Newbie question: editing metadata

[ardeur]

I discovered Calibre *after* I had purchased my Nook and uploaded about 1300 ebook onto the SDHC card I am using.

Calibre recognized my nook, and I populated Cailbre's library with all the books on the card in my ereader (this took maybe 10-15 minutes).

I want to edit author names so that there are no variations in the spelling for the same author. If I make those edits, and then upload those ebooks back onto my my card, what should I do from there... ? Will my nook recognize those changes?

[ardeur]

Also... how do I edit the metadata for several ebooks at once?

For example, I have several books by the same author, but the author's name is in a bad format on all of them. I want to change the author's name for all of the books at once, so they're all consistent.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by ardeur

Also... how do I edit the metadata for several ebooks at once?

For example, I have several books by the same author, but the author's name is in a bad format on all of them. I want to change the author's name for all of the books at once, so they're all consistent.

Select all the books you want to change.
Now click the Edit Metadata button:
Presto... Bulk mode. Set the Author, tick the Automatic Author Sort.
Set tags, series,

Remember: this applies to All selected books.

[hrynkiw]

Originally Posted by ardeur

Also... how do I edit the metadata for several ebooks at once?

For example, I have several books by the same author, but the author's name is in a bad format on all of them. I want to change the author's name for all of the books at once, so they're all consistent.

I'm betting you've figured this out for yourself already, but just in case you haven't...

Select all the books you want to edit (using shift- or ctrl-click)
Click on the Edit Metadata button in the toolbar (blue circle with an "i")
(Calibre should bring up the "Bulk edit metadata" dialogue.)

You can also click on the little down-arrow next to the Edit Metadata button and select the bulk edit option.

Link to Calibre User Manual on editing metadata

[hrynkiw]

Ah, TheDucks is three minutes faster off the mark than I am!

But I cleverly respond with an additional tip!:

On the edit bulk metadata page, I also regularly use the "update sort author" tickbox AND the "set titlecase" tickbox.

(The tickboxes may be labelled something slightly different -- I don't have Calibre on this machine to check.)

(Edited to add) Found a screenshot. The boxes are "Automatically set author sort" and "Change title to title case"

[ardeur]

Thanks! I can't wait to get try this out once I get home from work tonight.

[Manichean]

As for reuploading the books to the reader, that depends on whether or not you've set your save to device- template to contain the authors field or not. You can find this in preferences->send to device, if the template contains {authors}, then the path the book ist stored in on the device depends on the value of the authors field, thus, if you changed that field, Calibre will not overwrite your files, but instead create another copy.
If you want to avoid having duplicates on your device, you might want to delete all books before resending. Keep in mind, though, that this may delete your reading progress, bookmarks et al. as well.