Combine Books?

[pghaworth]

I have a collection of recipes that I would like to make into a book for my personal use. They were done as mobi files for each individual recipe but I would like to compile them. I did some button pushing and tried various things including "add empty book" but haven't figured my way around this yet.

I have searched the user guide, and this forum, but am not hitting on what I need. Can this be done, and what are the steps please? Running 0.7.12 but will upgrade later today, if that helps.

Would be nice to have an explanation of when to use "add empty book", as well.

Thanks in advance for any help offered.

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by pghaworth

I have a collection of recipes that I would like to make into a book for my personal use. They were done as mobi files for each individual recipe but I would like to compile them. I did some button pushing and tried various things including "add empty book" but haven't figured my way around this yet.

You are trying to do what an editor is designed to do. Calibre won't do it. I don't know any mobi editors, but you could probably convert to epub, combine with Sigil and convert back to mobi

Would be nice to have an explanation of when to use "add empty book", as well.

An "empty book" is a record in Calibre's database that has no associated book format or file. Calibre keeps a record (a "book") for each book. Inside that record are one or more files (a "format"). An empty book has the record, but no actual files. It's used for things like:
1) To keep track of paper format books that you own.
2) As a starting point to copy another book into with "merge-keep others" so you end up with two books - each with the same formats.
3) As a starting point to remind you of books you'd like to buy and later will add the format when you buy it.

[pghaworth]

Thank you for your help.

[eric11210]

Another choice which I used for some short stories: Convert them to RTF format, put them into Word or whichever word processor you like (Open Office should work and I believe even Wordpad, the cheap featureless word processor built into Windows can read RTF as well), edit them and make 'em look nice, save back to RTF and convert back to Mobi. This way you needn't learn to use a new editor. I too looked at Sigil when I needed to do this with some short stories but finally decided to use Word instead because I didn't want to figure out the quirks of a new editor for a one time project.

Eric

[pghaworth]

I tested it and it works just like I want it to. I didn't know that Calibre could do that, never needed to know. Now I do and I learned something new thanks to you.