Sorting by author's name and duplicates

[DrMartinus]

Hi,

I'm going to get an OYO ebook-reader for christmas and have started checking out what's available in terms of ebooks. So I stumbled over calibre which works just fine on my LinuxMint 10 64bit PC. However, when trying to add some books from a DVD, I noticed a serious problem:
The sorting by author's name only seems to use the last word in the field for sorting, and unfortunately, the fields are filled in in the manner "last name, first name". So I have a hard time finding certain authors, bcause it all seems to be upside down. It starts with "Hoffmann, E.T.A.", then comes "Christen, Ada", then little later "Wette, Adelheid" and so on. As I do not know the first name of all the authors, but usually the last name, I'm sometimes stuck finding a particular author (there are now about 3000 books in the collection).

The other thing I noticed while importing was the report of duplicates: calibre seems to look only for the title to determine duplicates, and that's quite dangerous. I have many books that are titled "poems" in the collection, so I have to allow the duplicates to be added. However, there are also some real duplicates. It would be imperative to check the author's name too when checking for duplicates.

Hope I don't roll up something that's been answered and/or discussed elsewhere, I looked around, but didn't find anything that would help me.

Will there be support for the OYO?
The calibre version I'm using is 0.7.18

[Manichean]

Install the latest version from the website. AFAIK, the Oyo is supported.
For the author sort thing, check out the tweak "author_sort_copy_method" (in preferences->tweaks, you want the method "copy"). Or, you could just fill the author field with "firstname lastname", which would then result in sorting according to "lastname, firstname" automatically.

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by DrMartinus

I noticed a serious problem:
The sorting by author's name only seems to use the last word in the field for sorting, and unfortunately, the fields are filled in in the manner "last name, first name".

This was your choice to fill the name that way. You can use the default of LN FN or change the tweak.

Read these:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=99131
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=102846

The other thing I noticed while importing was the report of duplicates: calibre seems to look only for the title to determine duplicates, and that's quite dangerous. I have many books that are titled "poems" in the collection, so I have to allow the duplicates to be added. However, there are also some real duplicates. It would be imperative to check the author's name too when checking for duplicates.

Turn on the Autosort/Automerge option. It's the one labeled: in Preferences|Import/Export|Adding Books| "If Books With Similar .. found, Merge..."

It will check both author and title.

The calibre version I'm using is 0.7.18

Upgrade.

[DrMartinus]

Thanks for all replies!

Originally Posted by Starson17

This was your choice to fill the name that way. You can use the default of LN FN or change the tweak.

No, not really. The files were all on the DVD with the authors' names put this way. I haven't seen any option to change that on the fly while adding the books to the collection.

Originally Posted by Starson17

Read these:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=99131
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=102846

That has helped, thanks a lot, also to the others, for providing this info. But it took me a while to figure out that changing the tweak is not all, but changing the way of sorting in the tag list is also required. But now it works.

Originally Posted by Starson17

Turn on the Autosort/Automerge option. It's the one labeled: in Preferences|Import/Export|Adding Books| "If Books With Similar .. found, Merge..."
It will check both author and title.

Hm, I'm a bit scared to do that... The term "similar" holds me back. What about titles like "poems I", "poems II" etc. by the same author? Would they be merged? And what does merge mean then? Removing the versions "II", "III" etc. and just leaving the version "I"?

Originally Posted by Starson17

Upgrade.

That's done, I'm now at version 0.7.30. The upgrade worked like a charm.

[DrMartinus]

Still sorting - author sorting works fine now, but in the manual it says:

You can also sub-sort (i.e. sort on multiple columns). For example, if you click on the title column and then the author column, the book will be sorted by author and then all the entries for the same author will be sorted by title.

I would like to have this, but it seems that I miss something. I click on the title column header and then on the author column headers, but it either sorts by title or by author, and does no sub-sort like to sort all the titles of one author alphabetically. What else is there to do to make that sub-sort work?

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by DrMartinus

I click on the title column header and then on the author column headers, but it either sorts by title or by author, and does no sub-sort like to sort all the titles of one author alphabetically. What else is there to do to make that sub-sort work?

You are doing it correctly. Sorting by Title then by Author will have all the titles for any author in "Library Order". Which means that a book like "The Client" will be sorted as if it was "Client, The", You can change this if you would like sorted under "T" instead of "C" by using a tweak.

# Control title and series sorting in the library view. # If set to 'library_order', Leading articles such as The and A will be ignored.
 # If set to 'strictly_alphabetic', the titles will be sorted without processing
 # For example, with library_order, The Client will sort under 'C'. With
 # strictly_alphabetic, the book will sort under 'T'.
 # This flag affects Calibre's library display. It has no effect on devices. In
 # addition, titles for books added before changing the flag will retain their
 # order until the title is edited. Double-clicking on a title and hitting return
 # without changing anything is sufficient to change the sort.
 title_series_sorting = 'library_order'

Just change library_order to strictly_alphabetic.

You can also use this tweak to ensure it is presorted on startup.

# Provide a set of columns to be sorted on when calibre starts
#  The argument is None if saved sort history is to be used
#  otherwise it is a list of column,order pairs. Column is the
#  lookup/search name, found using the tooltip for the column
#  Order is 0 for ascending, 1 for descending
# For example, set it to [('authors',0),('title',0)] to sort by
# title within authors.

sort_columns_at_startup = ('authors',0),('series',0),('title',0)

This is the one I use.