My fall-back approach would be to try the following:
- Duplicate the library and all the books to a new location
- Select all books
- Embed Meta-data in all books
- Use a find command to find book files updated since step one.
That's a bit clunky, but it should work OK... as long as the embed metadata command doesn't touch book files when there's nothing to update. Am I in luck on that front?
In any case,

for your time and advice!