Experienced users - what are your best practices, hints and tips for a new user?

[texasnightowl]

Ok, so I now have a total of 624 books in my Calibre library and I am slowly going through to convert each one so I have both Mobi and epub formats. I have come across an instance where a book I purchased in mobi format has a coding error which the Calibre viewer did not exhibit but in Mobipocket Reader and on the Kindle the error was apparent. Converting the book to epub and then back to mobi solved the problem. So, this was not a big deal, but it was while working on this book that I started looking for a way to tell from Calibre when I last "modified" or touched a book. The only columns seem to be "Date" which seems to be when the book was added; and the Published date. Is there a way to either get the Date column to reflect the date the book was last edited or converted or metadata updated instead of just the date it was added? Or a way to add another column? I would want the date to be updated automatically if metadata is uploaded or a conversion takes place.

For anyone curious, the coding error caused the first word of any chapter to have the first character on one line and the rest of the word on the next. ie.,
F
irst

[GRiker]

Originally Posted by texasnightowl

For anyone curious, the coding error caused the first word of any chapter to have the first character on one line and the rest of the word on the next. ie.,
F
irst

I'm guessing that the original text had a drop-cap on the first letter, it was probably tagged with an element changing its size, which parsed as a new paragraph.

With respect to keeping track of your own modifications, the expedient approach would be to create a custom tag indicating that the book has been edited/converted, maybe 'MOBI-modified'. You could then search for books having/not having that tag. Would that help?

If you need the date to be the date you modified the MOBI, you would export both the EPUB and modified MOBI, delete the original title, then reimport the edited one.

G

[GRiker]

Originally Posted by texasnightowl

BTW, I think I am a convert to the "tag" way of doing things. While doing all the metadata, I also tagged each item by place purchased, read or unread, and the freebie items got marked free.

If you're planning to create a catalog of your library, it would be a good idea to use a special tag format for source, e.g., [Amazon Freebie], [Project Gutenberg]. Using brackets is the default for the catalog builder, which knows to ignore tags of that format when inferring genres.

Also, '+' is the default tag for read in the catalog builder. It's easy enough to do a bulk tag conversion later, but you should be aware of these tag conventions used with catalog generation if you're planning to go that route.

G