Comment 3 for bug 1503683

Firstly, the Kobo devices do not use the "sort" columns. The title and author are loaded into the database from the values of "dc:title" and "dc:creator". The sorting on the device is done using this value in the database. That is also what is displayed.

Title sorting on the device uses "library order", so it is ignoring articles. And the articles used appear to be based on the language of the book (also put into the database).

Looking at the screenshot of the Kobo device, the sort on title is correct. The first and last title start with articles, hence the second word is used for the sort. Without seeing the pre-converted version, I can't be sure what is happening.

The sort in calibre suggests you are either manually setting the title_sort to not use the articles or have used a tweak to change the sorting.

Also, you say you are not using a metadata plugboard. But, it looks like you are. The title on the device appears to have been set using "{title} - {author}".

The only reason I can see that there might be a difference is if you have set the language of the books between the original send and post-conversion send. If these were originally sent to the device with the language set to English, they would have sorted as if "Die" and "Der" were not-articles. I you sent them after the conversion and the language had been set to German, then these would be used as articles. Using the Kobo Utilities plugin to set the metadata on the device could also do this.

And thinking more about this, the following occurred to me:
- Are you using the KoboTouchExtended driver or converting to kepub and sending that?
- Do you have t Kepub metadata writer plugin installed?