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Personally, I've never trusted bulk data downloads; not with music, and not with books.
With all of my CD's, I've downloaded the metadata for one album at a time only, checked it for correctness and changed it where necessary, and put the album covers into the songs. Rinse, repeat.
I do the same with books, but obviously, I combine series and authors to edit. I even put the cover in myself using the new Edit Book feature. (Before, I'd use Sigil for that.) I really HATE a double cover, as Calibre will just tack a new cover page on top of the book if you let it insert covers.
I also find a list of the series on the internet first, so I can also quickly put in ISBN's and first publication dates. (And if I'm lucky, descriptions as well.) I don't care if it's the ISBN of the particular ebook, or the ISBN of a paperback or something; I just want an ISBN to refer to SOME version of the book. I also use the first publication date. If the paperback wash published in 1977, and the eBook was published in 2010, I put in 1977.
Yes, it takes more time, but I know that everything will be correct.
You know what? Bulk downloading metadata and then having to fix it often costs more time than putting in the correct stuff yourself immediately, especially if you combine authors and series.
How do you get 1800 books done like that? By doing 10 books a day. After some practice, it won't take you more than 30 minutes to do 10 *unrelated* books. Same series and authors will be faster. After 180 days, you're done.
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