Library Management Software?

[TantricWarrior]

I recently purchased 10,000 books on DVD. Now the biggest problem, unsurprisingly, is the cataloging of the contents of the DVD, there are errors and duplicate listings etc. I was wondering: is there a way to extract the "tag data" (author, title, description, etc) from a list of .prc files (non-DRM) and output to a list? Obviously a batch process would be best.

Also, has anybody else bought from these people and what is the quality of these book-files (WRT OCR errors, etc.)?

[JSWolf]

BUMP!

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by TantricWarrior

I recently purchased 10,000 books on DVD. Now the biggest problem, unsurprisingly, is the cataloging of the contents of the DVD, there are errors and duplicate listings etc. I was wondering: is there a way to extract the "tag data" (author, title, description, etc) from a list of .prc files (non-DRM) and output to a list? Obviously a batch process would be best.

Also, has anybody else bought from these people and what is the quality of these book-files (WRT OCR errors, etc.)?

The DVD is offered by Munseys, the site formerly known as Blackmask. You can find them at http://munseys.com.

The proprietor grabs PD stuff from places like Project Gutenberg, and creates versions for a variety of different readers. My feel is that the quality will vary depending on the format. The conversions are scripted, and some scripts probably do better conversions than others.

He does a fair bit of editing on some titles to massage them for publication: he likes old pulp material, and some of what he offers hasn't hit places like PG yet.

I have a lot of Munseys titles, but I grab the HTML versions from the site and do my own conversions to the format used by the Plucker offline HTML reader for Palm OS. I also check PG to see if the title appears there and grab it in preference if it does. Among other reasons, some of the PG stuff I grab includes images, and the Munseys versions don't -- neither he nor the chap who runs Manybooks (http://manybooks.net) have found a good scripted way of handling images in ebooks. (That would be a problem in any case. Do you use full color images or convert to gray scale? If gray scale, 4 or 16 shade? What about image size? The answer depends on the reader used to view them.)

I'd call the DVD a good deal, but I'd keep my expectations moderate as to quality. The best quality I've seen are the versions posted here, created by MR users. Doing it right takes time and skill. Munseys' proprietor tries to add a dozen books a day to the site. With scripts, he can do it. Handcrafting, he couldn't.
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Dennis