create custom format column

[blaubach]

Hey,
I'm using calibre since a while and now I wanted to add a custom column which shows the formats I have for this book.
How can I do this?

Thanks

[Manichean]

I don't think you can easily do that. You could add a tag-like column and manually input the formats for each book in your library, but that could be a lot of work.
I don't really see the need for this, anyway: If you want to search for specific formats, you can do that by using the identifier "formats" in the search bar, e.g. "formats:epub".

[chaley]

You can't.

You see the list of formats for a book in the book information pane.

[blaubach]

That's a pity.
It would be nice to see on the overview which formats the books have, without being forced to manually look at each separately.
And the search function doesn't help here either as I don't want to search for formats.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by blaubach

That's a pity.
It would be nice to see on the overview which formats the books have, without being forced to manually look at each separately.
And the search function doesn't help here either as I don't want to search for formats.

Use the Luggage Tag, Luke
The first Overview (section collapsed) is COUNT overall
Expand the "Formats" section: Count per format.
Click once (+) and you see all the books that have that format.
Click again (-) and you see the books that do not have that format.

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by blaubach

That's a pity.
It would be nice to see on the overview which formats the books have, without being forced to manually look at each separately.
And the search function doesn't help here either as I don't want to search for formats.

The column you want would be pretty wide and use up a lot of valuable space. Personally, if I want to know what books I have in a format, I just do the search and see them all - if it's listed after the search, it has the format of interest. If I want to know if an individual book has a format, I just check the book information pane.

[blaubach]

The column wouldn't necessarily be wider than the Tags column.
And I don't want to know how many books I have with a specific format but the other way round. I want to see in the overview what formats the books have which I see at this moment.
And normally I don't open the book details tap because it take a lot of space. A

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by blaubach

The column wouldn't necessarily be wider than the Tags column.
And I don't want to know how many books I have with a specific format but the other way round. I want to see in the overview what formats the books have which I see at this moment.
And normally I don't open the book details tap because it take a lot of space. A

At the present time, the only way to do it that I know of is to make a custom column and populate it. Populating it manually is gruesome. You'd need to either write some code to automate it, or possibly do it inside metadata.db using SQL tools. It would need to be updated each time you added a book.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by blaubach

I want to see in the overview what formats the books have which I see at this moment.

Why? .

[blaubach]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Why? .

Because I have a huge package of unsorted ebooks which I'm adding to my library. Some of the books are there in different formats.
It's a lot easier if i can see immediately which formats are already in the library so that I know which ones I still could add.

[kovidgoyal]

That's a one time use. Not worth creating a special column for that, IMO.

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by blaubach

Because I have a huge package of unsorted ebooks which I'm adding to my library. Some of the books are there in different formats.
It's a lot easier if i can see immediately which formats are already in the library so that I know which ones I still could add.

Consider using the autosort/automerge option in Preferences|Imp/Exp|Add|"If books with similar authors and titles found ..." Its purpose is to find the matching book entry (if there is one) and put the new format into it. If the format already exists, it does nothing. If there is no match to the author/title, it adds as a new book.

[jackie_w]

...another possible option as a one-off exercise...
You could use the Catalog feature to list your library in CSV format. 'Formats' is one of the many fields you can choose for output. Once the CSV is loaded into a spreadsheet it can be manipulated at will.