@Bookatarian - a good list, you reminded me of a few things.
The term "metadata" is fairly prevalent throughout calibre - metadata download, getting metadata from book, inserting metadata as a (jacket) page, metadata plugboards and so on. But as a new user I didn't have the foggiest idea what on earth "metadata" was in the calibre world. Sometimes it means the data in calibre's library, whereas other times it means internal data stored inside book formats that can support it (a concept I did not know about). I certainly didn't know why when I renamed book titles in my library in calibre and then opened the viewer, that it has some "other" title being displayed in the window title bar - and as Booktarian says the cover was different until you did a conversion. Of course once you "know" it becomes a non-issue.
I also rather understated above the challenges I had with getting books into calibre. My existing ebooks to import were a mess (which was why I wanted calibre), being inconsistently named/organised from 10 years of collecting and shovelling into random subfolders. I turned one mess into another mess in calibre - the combination of regexes for adding, pulling metadata (often awful) from inside the book, metadata download overwriting titles sometimes incorrectly and then the duplicates box ignoring books since an alleged "title" matched. Eventually I saw it as an excuse as a software geek to spend several days writing a program to do some pre-processing. It allowed me via keyboard shortcuts to perform lots of common cleanup tasks on the book names as well as query the underlying calibre database to perform some duplicate analysis, putting such duplicates in separate folders etc. So then I had this whole complex and time consuming workflow going on that I did for about a month.
It was in hindsight just a dumb thing to do. Trying to stick so many unorganised and duplicated ebooks from a range of sources into calibre up front is just asking for trouble, and I got it
. Eventually I figured out a better strategy and it is that which I continue to use today:
- focusing on the books I am most likely to read one author at a time
- using Windows search via explorer to find them
- picking the best single format if I have duplicates before adding to calibre
- using my Quick Preferences plugin to switch between a couple of regexes using a keyboard shortcut before I drag/drop them in
- updating a yes/no custom column "done" (I forgot to mention it above) once I have grabbed the metadata/cover, converted to ePub, formatted in Sigil and converted to Mobi.