[Hitch]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Have you tried the second option - see attachment - I think this caters for the situation where there are multiple formats of the same book in each sub-directory (subfolder)

BR

Red:

Yes, of course I've tried that; it only adds books from one folder at a time. You can't select multiple folders--it doesn't work.

@At_Libitum:

Well, yes, that would be nice if it worked, but it doesn't, which is why I'm asking here. We have archives of the books we've created for our clients. Each archive folder is authorname--booktitle with the created books inside, which are ePUB, MOBI, (once in a blue moon an LRF) and sometimes PDF. The 3rd option puts EVERY book in, even if you have 3 with the same title, as a "new" book. The 2nd option won't allow you to select multiple folders, unless I've missed a step. Unless the 2nd option requires that you pick a higher-level directory--e.g., "Books-For-Calibre" and then copy all our archives over to it selectively for the new books we want to archive (?). (Honestly, if that's the answer, I'm going to head-smack myself. I think I'll go try it. I know this sounds dense, but I didn't.)

@Sabardeyn:

Thanks. I'm pretty cautious about adding material, so I generally tell it not to add any books that it sees already in Calibre, as our cataloging has not been as scrupulous as it should be. The catalog is for other purposes; our archives are well-maintained, but cataloging tends to take a long-ish time, and is done when we have down-time.

We primarily use it to then export the data to disk, naming each cover individually, so that we can then FTP them (the covers) en masse to our website. Then, using Calibre's capture of the metadata we've embedded in the epUBs we can copy and paste a) the book description, b) the author info, and c) display evenly-sized covers (more or less) across the website. I know it seems very labor-intensive, but believe it or not, it seems to be the most consistent way to obtain the data we need to update our site in an organized fashion. ;-)

Because we have some of the authors up there, and some of the books, (about 700-ish) we get emails from authors being very...well, annoyed, if they are not up there. It's not something we've ever promised, and I certainly never intended the booklist to be all-inclusive, but....

Hitch