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Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
Well, I'm afraid I'm not interested in preserving hyphens in that field, a bit too much work and also I doubt many of the metadata sources preserve the hyphens either.
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I understand Kovid. When I posted the question I was hoping that there was a tweak that could achieve this, or an existing plugin retained the hyphens (for some other reason), but did not make this obvious in the tweak/plugin documentation.
However I know one excellent data source that does preserve the hyphens - The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (
www.isfdb.org). Although primarily limited in coverage to Science fiction and fantasy, in practice it exends to many thrillers, some detective fiction, some historical fiction. It preserves the formatted ISBN, links variant titles (where the same novel has been printed with different titles), is *much* better at documenting series data/sub-series data than than any other source I have found, and is excellent for pen names and publisher data. I use this to verify Metadata downloads.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
You could however write a simple script to process the metadata using the calibredb command line tool. It could read the XML file and thereby extract the needed information and either directly correctthe publisher or stick the hyphenated isbn value into a custom column.
If you wanted to get really ambitious you could write a calibre plugin to do this as well.
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As I had a 6 year old (unfortunately incomplete) spreadsheet of my books/ebooks containing many hyphenated ISBNs and publisher names (as the s/sheet already has publisher names, it takes me one step beyond simply obtaining publisher codes), I've already started down the road of an excel macro. When the spreadsheet is missing data, I add a row using the data from an ISFDB query. Ugly but practical. In the future, I might, as an intellectual exercise, look at what would be involved in writing a plug-in to use the ISFDB as a metadata source, but this would be after I complete my retirement abroad in about 18 months - too late for me to use now.