Clara 2E Author Duplicates/Multiple Authors

[UrsulaGirl]

Hi Yall,
I have a Kobo Clara 2E that I sideload books onto from Calibre. I have sorted and catalogued all my books by subject, and all my authors are properly sorted. When I have multiple authors, I format by separating the authors with an "&", which separates the authors in Calibre but not on the Kobo. So I end up with an authors column with an entry for "David Whelan & David Graeber" and a separate entry for "David Graeber." When I look at the entry for just David Graeber, the other title written by "David Whelan & David Graeber" does not show up. Any idea how to solve this issue?

[Sirtel]

Kobo wants multiple authors to be First Name Last Name, First Name Last Name. As this is different from what calibre wants, I personally use a separate subset library for dealing with my Kobos. It can probably be done with a metadata plugboard, but I don't know enough about those.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Kobo wants multiple authors to be First Name Last Name, First Name Last Name. As this is different from what calibre wants, I personally use a separate subset library for dealing with my Kobos. It can probably be done with a metadata plugboard, but I don't know enough about those.

If your author field in calibre is FirstName LastName & FirstName2 Last Name2 & FirstName3 LastName3..., the KoboTouch drive will automagically mangle it to FirstName LastName, FirstName2 LastName2, FirstName3 LastName3.... No metadata plugboard is needed.

One caveat is that the author names are sent on the second connect. When the books are imported after the safely eject on the first connect, the first author name in the .opf file will be used as the author. You need the second connection to have all the author names inserted into the database entry created during the import process.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by DNSB

If your author field in calibre is FirstName LastName & FirstName2 Last Name2 & FirstName3 LastName3..., the KoboTouch drive will automagically mangle it to FirstName LastName, FirstName2 LastName2, FirstName3 LastName3.... No metadata plugboard is needed.

Good to know. I prefer my authors in calibre to be Last Name, First Name (changed from the default with the Quality Check plugin), so the driver automagic wouldn't work for me.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Good to know. I prefer my authors in calibre to be Last Name, First Name (changed from the default with the Quality Check plugin), so the driver automagic wouldn't work for me.

You could always hide the Author field and show an Author Sort field. I've done a screenshot of the column definition and calibre with both fields shown.

[Sirtel]

Yes, that's a solution too. I've thought of it, but I prefer the separate library approach also for other reasons - I only have a relatively small subset of my whole library on my Kobos, and it's simpler for me to keep that subset (well, copy of the subset) in a separate library and connect my Kobos only to that specific library, not to the main one. Maybe I'm just too used to doing things this way.

[DNSB]

Possibly. But if it works for you, nothing wrong with not doing it the "standard" way.

I tend to be very conservative in what I do with my calibre libraries. I have two libraries (Intake and Main) and a very boring workflow. I preferred to see authors in the last name, first name but didn't want to screw up sending to a Kobo so went with the solution I suggested. calibre is enough of a Swiss army knife tool that there are very often multiple ways of achieving the same end. Chacun a son goût