Author lastname, firstname

[Britt]

When I added my books into Bookpedia (via search for ISBN#), all names was recorded as lastname,firstname.
This also gave a good overview.

Unfortunately I did versions update, and authors names are listed firstname lastname.
This caused chaos as it is not possible to print out any reasonable overview, listed by authors lastname now.
I have several thousands books and would not like to have to add all over again. (If so, that will be another application, after this trouble).

Hopefully there is a solution to this?

tx,

[Conor]

Hi Britt,

The author names are added as they come from the database. It sounds as if the ISBN searches you did returned results from the Library of Congress that gives the author last name first. However, Amazon lists the author name the other way around and would cause for the different formats you are seeing. It's best to get all your data from your favorite database to minimize the format inconsistency (set the "site" in the search window to a specific site instead of "cascade"). We agree that it would be great to have Bookpedia change the format to fit your preferences, but it's no easy task to get a computer to separate a name, especially when you start working on edge cases like multiple last names (John Burnham Schwartz) or multiple first names (Edgar Allan Poe) or Initialized names (J. R. R. Tolkien). Bookpedia is great at organizing the Authors by last name as it can look for the comma, to do so hold down the option key and click on the author's column header. This will organize books by author's last name and allow you to easily spot those that need updating or to export a listing that is in order.

[Britt]

My library consist of books in several languages and from several countries, so there are not any single source which can be searched for the information.

[Conor]

That does make it tougher. We have put in request with Amazon and a few others to have the names separated so that we can tell first from last name, but format changes are always slow.

[thajeztah]

As a workaround, I've added two custom fields to BookPedia; Author Firstname and Author Lastname, this allows me to sort the list on both fields, without BookPedia making mistakes.

It will require you to enter that information manually though..

[nachtgedanken]

I know this topic is quite old and forgive me but I haven't found anything from recent times.
I switched to Mac and consequently to Bookpedia in March. I was quite happy with the import of data and happily started adding books. After a while I noticed that the order in the field author was firstname lastname while all my previous entries (3000+)where lastname, firstname. I wouldn't mind at all because in bookpedia I don't the alpabetical order any more but: I export my data to csv for the app csv touch on my iphone and there the quickest way to find an entry is alpabetical. So from March to now I had to change all author names manually. I still have around 1000 books to add but I can't get myself to do it with all this manual afterwork. As my former program bookcook also worked with the data from amazon and always separated the names right, maybe you could give this features a second look? It would be great if one could choose between the different versions of author name.