[Enhancement]: Authors with alternative names/nicknames to prevent duplicate authors

[wtanksleyjr]

Describe the feature/enhancement

J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, L.E. Modesitt Jr., G.R.R. Martin: all have something in common, that their names are spelled slightly differently across different import sources, which sometimes insert a space between the initials and sometimes not.

My first (and only planned) proposal is to keep a cache of all such initialisms, and when a newly imported book contains an author with an initialism, scan that cache in a space-insensitive way, so that you can collapse newly input authors into whatever was entered into the database first. The user can then adapt the spelling using the author's page if desired (also updating the cache, removing the entry if the user changes the author's name to not include an initialism).

[advplyr]

I believe I saw this in other software where you could list alternative names for an author/artist. I think the first step would just be to add an alternative names multi-input for authors and have the scanner check against those names when looking for matching authors. Adding the authors would be manual until we figure out a good way to auto-populate it.

[wtanksleyjr]

That's a lot more flexible, yes. Good sense.

[hobesman]

Yes to this!

Sometimes authors add a middle initial and sometimes don't. (Patrick Laplante vs. Patrick G. Laplante). Sometimes they use initials and other times spell out the name (Katherine Applegate vs. K.A. Applegate).

And even Audible sometimes has different versions for different books, so matching doesn't always ensure consistency.