[Rellwood]

Let me preface this with the statement that I am on "the Spectrum" so it explains why this post is written the way it was, which is much shorter than I really wanted.

I know there is a better way to do things in Calibre than what I am doing, but no matter how much I try to read the Calibre help pages, there are still a lot of features that are lost on me.

I have to know, is there a book, guide, or manual that can be suggested that will help me to get a better understanding of how to make Calibre work better for me? I know there are a lot of features that I just don't know how they work, or how I can make them work better.

The goal I have in mind is to create a single perfect library, and save it so that later when I get that urge to "make things better" I don't spend a month trying to rebuild it, using books rescued from the trash or DropBox.

There are many features in Calibre that I still haven't figured out, and so haven't used.

Save to Disk- what exactly is this, and why does it seem that everyone is creating plugboards to use it? Is this just a way of getting the books into a reading device? Or is it a way to save the library and metadata so that later when I get it in my head to "make it better" I am not left weeding through thousands of files in my recycle bin.

Automerge- I really, really need to understand this better. I read that the choices of overwriting, ignoring, and creating a new record indicate the "format" of the book, but what about the metadata? What do I need to do to blend books together to get the metadata to merge? Has anyone come up with a plug-in that allows the users to choose per column what happens? If not, then this would be an excellent feature. If some formats of columns won't blend, then which order do I copy them to get the metadata of a specific one to populate, or leave alone. This will help me to weed down the library with 23,000 books that are basically various copies of 1800 books.

Finally, am I mistaken or did the newest version have a feature that allows copying or importing libraries to be done with a hard link, thereby making it quicker? If this is true, then were do I find out how to use it. I have spent hours waiting on my libraries to copy or import.

Ok, I know that was long, but really, I needed it to be out there.

Also, please do not just point me in the direction of the online users manual. I have read it many times over, some of it was helpful, and a lot of it was still lost on me. I don't want someone to babysit me, but if there are some facepalm things I need to know it would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance...