I have a lot of ebooks. 329 of them, to be exact. And when I open the ebook app on my tablet to settle down for a good read, I’m bothered (more than I probably should be) that some of my books are listed with an author of Alastair Reynolds while others by him are under Reynolds, Alastair. There are many instances of that, where the same author is listed two ways. It’s maddening.
Yes, it’s a First World problem. Yes, there are more important things I could concern myself with. But hey, it’s a problem I can fix.
So this afternoon I sat down and read the documentation about the epub format. It’s not so much a “standard” as a “recommendation”, which means all of those pesky epub files are formatted slightly differently. But with some research and experimentation, I was able to find the appropriate places to modify the files and update the authors’ names. While I was at it, I tinkered with the book titles, too.
Now my ebook app shows all of Alastair’s books together, in a well-formatted list, and I’m a happy guy.