Hi all,
First of all, a quick disclaimer: I've had Calibre installed on my machine for a long time but have used it mostly to convert books and to quickly fix pieces of metadata. I used to distrust all these "manager" apps but iTunes experience has changed my mind and I decided to give Calibre a thorough second look. Over the past 3 weeks, I've been learning more and more about how it works and I've been impressed and decided to eventually import my giant collection of books and I started by importing just 500 of them to "kick the tires" and learn more.
Even though Calibre is amazing and
super-powerful, here's some of my issues that I've come across and quick suggestions on how to improve Calibre.
After importing and performing automatic metadata lookup (based on correct title + author name), I've been completely unimpressed. It just doesn't work well... and it's not really Calibre's fault.
Here's an example of what happens when you import a well-known books by a well-known author:
So right off the bat, the series is wrong (it's actually book #11 in the Jack Ryan series). And look at the star rating... only two stars for a book that's has this in the same summary "The #1 New York Times bestseller in hardcover, on the list for 24 weeks!". Amazon reviews are just full of negativity and stupid reviews like "1/5 stars... book didn't ship on time and came in a damaged box". Anyway, this is a subjective point but having read many of the Clancy's books, I think 2/5 is a silly rating.
I've seen so many examples of these metadata errors that I've decided not to waste my time on adding star rating and series numbering because I'd rather have an empty set than a set of metadata that's wrong. Other times, auto metadata lookup would insert foreign language versions and corresponding foreign language summaries and junk data. Somehow, Calibre matched my English lang books (that have English titles) with Italian and Spanish summaries and Italian and Spanish language tags. By doing manual metadata lookup, you can pick better options from the list offered, however.
Another issue is garbage tags that get imported... there's just so many generic tags and some are listed as: "FIC10001", "ebook", "book", "General", etc. and are therefore completely useless. For 500 fiction books I imported, I ended up with 386 tags. After closer inspection of these tags, lots of them are duplicate.. stuff like "Mystery", "Fiction - Mystery", "Fairy Tales & Folklore" Fairy Tales;" "Folk Tales; " etc. Just way too many of them to be any useful.
I've examined about 200 random books (of 500 I imported & auto tagged) and about 40% of them had various metadata issues listed above.
But, you know where we can find good metadata? On goodreads. Check this out:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...and_the_Dragon
Has the correct title, correct series, more fair star rating and if you use "genres" section as "tags", you also get a lot more useful tag data.
Would it be possible to import this data from Goodreads and to add Goodreads to list of metadata sources?
Second issue is cover search. I used that excellent Quality Check plugin to find covers that are small but "Download Cover" options just sucks. I don't know how it searches for covers but I rarely get nice & large covers out of it and many times it doesn't find any covers at all. Manual search produces much better results. Here's how manually you can find larger covers:
1) Use Google image search: A simple title + author in image search box will give you much better results than Calibre.
2) Use Google image search based on current cover. For example, to find the larger size of the current (295 × 475) cover, just use the current image as the source:
https://www.google.com/searchbyimage...3D271976-L.jpg
and you can find a perfect 1024 × 1645 version of it (
http://ecimages.kobobooks.com/Image....0ESGn2TR-roAxw )
Google Image search also allows you to upload a current image so it can be used by apps like Calibre that have images stored locally.
3) Go to Amazon and hit "Front Cover" option that you get if you hover your mouse over a cover. By this method you get this:
cover which is also much larger image as well.
Anyway, could one or some of these methods be added to Calibre?
Calibre is an amazing app and extremely powerful and I'd just like to thank Kovid & the team for an amazing work!!! None of my issues are deal breakers and I plan to let Calibre manage my books but I will have to manually start adding them and tagging them.
Thanks for reading & please let me know what you think
Melanie