Batch update of a library

[Krogagre]

I have been collecting ebooks for quite some time in Calibre and decided to do some house cleaning, The total library contains a few thousand books and a lot of the books have bad titles and/or authors. In order to be able to consolidate I thought about doing a plugin or use the command interface with the following functionality

For each book
Check if author is known
Check if title is known and for author
If ok exit

If unique match on title, replace author and exit

Check if author is a title and title is an author
If so swap and exit

Check if title contain separation marks (-)
If so check for author match, title match and place acordingly (including excess in series) and exit

Use extract ISBN
If ok extract metadata, update and exit

This would probably clear out a lot of mess, but is a plugin the right approach and is this feasible??

[kiwidude]

Welcome to MobileRead.

To be honest for "only" a couple of thousand books I would suggest you just crack on and sort it out manually. You can use the Quality Check plugin to do some of those checks. The biggest problem you will have with trying to write something like this in a plugin is "if author is known" for instance - "known" according to who/what? Some website? Which may or may not be incomplete even if you could find something which had a massive list of authors on it, that presumably you are scraping data for. Which may or may not match due to all the subtle variations that can happen with author names, hyphenations, aliases etc.

In my opinion it is a non-starter as a plugin. Sorting out titles and authors for a few thousand books using a combination of extract ISBN, Quality Check and visual eyeballing will take a tiny fraction of the time that attempting to write a plugin for it would take, even if you could figure out a solution to the not inconsiderable other issues

[JSWolf]

Question to the OP... These eBooks with bad title and/or bad authors, are they legal eBooks?