[Inukami]

Originally Posted by drlolly

Hi, I am a novice and so I don't know how to use Automator on a Mac to transfer an iBook to calibre. I need to do this so I can open an iBook into a reader that I can study off and make notes directly on the text book with an iPad Pro rather than next to it, but it seems I cannot get a book out of iBooks if it is large.

I am happy to try Automator but I cannot see how I can do it. Any step by step help would be appreciated. Many thanks

1. As @BetterRed mentioned, Automator is a tool to automate tasks. I use it to automatically add books into Calibre once I have downloaded them onto Desktop. At the moment only using for Amazon, but hope to use it for iBooks as well. I can provide more information/how I use it if that would help.
   
2. All iBooks have Fairplay DRM which means you cant read the ibooks on any other reader unless you remove the DRM or the reader can somehow access the books with the DRM (there are some readers that do this). I use a software to remove the DRM. This then enables me to move the books into Calibre, otherwise you can't move DRM ibooks into Calibre. The majority of my books are with Ibooks so decided to get the software, as the cost was worth it, especially with the current issues with the Amazon Kindle KFX format. The software also preserves most of the basic metadata.

@dickloraine, a few more questions/comments...

Originally Posted by dickloraine

I use just one calibre instance with multiple libraries.

Unfortunately I can't use the multiple folders as I'm using iOS so not sure whether better to have one library or two. If I have two, I will only be able to show one library on CC. That it why I'm leaning towards one library, with tag/custom column, eBook & eManga. This is a lot of books in the one library though. It would be great if we could have multiple instances of CC on iOS or access to multiple libraries. I have requested but who knows when/if this will be possible.

Originally Posted by dickloraine

I don't read mangas, so I don't know. Comicrack and Comictagger use comic vine as their database. If the manga are there, it should work. Comicrack and Comictagger do the exact same thing, so if comicrack doesn't work, comictagger wouldn't work either.

I don't use comicrack anymore, but as far as I know, it has scripts. Maybe there are scripts specific for manga metadata for it?

Unfortunately I can't use ComicRack/ComicTagger. It has limited data for Japanese language manga and the majority of mine, around 98%, are in Japanese.

However I have found another solution. Since most of the eManga are from Amazon Japan, I have enabled another country Metadata Download source, and it seems to be finding most of the data. I also have a lot of manga which are in paper format. Now with that extra metadata source enabled, it seems to find the metadata through ISBN as well. Although seems to have problem finding the comments information. This means I can now do both in Calibre, which is good, as like you I would prefer to keep it all in Calibre if I can.

Originally Posted by dickloraine

My plugin doesn't download any metadata. It just imports existing metadata in cbz/cbr files into calibre. I just know/like calibre better than comicrack and my plugin allows the reading/writing of comicrack metadada embedded in comics.

I seem to have the following two metadata plugins:

1. Embed Comic Metadata
2. Embed Metadata

Are these both yours or just the first and what is the difference between the two? And if I am now getting the metadata from the source/ISBN, do I not need to use your plugin? Do I still need to polish book or is this only used for EPUB and need to use your plugin for CBZ files? All the eManga will be in CBZ format...

I also note that the "book jacket" option in polish books doesn't work for comics/cbz files. While if I have the manga in CC, I don't really need it (not intending to use "book jackets" for books), is there any way to add a sort of "book jacket" or "back cover" to the manga with extra information/metadata like for the books. Or would you just have to add another jpeg/image file?

And one final (I hope) question. How can I get Calibre to convert AZW3 to CBZ? Obviously the ones from Amazon are in this format. I can convert to ZIP, but then I have to manually move file to desktop and manually rename, which is a bit tiresome.

Thanks,

Inukami