|
Divingduck addressed most of your points, but to answer your other query about the published date column. Calibre since v0.8 does attempt with the metadata download to identify the earliest published date for a book, rather than the published date of that specific edition.
However it is at the mercy of the metadata source it pulls from (Worldcat?) in combination with the ISBN associated with the book. I find that "most" of the time it gets it good enough, but yes there are occasions where it is wrong (or missing). Mostly I only notice it when looking at the books in series order if dates stick out, or when comparing the books I have with a site like Fantastic Fiction which often lists in published order. It is simple enough to manually edit the date to put a correct value in such cases.
|