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frabjous · 10-13-2010, 07:47 PM

What you describe is usually called "metadata".

Calibre comes with subprograms you can run from the command line. One of them ebook-meta can be used to set metadata in files. This can be done without opening calibre's GUI at all, and is much faster than doing through the graphical interface. (IMHO anyway.)

You can use it like this. Open the mac terminal, and then:

Code:

cd "/path/to/folders-containing-file/"

and then:

Code:

ebook-meta "ebook filename.epub" --authors="John Doe" --title="Autobiography of John Doe"

(and so on), and it will update the metadata to what you enter. (If you just put ebook-meta "filename" with no options, it'll just show the current information in the file.) For more information, including a list of fields, see here.

Since it's a command-line program, you could even use it inside a bash script. In fact, if your files have patterned file names, it wouldn't be hard to write a batch file to set the author and title of each book automatically by reading it from the file names. If you wanted help writing a script, feel free to ask. I've done it before.

There may be other options out there, but this works great for me. (I'm on linux, not mac, but it should be the same.)

10-13-2010, 07:47 PM	#2
frabjous Wizard Posts: 1,213 Karma: 12890 Join Date: Feb 2009 Location: Amherst, Massachusetts, USA Device: Sony PRS-505	What you describe is usually called "metadata". Calibre comes with subprograms you can run from the command line. One of them ebook-meta can be used to set metadata in files. This can be done without opening calibre's GUI at all, and is much faster than doing through the graphical interface. (IMHO anyway.) You can use it like this. Open the mac terminal, and then: Code: cd "/path/to/folders-containing-file/" and then: Code: ebook-meta "ebook filename.epub" --authors="John Doe" --title="Autobiography of John Doe" (and so on), and it will update the metadata to what you enter. (If you just put ebook-meta "filename" with no options, it'll just show the current information in the file.) For more information, including a list of fields, see here. Since it's a command-line program, you could even use it inside a bash script. In fact, if your files have patterned file names, it wouldn't be hard to write a batch file to set the author and title of each book automatically by reading it from the file names. If you wanted help writing a script, feel free to ask. I've done it before. There may be other options out there, but this works great for me. (I'm on linux, not mac, but it should be the same.) Last edited by frabjous; 10-13-2010 at 07:51 PM.