the author field (there is no place to add additional authors, btw) and swap the first and last name. It's just not feasible with this many books.

So, please tell me there's another fix for this, or will be in the future. Thanks.

01-05-2010, 11:05 AM	#1
DrJanet MacOS 10.6.x, iPhone 3G Posts: 11 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jan 2010 Device: iPhone	Author Sort is messing things up Hi, Thank you for Calibre - it's like iTunes for ebooks; you've done a great implementation. Unfortunately, the actions of the Author Sort field is severely limiting the app's usefulness for me. I have read in earlier posts that it cannot be deactivated (too bad), but, is there any way to modify or over-ride it? Or, can we just chose to sort on the authors field directly? Here's the problem: I have imported over 2500 books, with a few thousand more to go. The file names all had the format of AuthLastName, FirstName & 2ndAuthor - Series - Title. So they alphabetized by the authors' last name. ex. Bradley, Marion Zimmer & Ross, Deborah J - (Darkover Clingfire Trilogy 1) - The Fall of Neskaya (.rtf v1.0).rar When imported, Calibre correctly breaks the filename down to put the authors and series into the author field and the title into the title field, which is fine. (Of course I would love to be able to set - as a delimiter and direct Caliber to put the series, and series order into other fields, but that's for the future wishlist; see the MS Excel UI for this ;o) So I end up with the author's name looking like this: Bradley, Marion Zimmer & Ross, Deborah J - (Darkover Clingfire Trilogy 1). Author Sort seems to assume that the text string following the last space is really the authors' last name, and that the rest is the FirstName, so it ends up as 1), Bradley, Marion Zimmer & Ross, Deborah J - (Darkover Clingfire Trilogy totally screwing up the alphabetizing order which was correct to begin with. Checking the Swap author firstname and lastname box in the Add prefs seems to have no effect on this behaviour. Worse, when I edit the metadata by hand (which isn't really viable with this many books, anyway), and paste the authors name into the author sort field, it reverts back to the original incorrect entry. The only fix is to remove everything from the author field (there is no place to add additional authors, btw) and swap the first and last name. It's just not feasible with this many books. So, please tell me there's another fix for this, or will be in the future. Thanks.