Remove All Formats Except...

[dkelly701]

Just got my Nook and installed Calibre on my PC. Since then I have busy collecting all of the free books that are available out there and starting my electronic library. One problem with all of the free ebook sources are that you never know what format you will get and you often get multible formats for one book. I want to do a little house cleaning and remove all formats except epub. I see that I can select all books in my library, right click, choose "Remove all formats from selected books except...", choose my desired format whick is epub, and let it run. My question is, if a book does not contain an epub version, will it delete everything and I will not be left with a format to convert to epub?

Is there a way to filter books to only show books that do not contain an epub? If so, I can then convert just these books and then delete everything except epub.

Thanks for any guidance.

[kiwidude]

Use this search to find all books that do not have epub formats
not format:epub

[dkelly701]

Thanks, that worked great!. Now to do a backup and delete those other formats.

Thanks again.

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Use this search to find all books that do not have epub formats
not format:epub

[barium]

A related question about searching:

What do the equals sign and quotes that calibre adds to searches do?

For example, if you use the category browser to show only epub books, it inserts the following string into the search box: formats:"=EPUB"

Are those equals signs and quotes ever necessary when you're manually entering a search?

Also, does the singular and plural version of the operators the category browser adds to the search box always work? (The category browser adds plural versions of "authors" and "formats", but "author" and "format" seem to work, too.)

[kiwidude]

Originally Posted by barium

A related question about searching:

What do the equals sign and quotes that calibre adds to searches do?

For example, if you use the category browser to show only epub books, it inserts the following string into the search box: formats:"=EPUB"

Are those equals signs and quotes ever necessary when you're manually entering a search?

Also, does the singular and plural version of the operators the category browser adds to the search box always work? (The category browser adds plural versions of "authors" and "formats", but "author" and "format" seem to work, too.)

The help page for search is here. The equals sign is for an exact match rather than a "contains" match. The quotes are only needed if you need to add spaces to your expression.

As for the author/authors thing - I believe those are just aliases and so either works. I would guess it is just to make the search UI more "user friendly" for people guessing a metadata field name.