Quote:
Originally Posted by akkachotu
ebooks name can include anything like combination of isbn, publisher, ebook name etc. and ebooks does not have proper format in their file names.
Now the problem is, I have to load each and every ebook manually into Calibre and then specify the isbn manually in Calibre and then ask Calibre to fetch other metadata for the ebook. If I have to do this for each and every book on my hard drive then it is very painful process and so I want avoid this process and want Calibre to automatically download all the metadata as soon as I load an ebook from my hard drive into Calibre. How can I do this ?
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The other answers are essentially correct. OTOH, I've been working on this problem for a while, too, and have submitted several patches to the source code, trying to help.
Read this thread for my latest and most ambitious proposal for source code changes that may help.
Your problem breaks into 3 parts. First, you need good solid author and title data. I think it's easiest to get that into the filename before you try to import, then choose the "Read metadata only from filename" option in Preferences, Add.
To get your filenames fixed, you can use tools like
BookSorter I provided a tiny bit of code to improve the logic used to get the author's name from the filename. (I'm thinking of another improvement - use a comma in the name to signal "lastname, firstname" format instead of having to turn the option for this on/off - but that's for later.)
Second, you need to be able to get multiple formats of the same book into an existing record. Right now, you can only do that when you first add the book. That's what the code changes discussed in the
link above are all about.
Finally, you need to get metadata as automatically as possible. I added some code that made that a lot easier. It used to be that downloaded metadata overwrote your title and author. That's fine when you're closely watching - you can cancel, but doing bulk automatic updates was hard. Since the quality is spotty and the matching is risky, I lost a lot of good author/title data (step 1 above) when all I really wanted was the best Calibre could do at getting a cover image, description, tags and social metadata, but I didn't want to lose the correct data. You can now keep your correct author/title data (that's what Calibre uses to identify a book) and let it run free with doing the best it can to get the rest of the data, then clean up the secondary stuff later later if you want.
As you can see, I've been trying to deal with similar issues for a while. Calibre has a great community of people around it, led by Kovid Goyal. Automatic operation will improve with time, but I doubt it will ever be totally hands-free for a mess of oddly named books.