Author field

[moomintroll]

When I import books it always fills the Author field with "Jean Genet" instead of the usual cataloging method to use the last name first "Genet, Jean" -

Is there a way to set the preferences so it will automatically fill the field as Genet, Jean?

[itimpi]

The author field is taken as an exact copy of what has been set up in the book. The only way to change this behaviour is to find books or information sources that already have the author name the way you want. In practise he vast majority are stored as firstname secondname so correcting this is then a manual process.

There is another field called author_sort and that is the one that is used when sorting books by author. You can tell Calibre how to derive this from the author field. The default behaviour if author is syptored as firstname secondname is to store it in the form you specified.

This is consistent with how books have the name printed one way on the cover for display purposes, but are filed under surname in indexes or on library shelves.