[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by ZioNemo

I still have a couple of problems:

• I went for real and Import List was rather quick parsing the .csv file and to do the preview, but after I gave the final "Finish" started trashing on disk and it's still mumbling with no feedback aside for disk access (It's a couple of hours, now)

It's better to post questions about optional plugins, such as Import List, in the the corresponding thread in the Plugins subforum.

But regarding the speed of processing the csv; when you use IL to add empty books, it will write a subfolder for every primary author, a subfolder for every book, and write an opf file for every book. By my reckoning, for ~25.000 'empty' books, that's about 70,000 operations, plus a similar (or probably more) database operations.

Calibre is optimised to provide robust file operations on file systems ranging from FAT32 to Ext4 and most others in between.

Speed is not Calibre's forte on file system intensive tasks - whereas searching in a library is.

Originally Posted by ZioNemo

• I don't really understand your comment about using my "third attempt" with the .opf file: I tried that, but Calibre seems to ignore completely the .opf and tries to gleam Title/author from unknown (to me) sources with "funny results". What should I do to prepare a directory that will be associated to a given book (note: I have some books "duplicate" because they are different editions.

If you have a folder/file structure, such as that shown below and the metadata.opf files comply with calibre's expectations regarding their contents and formation then using the - Add from directories [ . . . ] (One book per directory [ . . . ] should pick up the metadata from the opf files.

Calibre's .opf files are not normally created by anything other than calibre itself. The primary reason they can be used in this way is that they provide a means of reconstructing a library database from an pre-existing calibre library.

Speaking for myself, I wouldn't dream of creating the metadata.opf files outside of calibre, far. far too fiddlesome. I'd get the book's (format files) into a library, get the Author names and Book Titles correct, deal with duplicates, and then use IL to match on Author and Title to inject other metadata columns (publisher, pubdate, series etc)

    Title 1
        metadata.opf
        book1.epub 
    Title 2
        metadata.opf
        book3.epub 
    Title 3
        metadata.opf
        book3.epub 
        book3.pdf
    Title 4
        metadata.opf
        book4.pdf

TiA!

Hope this helps

BR