Quote:
Originally Posted by Starson17
That's the manual merge method, which is usually the best. OTOH, if he has lots of these duplicates and all have approximately the same metadata, another option is to do it automatically. To do that he can turn on the autosort/automerge option in Export/Import|Adding Books, then copy the entire library into a new library. This process will check each book as it is copied into the new library and when it finds a book that has the same author and nearly the same title as a book that was previously copied, Calibre will copy the new format into the previous record. This method is not suitable for cases where the author/title differ significantly or where the metadata of the first record is worse than the metadata for later books.
|
Starson, I really appreciate you taking the time to help!! I have a similar problem and am not sure how to tackle it. I started out with a large number of ebooks, probably about 12-15K. I imported them into Calibre and now I have almost 40K and loads of duplicates. The problem with going down the list and deleting the one or two (or more!) extras is that the DB is really bogging down. I am a very new user, but am a programmer/software tester so I understand the lingo. Can you give me a short set of instructions and then perhaps I can techwrite them into a more complete help item? From what I've googled up, it looks like this is a common question.
Part of what I am wondering if it would be worth organizing the books properly (author, title, series) or downloading metadata or any other prework that one could do that would make the duplicate matching process more effective or streamlined.
P.S. Happy to help out in testing or other tech stuff as needed too since I am currently out of work.
