MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Using calibre to organize a paper library

Worldwalker · 06-24-2010, 07:07 PM

I came across this post on dearauthor.com when I was googling for something else. It seems like I'm not the only one who wants to do that (although their genre isn't my cup of tea, they seem to have some calibre fans over there). But this leaves me with a critical question.

I recently bought a barcode scanner from ThinkGeek, which I'm going to use to capture book ISBNs as we unpack all those cartons of books. Thousands of books. Using calibre to organize all my books, both e- and p-, is the logical next step. There are three things that would make this project enormously easier:

1. "paper" as a format option. A lot of us have hybrid collections, after all.

2. An easy way to import a text file of ISBNs and generate empty books for each of them, or add "paper" as a format if they already exist.

3. Bulk metadata lookup, since I'll have the ISBNs.

Are there ways to do this I just haven't found yet? Or is this going to be one of those questions answered with a link to the "how to set up a development environment" page?

06-24-2010, 07:07 PM	#1
Worldwalker Curmudgeon Posts: 3,085 Karma: 722357 Join Date: Feb 2010 Device: PRS-505	Using calibre to organize a paper library I came across this post on dearauthor.com when I was googling for something else. It seems like I'm not the only one who wants to do that (although their genre isn't my cup of tea, they seem to have some calibre fans over there). But this leaves me with a critical question. I recently bought a barcode scanner from ThinkGeek, which I'm going to use to capture book ISBNs as we unpack all those cartons of books. Thousands of books. Using calibre to organize all my books, both e- and p-, is the logical next step. There are three things that would make this project enormously easier: 1. "paper" as a format option. A lot of us have hybrid collections, after all. 2. An easy way to import a text file of ISBNs and generate empty books for each of them, or add "paper" as a format if they already exist. 3. Bulk metadata lookup, since I'll have the ISBNs. Are there ways to do this I just haven't found yet? Or is this going to be one of those questions answered with a link to the "how to set up a development environment" page?