[kiwidude]

As mentioned a few posts ago I've added a completely new feature as per the screenshot below. This will allow users to find variations in Authors, Series, Publisher or Tags using different algorithms.

You will need calibre 0.8.59 to try this.

On the Find Duplicates dropdown menu is a new option of "Find metadata variations". Unlike the normal Find book duplicates screen, this is a self-contained dialog allowing you to perform the rename operation in place for all the selected variations. If you tick the "Show matching books" option, then in the background your calibre GUI will execute a search and show you the related books. So for Authors and Series renaming you may sometimes want to see the related books to decide if they really are duplicates, but in many other cases you don't need to.

This dialog is in some ways an experiment. The Authors functionality is in reality just a different way of presenting what you saw with "Ignore Title" book duplicate searches. I could have also made the series, publisher and tags features all work the same way, dumping you back to the calibre gui showing you one set of data at a time and highlighting in the tag browser.

However the tag browser is not convenient for doing bulk renaming operations like this, and often you don't even need to see the books, so having the overhead of navigating through duplicate groups etc seems overkill. Traditionally there have been issues with renaming series via the tag browser too (since calibre renumbers them), though 0.8.59 offers a new tweak value of "no_change" for "Auto increment series index" - thanks very much chaley for doing this. Note that this new plugin does *not* need you to apply that tweak value if you rename series, as it always preserves numbering.

Anyways please experiment with it, try to break it and let me know if this interface approach is something that works well for this feature.