[haertig]

I use "Download Metadata" to get basics only. After reading this thread, I added the add-ons for Goodreads, Baen and Fantastic Fiction. That just gives me more choices of retrieved data than I had before. But I always curate it.

Most comments/descriptions come down with a whole bunch of extra junk that I don't want. Like "The latest book from New York Times #1 Best Selling Author!" (is there anybody who is not a NYT #1 best selling author???) Or like praise from some publisher I don't care about telling me how great the author is. All's I want is the description of the content of the book, plot synopsis, etc. So I strip out all the excess junk (and there is a lot of it!), clear any font changes or use of bold/italics, etc. so I have a plain text clean looking description.

The series info is either wrong or not to my liking. e.g., Jean Auel's "Earth's Children" series. I changed that series name to "Clan of the Cave Bear" because I like that better, even though this is the title of the first book in the series rather than the actual series name. Tough - I like it as the series name. Or I'll see a series name of "The Amazing Adventures of Detective John Doe". I'll change that series name to simply "John Doe". Also, some sources may list a series with books numbered 1 through 10. But there are actually only six novels and four short stories the author threw in between novels to entice readers. I personally like to number my series with novels getting a whole number, and short stories getting a fractional number. Like 1, 2, 3, 3.5, 3.6, 4, 4.5, 5, 6, 6.5. So I know what is a longer book and what's a short one. I could not care less about publisher or ISBN number, so I wipe those out when curating. You always have to look at the author(s) and make sure they are consistent. I don't want entries that are by "John Doe", "Doe, John" and "John C. Doe" when those are all the same person. And for co-authors, sometimes the metadata and/or the book covers might come down as "Jim & Bob", and sometimes they may come down as "Bob & Jim". So that needs to be curated and made consistent too. Lots of times a series will have several different sets of cover art. I want my series artwork to have a similar design/theme throughout the entire series if possible (often it is not), so I do a lot of work comparing and picking the style of cover that is available for the majority of books in the series. Sometimes I will manually go searching for artwork with a Google query of, say, "image cover art book Jean Auel Clan of the Cave Bear". Searches like this will often turn up artwork that Calibre does not find directly itself. I use GIMP to fix up cover art that is not to my standards of clarity, cropping, size, color saturation, etc.

Metadata downloads just give me most of the raw material to work with as I then manually input that into the books Calibre page. Sometimes the metadata comes down just as I want it. In those rare situations I say "Yippee!" and take a second swig of my coffee before moving on to the next book.