[Starson17]

Originally Posted by mike_bike_kite

I assumed the database was held on the Calibre side rather than having to go to an external server so I guess there's not much you can do apart from request a better interface.

It's worse than that. There is no single database, there are four now, and more on the way. Google, Amazon, ISBNDB, and LibraryThing. They have different datasets, search formats, etc. The same book in one may have a slightly different title in another. Behind the scenes Calibre is getting bits of data from many different places and making it look uniform - like it all comes from a central server.

You could perhaps have an intermediary database to store the name of the file, along with the final book name and author chosen by the user. Now if a file name appears you could see if it's in the database and whether more than 90% (for example) users chose this book and title then return those details.

It doesn't sound feasible to me. Who would host this massive database? Does every user have to download it?

Look - I understand why you want more automation in data entry. So did I. That's why I contributed code to the project - to make the initial data entry job easier. It is currently much, much easier. The improvements from 0.6 to the new 0.7 are huge.

You mentioned entering a library of 14k books so even if only 5% of these books needed manually adjusting this would still mean 700 books need adjusting.

It was far more than that. I didn't write the merge record code until I was nearly done. I didn't write the option that lets you turn off "Overwrite author/title" until I'd lost a huge block of books and had to re-enter them (with that option on, a bulk metadata fetch may cause you to overwrite the correct author/title on a percentage of the books. Once lost, it becomes very hard to get that data back other than manually.) I didn't tackle the "If books with similar titles and authors found, merge the new files automatically" feature until I was more than halfway done. I did lots of manual fixing. Heck, I'm still fixing stuff. Some books don't have covers. Others have tags that need adjustment.

I suspect Calibre will continue to improve, but it will probably never reach the stage of completely automated metadata fetching.

I think it's great such options exist but I just can't see why a user needs to use them when the program could sort much of this out with a little fuzzy logic.

There are always improvements that can be made, but there are limited programming resources. If you want to contribute, Calibre has an easy to use development environment, and assistance is always welcome.