Scan for duplicates

[mbovenka]

Originally Posted by lbutlr

C S Lewis, C S Lewis, Clive S Lewis, Clive Staples Lews, Clive S. Lewis. It's even worse for JRR Tolkien since JRR, J R R, J. R. R are all frequent variants, along with various random seeming expansions of his names.

The Quality Check plugin can help with inconsistent initials and authors with commas (or without them, if Lastname, Firstname is what you want).

[Cyphigma]

Whether using the Quality Check or Find Duplicates, you're still going to have to look through each ebook for quality control. Failure to do so means you're very likely to find that you've retained the damaged, less-structured, missing font, damaged/missing image, funky colored, whatever... version of the ebook.

Start with Quality Check and other "fill in" or "match" metadata plugins or processes. Then try Find Duplicates. Open both books, look through them and compare. Check every feature imaginable.

But believe me. One of the worse things you can do is remove duplicates too early in the library building process. Too often I've found the "obvious" choice of which file to keep to be the wrong answer. Now how do you get that duplicate you deleted six months ago back?

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Cyphigma

Too often I've found the "obvious" choice of which file to keep to be the wrong answer. Now how do you get that duplicate you deleted six months ago back?

I compare, using Find Duplicates->Library Duplicates, my Intake library with my Books library, at the same time I run a CalibreSpy instance against my Books library. When FD finds a duplicate, I can eyeball compare other metadata (e.g. publisher, pubdate etc), as well as file sizes, editions, examine contents in viewers and editors etc.

If I'm in no doubt it is a true duplicate I delete from the Intake library, otherwise I tag the Intake copy with Merge or Investigate and move it to a Duplicates library.

I process Duplicate books I've tagged with Merge immediately after moving non-duplicates from Intake to Books - note this is a rare event. I switch Calibre to Books and CalibreSpy to Duplicates, and do the 'merging' myself; by editing metadata in the Books library booklist cells, and/or adding/replacing formats in Duplicates to Books via DnD into the Book Detail panel, CalibreSpy has an open book folder function.

For Duplicates tagged with Investigate, I tag the 'duplicate' in Books with DupInvest immediately. But I do the 'investigating' as and when necessary or I'm minded. A few books I've tagged as Investigate have been there for years.

BR

[yonkyunior]

Originally Posted by lbutlr

This is what I ended up doing, though it meant rebuilding the entire library and redownloading meta data. and "identical" since cources cannot agree on naming conventions. Importing the library with the metadata failed because that got me back to exactly what I had before, with duplicate books listed as separate entries.

C S Lewis, C S Lewis, Clive S Lewis, Clive Staples Lews, Clive S. Lewis. It's even worse for JRR Tolkien since JRR, J R R, J. R. R are all frequent variants, along with various random seeming expansions of his names.

To say nothing of the disaster that is marking an editor as the author which ads many more variations to try to sort through. I must have seen 50 variation on the tags for books edited by George RR Martin.

Heck, even with Jane Austen I had one book with the author tagged simply as "Austen" one a J. Austen, and one tagged as J Austin. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(Since the metadata doesn't modify the original book, I essentially had to start all over from the original sources)

In Find Duplicates, it was quite easy to sort it with Find Metadata Variation, started with identical, similar,.... or ignore title with every author variation.

search identical author, set tag browser with lastname, firstname
and rename, i often do "manage author",

Lewis, C S
Lewis, Clive S
Lewis, Clive Staples

it's easy to see and standarized.
with quality check plugin to standarize this one (JRR, J R R, J. R. R.)