[mornington]

I've been adding my library to calibre (for my shiny new Kindle, since you ask) and it's a lovely piece of software but there are some columns/fields which would make calibre much easier to use:

has_cover: A multi-valued field which indicates whether the eBook has a cover or not and, if so, where it came from. Possible values: Downloaded, Generated, fromEBook, None (respectively: the cover was downloaded by calibre, was generated by calibre, was read from the eBook when it was added to calibre and No cover detected)

has_metadata. Same thing as for "has_cover" but it refers to whether the book's (social) metadata was downloaded, generated, read from the eBook itself or doesn't exist.

The idea of the above two fields is to permit *filtering* (and sorting) to decide which books need to have metadata/covers obtained from the internet (or manually updated) and which can be left alone. Complementary "has_cover_datechecked" and "has_cover_metadatachecked", holding the date these were last checked/downloaded, would also be handy.

device_path: The path of the eBook on the device (as of the last time the device was checked by calibre). This info is available, since it's displayed as a hyperlink when the device is attached, and so should be displayable *and updateable*. Alternatively, make the "on device" column a permanently accessible column *which can be filtered on* (i.e. not merely sorted by).

Specifically, if I change the title/author metadata in calibre or relocate an eBook file on my kindle outside of calibre then I'd like calibre to be able to detect the book in the new location instead of assuming that it's no longer on the device. Ideally, I'd like a "sync calibre with device" command which compares the CRC (say) of items in calibre with that of files on the device and updates calibre's db accordingly.

Also, on an unrelated note, there's an option to auto-merge records when they're added but no way to do the same thing manually (they can be merged manually, but calibre won't detect them itself). Use case is: Added several eBook files, metadata was incorrect and was corrected (manually or via a download or batch process) and now several are duplicates - same title and author. I'd like calibre to fix that up for me, by making the "auto-merge" code from the "add books" module accessible as a manually-executable command.

I have a few other feature suggestions, but the above ones seem to me to be the lowest hanging fruit since (presumably) the code to implement them is already in place and can just be exposed in the UI.

One more slightly higher-hanging fruit, while I think on, would be to add an option to the internet import of metadata to not overwrite "series"/"series_index" metadata if it's already populated. Also, if the import could automatically detect and correct "foo;bar" as "foo & bar" in the authors field (and ditto for "last, first" --> "first last") that'd be great too.