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Some answers
> ...inspect a book using Calibre without adding it to the library?
Yes, via the command-line tools Calibre provides, e.g. "C:\Program Files\Calibre\epub-meta.exe", ebook-view.exe, etc, if on Windows
> ...delete one or more formats of a book?
Edit Meta-information for the book then via the buttons to the right of the "Available Formats" panel.
> ...use Calibre in multi-user mode?
Hmm - at a guess, it would only work if you manually ensured you weren't running two copies at the same time.
> Is it possible to persuade Calibre to pre-populate the metadata for a bulk edit where the data for all the files to be edited is consistent?
Select the files then "Edit meta information" will default to "Edit meta information in bulk" , which is what you need, isn't it?
> a piece of software which I could use to run queries against the Calibre database and/or export the data from within it.
It's an SQLite database, so you can either use the SQLite command line tools or access it programably. If the latter, it's probably easiest to use the Python DB modules in Calibre itself - I know there's been some mention of them here, but I don't have a link at the moment.
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