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kiwidude's comments are all right on point.
Automerge off
With Automerge off (and accepting the duplicates), you get each format as a separate record. The author/title will be whatever you specified (obtained from metadata or calculated by regex from the filename). You then use Merge to put matching records together. This is the best for those OCD users who want to deal manually with every record merger. If the title of the html version is "The Oasis: A Novel", and the title of the EPUB is "The Oasis - A Novel" you get two records with those different titles. kiwidude's Find Duplicate plugin will let you find them and my Merge will let you select the better title and Merge them.
Automerge: Fuzzy Title Matching
Automerge was written before Find Duplicates, for those who didn't want to have to do it all manually. It will see the above two titles as the same (punctuation is ignored and multiple spaces are collapsed to single spaces). The first title on the first format entered will be the title used for the book, and later titles will be discarded if they are a close enough match. Authors must match exactly.
Automerge fuzzy matching won't ignore any differences in the author, and won't ignore any character order differences, except if the start of the title is an indefinite article ("The, A", etc.) for whatever indefinite articles you've set to be ignored in your language for the applicable Tweak. There will still be lots of non-duplicate duplicate books as a result of these non-matches. Find them with Find Duplicates and use Merge to pick the better Author and Title.
Automerge: Duplicate Formats
The other question is what to do with incoming formats when Author/Title match according to AutoMerge fuzzy matching rules and the incoming format already exists in the matching record. You have three choices:
For OCD users, tell Automerge to create a new record, use Find Duplicates to locate the dupes and manually Merge them.
For less compulsive users, tell it to ignore the incoming as a duplicate. I have added thousands of books in testing, and have yet to find an inadvertent AutoMerge match. That said, if your books come from different sources there will likely be many non-matches. If so, Find Duplicates still has to be used.
For those who like to work on a copy of a book, then replace the old with the new, or those who assume that newer copies are better - set AutoMerge to overwrite.
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