[Feature Request] Menu options and Author sorting.

[phospholipid77]

Most libraries have their shelves sorted by Author's last name.

1. Can that be an option in the sorting menu? Or, is it already and I'm not seeing it?
2. It appears that some of my books are interpreting "Jr." as a last name (e.g. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. seems to fall in J and not V). Is there a way to correct for that?

[bayang]

It is not possible for now, see #106

I am still unsure of what to do when there are multiple authors on one book.

[phospholipid77]

It is not possible for now, see #106

I am still unsure of what to do when there are multiple authors on one book.

Oh, that's so interesting! I can imagine that's actually more difficult than I would suspect.

For what it's worth, I'll offer something I just found in my searching. When I look up an OpenLibrary entry for a book with multiple authors, it just shows them in the text with an "and" between them:

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL20480768W/The_Red_Scrolls_of_Magic?edition=key%3A/books/OL27710722M

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL37572762W/Sunrise_Nights?edition=key%3A/books/OL50730034M

It also appears that OpenLibrary is deferring to whatever author order is provided by the publisher because the authors are not showing in alphabetical order and they match publisher listings.

When I scrape those page to get bibliographic entries in my Zotero library, Zotero shows it as two separate AUTHOR fields, and it sorts them by whatever OpenLibrary had listed as the first author.

I don't know if that's useful at all. And I know you folks are always working hard for improvements. So thank you for your consideration.

[bayang]

I have been thinking a bit about this.
I think I'll defer the choice to the user. The user will be able to choose if they want to sort according to the publisher order or their custom preference.
So for single author books the order is simple, for multiple authors the default sort will be alphabetical and then each user will be able to change the sort order on a per book basis.