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Originally Posted by Worldwalker
Well, in my Authors list right now, I have A.E. Merritt, A.E. Van Vogt, Aaron Allston, and Abraham Lincoln at the top. So I'm a little unclear on how "Calibre does sort author lists by author". And yes, author and author_sort are set correctly in the metadata (I just double checked).
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As I noted above, my earlier response was missing some words. I meant to say that book lists are never sorted by author. As you noted, lists of authors, such as authors in the tags pane and lists generated by the command line tools, are sorted by author, not author_sort.
In fact, author lists cannot be sorted by author_sort, because author_sort is a property of a book, not an author. A reasonable case can be made for storing a sort string with each author, but then the tools would need to be extended to permit setting and editing them.
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The reason I'd like a swap button to swap author and author_sort is the PRS-505 doesn't respect author_sort. So if I go into "Books by Author" there, it starts with, guess who, A.E. Merritt. If I could swap author and author_sort, transfer the books, then swap it back for calibre use, that would get around the PRS probelm.
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Why not store authors in ln, fn format? That would make calibre and your sony have the same behavior. Alternatively, you could ask for an enhancement to the device plugin, telling it to use the first author from author_sort instead of from author. Note though that this choice could be problematic for the reasons given below.
One difficulty with your button is that calibre uses the author field in interesting ways, such as setting up its internal folder structure. Changing the author also changes the paths. Pushing a 'swap' button would cause calibre to move all the books in the library to different folders and to rename all the book files. Although one can argue that calibre shouldn't do this, the fact is that it does, and that won't change soon if ever.
In addition, author_sort does not have a fixed relationship to author(s). It is generated once, and then can be changed by the user, making copying it back to author somewhat problematic. For example, for names like 'de Quelquechose, Pierre', I change author_sort to remove the 'de', because the name should sort under Q but should display as originally written. Similar kinds of things happen with names like 'Joe Blogs 2nd' and 'Joe Blogs 1st'; they require adjustment to sort the way I want (younger person before older in an ascending sort). In these cases, swapping back and forth would play havoc with the names.
Well, off my soapbox now.
