How can I more reliably show bks "on device"? (Kobo Forma)

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by LivresInOz

Thanks all.
If I keep it simple by using commas between names, will a search for those names on the Kobo find them?

eg.
John Smith, Don Roberts, Mary McGee

With authors on the device like that a search for any part of any name will find them. In lists, sorting by author will put them under "Smith". In the Author list, there will be an entry for each author. You will see "John Smith", "Don Roberts" and "Mary McGee".

The take-home of my msg above was that using an "&" (in author section) is what made the book not show up.

(Well specifically: an '&' before the last name. Havent tried '&' between all names)

Yes and no. As @DNSB stated, the ampersand is used in calibre as the separator between authors. The author names are actually stored separately and the database know which to use and the order. So calibre does not store "John Smith, Don Roberts, Mary McGee", it stores "John Smith", "Don Roberts" and "Mary McGee" in the author table and a reference that "Book X" has those three authors. When the details are displayed, it reconstructs the list of authors. If "Mary McGee" wrote something by separately, you can search for all books in calibre by that author and see both.

The problem comes with how different applications see the author. As stated above, when calibre updates an epub with the authors, it does not do it in a way that Kobo will read it. What is done is correct and follows the specs. What Kobo does is also correct but, takes the simplest path with the specs. Which is why I recommend using the metadata plugboard I posted above. You could use one that put an ampersand between the author names. That would produce "John Smith & Don Roberts & Mary McGee", and it would work on the device. But, the device would treat that as single author, there would be a single entry in the authors list and when sorting by author, the book would be under "McGee". And searching for any part of that would find it.

What you do is up to you. You might prefer the authors displayed with the "&". But, with the commas and plugboard will give the best matching back to calibre when it is getting the list of books from the device.


And for the record, because of "Mary McGee", I have now have Janis Joplin's "Me and Booby McGee" going through my brain. Which is not actually a complaint. But, it might show my age.

[Sirtel]

I just have a separate library for the books I send to my Kobos (which is only a tenth or so of my whole library). In my main library authors are separated by &, in the Kobo library by commas. As I do most of the work in the main library and the Kobo library exists only for interacting with my Kobo readers, this solution works perfectly for me.

[LivresInOz]

In summary, what would be the simplest way to ensure authors are SEARCHABLE on the Kobo without causing the problem of the book not appearing (as it should) as 'on device' in Calibre

(...which definitely happens if you list authors using the form: "John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison & Ringo Starr")

I don't care too much whether the author's name is listed on the book, but it might sometimes be useful to have them findable in a search.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by LivresInOz

In summary, what would be the simplest way to ensure authors are SEARCHABLE on the Kobo without causing the problem of the book not appearing (as it should) as 'on device' in Calibre

Read my first post. That is the answer to both of these issues. Everything else said has been to try and explain to you why it works and possibly why there are exceptions.

But I will repeat it.

Enter the authors in calibre in the way it supports them best: "John Lennon & Paul McCartney & George Harrison & Ringo Starr"

Create a metadata plugboard for sending books to the Kobo device that sets the author to the template:

program: raw_list('authors', ', ')

Send some books. The author will appear on the devices as "John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr" (though it might be truncated in the book lists). A search for any part of that should find the books.

It will probably match back to calibre when the device is connected. The matching is not perfect of a number of reasons and multiple authors can be the problem.

This works. I wouldn't suggest it if it didn't. A lot of people are doing this and have reported that it works. If it doesn't work for you then, we would need to do some debugging for why.