[terencek]

Here's a challenge which may be quite simple for someone with programming skills:

Could anyone come up with a fairly basic way of cleaning-up the booklist generated through a command-prompt procedure directly from either the Kindle's own directory (or a mirror of it on the PC). I am not referring to Calibre's booklist generator, which requires all the books to actually be loaded in Calibre itself, which is painful if you have hundreds.

This is one popular way of generating a booklist (of .mobis) from the actual Kindle (or mirror) directory:

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"To print a list of all books in the Kindle master folder (or on the PC), from Command Prompt, switch to the relevant drive, drill down to the Kindle folder, then type: dir /s *.mobi > holdbooks.txt (press enter key) where the > redirects the output into the file holdbooks.txt, /s means go down the folders if you have subfolders. Then remove unwanted text, numbers etc. with Find and Replace."
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In principle this works fine, but it produces a very bloated document with a bunch of info you don't need if you only want a catalogue of all the authors and their books, plus unnecessary spaces, file sizes etc.

The trick would seem to be to find a way to strip the resulting .txt file down to its essentials which I suggest needs to look simply something like this, e.g. under your own Novels classification you might have:

Colm Toibin: Mothers and Sons
Colm Toibin: The Empty Family
Colum McCann: Let The Great World Spin
Cormac McCarthy: Outer Dark
Daniel Handler: The Basic Eight
Dave Eggers: You Shall Know Our Velocity!
David Abbott: The Upright Piano Player
David Guterson: Snow Falling on Cedars
David Malouf: Ransom
etc.

To get to this stage, without more than basic abilities to run repeated Find & Replace actions involved me in an enormous amount of manual deletion and cleaning up. Can there be an easier way? If someone can come up with a solution he or she will be doing the ebook community an enormous service. Many of us would love to be able to generate a simple catalogue of our collections at regular intervals!