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Old 12-28-2010, 03:30 PM   #2
kiwidude
Calibre Plugins Developer
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Join Date: Oct 2010
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BadGandalf View Post
Hi,

I'm new to calibre (fantastic app, by the way!). Until now I used to maintain a list of my paper books database in excel, with author, title, editorial and so on. With my eBook collection growing fast I was wondering if there would be an option to move my old database into Calibre. I know about the ISBN import possibility but my paper book collection is very big (+2000) and I really do not feel like going through all of the to note down the ISBN...

Any ideas that would help? Thnx a lot,

Ignacio
I think you might be scuppered in terms of existing functionality in Calibre? There are two suggestions I can offer but am sure someone else will offer a better one if it exists:

(1) Write a custom UI plugin to read your CSV file and create books for each row. This would allow you to retain your editorial data if that is important to you and whatever other columns that have a Calibre equivalent.

(2) Either write a macro in Excel or knock up your own standalone exe/script to create a directory structure of fake books named to match your calibre regex for each row in the csv. Each "book" could just be an empty text file. Then just bulk import to Calibre, and use the "Remove format" menu option to delete the fake book formats, and do a metadata retrieval to populate descriptions, covers etc.
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