[Adoby]

When you work with the metadata for books in calibre you don't work with the actual books. Instead you work with a database entry for the book. That is why it is absolutely necessary to have at least title and author correct when you add books. Each book entry in the database can refer to several ebook files, the same book but in different formats.

So if you make sure that the title and author are correct when you add books, calibre can locate covers, series information and tags and a lot of other metadata for the books. Also calibre let you sort the books so you can easily find duplicates or books with incorrect author names and titles. Then you may have to open the book to see what the title and author really is.

When the book entries in the database are correct you can let calibre write this information to the books. When you send books to device, or save to disk, the books are also automatically updated.

The reason for the database is that it is very slow to open a lot of books to read metadata from them, or to write to them. It is much, much faster to read and write to a small database file instead. And very fast to sort and search.

If the author and title for your books isn't correct, then you have to fix that first. Then you may have to open some of the books to see what the author and title really is. But usually calibre can read this from the filename or from the metadata already inside the ebook file.

I usually work something like this:

1. Add some books to calibre. Let calibre try to read metadata from the books.
2. Make sure that author and title is correct for each book. Open the book if in doubt.
3. Check to see that the new books are not already in calibre. Merge or delete if needed.
4. Download metadata for the new books. Also covers.
5. Check that all books look ok. Series information and cover and so on.
6. Send new books to my tablet for reading.

It takes perhaps 5-10 minutes per book to make sure everything is perfect.