Quickest or best way to sort/edit metadata and series?

[Goondu]

Hi

I am new to Caliber but I think it is great.

I decide to use it for my ebook management.

Over the years, I have accumulated 500+ ebooks

Few questions:-
1) What is the quickest way to edit metadata and social metadata?
For example I have 20 plus books by Agatha Christine. They have various degree of completed metadatas. If I highlighted all my Agatha Christine books and click bulk metadata, I might get wrong metadata for some books. Going through one book at a time is quite time consuming

2) What's the easiest way to categorise books into a series?
Say for example my Agatha Christine's book again. Some of the books are part of a series eg Miss Marple. And they are from different publishers. So some metadata put them down as belonging to the `Miss Marple' serie, some don't. How do I sort the series out in the simplest way?

3) I notice some people classify their books as `Title - Author Last name, Author First name'. I prefer `Title - Author First name , Author Last name'.
Any advantage of the former?

Sorry if my questions sounds so mundane and anal, but I love to my ebboks collection sorted out nicely once and for all

Thanks

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Goondu

Hi

I am new to Caliber but I think it is great.

I decide to use it for my ebook management.

Over the years, I have accumulated 500+ ebooks

Few questions:-
1) What is the quickest way to edit metadata and social metadata?
For example I have 20 plus books by Agatha Christine. They have various degree of completed metadatas. If I highlighted all my Agatha Christine books and click bulk metadata, I might get wrong metadata for some books. Going through one book at a time is quite time consuming

2) What's the easiest way to categorise books into a series?
Say for example my Agatha Christine's book again. Some of the books are part of a series eg Miss Marple. And they are from different publishers. So some metadata put them down as belonging to the `Miss Marple' serie, some don't. How do I sort the series out in the simplest way?

3) I notice some people classify their books as `Title - Author Last name, Author First name'. I prefer `Title - Author First name , Author Last name'.
Any advantage of the former?

Sorry if my questions sounds so mundane and anal, but I love to my ebboks collection sorted out nicely once and for all

Thanks

I am not sure there is an 'easy' way

Some of what you 'have' to do, may be to make-up/avoid because of limitations of your reading device, Not Calibre.

My device uses files and folders.
Period.
I get to set the device (not the folder level to: Date or Alpha or file-type (not very useful since 99.9% are EPUB))

Calibre allows only 1 series level
I have books that were written in 'Universe's' or Cycles as well as series
so these get Hyphenated series to keep them grouped

Darkover-Clingfire
Darkover-Age of Chaos
Darkover-Second age
Darkover-Anthologies

I store books on my device By Series(name)/series_index-Title-Author(optional)
I set my device to alpha-sort files and folders. Opnening a Darkover folder, will then list books in series Index order.

Since my series tend to have multiple Author (or Combinations), the author name MUST NOT be before the series number-Title or it will destroy the series sort usefulness.

[kiwidude]

There is no magic shortcut to getting your series metadata perfect, which seems to be the gist of how I read the OP. Yes the metadata sources contain a lot of crap data, and if you hit ctrl+D on a large series you are almost guaranteed to get a combination of at least two different series names, some duplicate numbers plus a bunch of books with no series at all

What I do is use websites like FantasticFiction.co.uk to get the "correct" series information. I use the Calibre GUI plugin "Search the Internet" (see the sticky thread) to right-click lookup the Author on that website or others like Wikipedia, and then manually overwrite the series column values.

Once your metadata is cleaned up within Calibre, then you have various options for naming the output files as theducks has given you.