Sorting of books by author with "(ed.)" in the name

[JJ Johnson]

I have a couple of books that when sorted by author sort to the top of the list. Always wondered why and just looked into it. I see that they're collections with "(ed.)" appended to the author name.

For example:

title: 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories
author: Isaac Asimov (ed.)
author sort: Asimov, Isaac

I'm surprised they're not sorted as dictated by the sort string. Instead, the Kobo software appears to see that "(ed.)" in the name of the author and pushes the books to the top.

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by JJ Johnson

I have a couple of books that when sorted by author sort to the top of the list. Always wondered why and just looked into it. I see that they're collections with "(ed.)" appended to the author name.

For example:

title: 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories
author: Isaac Asimov (ed.)
author sort: Asimov, Isaac

I'm surprised they're not sorted as dictated by the sort string. Instead, the Kobo software appears to see that "(ed.)" in the name of the author and pushes the books to the top.

I remember it also doing something silly like that when there's something like Jr. at the end. In your case you could use the Apprentice Alf DeDrm plugin to remove the drm and then edit the book's metadata (with Calibre or Sigil) to get rid of that (ed.).

[John F]

Originally Posted by JJ Johnson

I have a couple of books that when sorted by author sort to the top of the list. Always wondered why and just looked into it. I see that they're collections with "(ed.)" appended to the author name.

For example:

title: 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories
author: Isaac Asimov (ed.)
author sort: Asimov, Isaac

I'm surprised they're not sorted as dictated by the sort string. Instead, the Kobo software appears to see that "(ed.)" in the name of the author and pushes the books to the top.

My understanding is that the Kobo readers do not have an "author sort" field.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by John F

My understanding is that the Kobo readers do not have an "author sort" field.

That is correct. For sideloaded books, the device takes the text from the first dc:contributor tag in the OPF of the book. It uses this without change.

@JJ Johnson:
For sorting, the name is in interpreted as "FN LN". For names with more than two words, there is no attempt to assign meaning to the parts of the name. It is just treated as "FN1 FN2 FN3 ... LN". So, "James Tiptree Jr." will be sorted as "Jr. James Tiptree". And "Isaac Asimov (ed.)" will be "(ed.), Isaac Asimov".

And remember, Kobo interprets the comma as the separator between multiple authors. If you use "LN, FN", Kobo will interpret that as two authors, "LN" and "FN". The book lists will sort on "LN" but the author tab will show two authors.

And there has been a lot of discussion on this over the years. There have been several suggestions on how to handle things.

[JJ Johnson]

Ah, Ok. That makes sense. I was going to say, the 'author sort' field appears to be applied correctly to all of the other author names. But if Kobo is just doing a simple-minded attempt at figuring out last name, it adds up.

[Jellby]

I'm using the following template with calibre for the author field:

{author_sort:'re(list_re(list_re($, "&", ",", ";"), "&", " ", "_"), "&", ", ")'}

except that instead of "_" I write a non-breaking space and instead of ";" a single low-9 quotation mark. This transforms the ampersand-separated author list of calibre into a comma-separated list, replaces the comma in the "Last name, First name" items with something that looks the same, and attempts to prevent the Kobo from splitting the names. Unfortunately it looks like the non-breaking space trick does not work any more and the Kobo will still split the names... but I can always sort by "first name", which as far as the Kobo believes, it's actually the real last name. I guess I could replace the spaces with an actual "_" and bear with those in the display.

I have this template in a plugboard that I use to "update metadata on the device" with the Kobo Utilities plugin, so the epub files are not changed, it's only the database that gets modified. I do similarly with the titles:

{title_sort:'re($, ' ', '_')'}