Calibre Metadata From Amazon Missing. What Am I Missing?

[BruticusBob]

Greetings All!

Advance apologies if this has been asked, but I've been searching for hours without a resolve and it's driving me to type.

Problem A:

After downloading a books meta from (presumably from the enabled Amazon, Google and ISBN plugins) the net and saving it to the 'book' I find that there is nothing displayed in the ISBN column in library view. When I ave a look at the meta, instead of an ISBN number it has an Amazon or Google number instead.

That's OK as I know not every book has an ISBN, but why is the other number not displayed? Calibre understands the given number as belonging to one of the two companies. So what gives.

I've tried adding additional custom columns (named: amazon and google) to no avail.

Problem B:

And because I know that this will be the next tech question I ask, I'll ask it now. So after the metadata is corrected, how would I go about telling Calibre to choose one (but choose wisely) to display and only one? In code, this is as easy as pie (maybe a nice little "if else" or "select case" program - you get the idea). But of course I'm a newbie to Calibre and I'm pretty sure I'm just missing something obvious (after all, this things a freakin' powerhouse of goodies).

Any help is appreciated greatly.

Bruticus

[BetterRed]

Problem A

If your books have an ISBN number somewhere in the text then the Extract ISBN plugin will find it and put it into the identifier column - its common practice to extract the ISBN prior to downloading any metadata. The Amazon and Google numbers are their proprietary SKU identifiers

BR

[BruticusBob]

Thank you,

That's an excellent plug-in. However, it does not answer my question or fix my issue.

I understand that not all books have an ISBN but some of those without it do have a Google or Amazon number and that number can be seen when viewing the metadata for the book.

My specific concern is how come the alternative numbers are not shown in the ISBN column (I created) but are shown in the ISBN field when viewing individual book metadata?

If they are saved somewhere else in the database, how do I access this data so I may create a column to display them? Even though the data is proprietary, Calibre manages to find and display this information after downloading the metadata. It's just not being displayed where I want it.

Hope this makes better sense.

Thanks again,

Bruticus

[theducks]

The field name is Identifiers and it is available on the Search and replace tab of Bulk metadata edit

This field also shows in book details (unless disabled)

There is no standard column that you can make show.

You CAN still do a search of identifiers
The help page has a whole section on search identifiers usage :
http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/gui.html#search-sort

[BetterRed]

@BruticusBob

As theducks said, the column in question is Identifiers, its a multi-value container, ISBN is just one of the values it can hold.

If you want to see all the Identifiers as a single column in the main book details area see first attachment, warning you may not like what you will then see in the main book details.

You can create columns for individual book suppliers, just like you've done for ISBN - see second attachment

BR