Quote:
Originally Posted by Starson17
So you've got two records in Calibre? And one has better metadata? What book formats are in these records? Are they different, or sometimes the same? I was just trying to deal with the issue of what to do when the destination record has a book format that is the same as a format in the record to be merged.
Originally I'd contemplated overwriting the destination format with same-formats in the to-be-merged records, then deleting the merged records. I suspect Kovid won't like that design. He didn't like my add books code that overwrote old formats with new. If I don't overwrite when formats overlap, then I also shouldn't delete the old record in a format overlap situation.
Hmmmm. I suppose I can merge only the non-overlap formats, merge the metadata, and warn about the situation. Complexity, complexifies....
If I leave records hanging around due to format overlap, does anyone feel strongly that I need to delete the formats that were merged from the merged records, or can I just leave those records alone after merging all non-overlapping formats into the destination record? The latter is easier (and already works!).
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I may not be the typical user. My problem/issue is that I've accumulated books over the years for reading on my Palm. Formatting wasn't nearly as important for that tiny screen as it is on the larger readers and well formatted books weren't always available. I'm something of a pack rat, so I've kept the source document plus the iSilo/mdb/mobi documents that I could read on the Palm. When I started using Calibre, I added my library with close attention to correct metadata. Then I found the books here on MobileRead and realized how much better formatted they are than the ones on Gutenberg. I'm now slowly downloading new versions of these books. When I get a new version, I tend to throw it into Calibre to see how it looks. I might convert it in an attempt to remove extra lines/headers etc. Sometimes books look better after a Calibre conversion. Finally, I decide which version looks better and delete the other one.
With your merging scheme and the check boxes recommended by TheDucks, this process would become much more simple for me. I'm with Kovid on not autodeleting duplicate formats. Just because they're both ePubs doesn't mean they're identical. Perhaps there could also be a check box for which version to keep? I think there would need to be some checkboxes for merging metadata too, since Calibre reads it from the file and inserts what it can. If my original book has all of the series information, the tags, a cover that I had to hunt down online, and a description, I'll want to keep all of that, even though I'm bringing in a book with better formatting. I would add one to TheDucks list.
x Add book but retain existing metadata.
It's more intuitively obvious to me to move the new book into an existing record versus adding the entire existing record to the new book's record. Either way, I agree that one of the steps in a merge should be deleting the duplicate.