[Starson17]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

I did indeed, many thanks for that, it certainly helps with the issue of merging duplicates once they are in Calibre and is one less local Calibre patch I can undo. However unless you intentionally/accidentally give files different names (or turn off automerge) you won't have two versions of the format to merge because the automerge has already thrown the latest one away

Yes, it's mostly useful to fix mistakes where automerge was off.

IMHO I am not sure I *always* want to be interactively prompted when doing bulk adds.

There's always that balance between control and complexity. I'll also be interested to see what Kovid comes up with.

Importing can already be a fairly involved and time consuming process of cleaning up filenames, adding certain subdirectories of files, separating html folder imports of one per folder from multiple books per folder to use different add menus, deleting your input folders once in Calibre etc. If you were adding a lot of books with a lot of duplicates, any interactive dialog forcing you to make choices then and there might not be practical given how time consuming it can be to open each version up and decide a "winner".

This mirrors my thoughts on the original automerge design. Prior to that I was getting questions about whether I wanted duplicate book titles added, and the question was asked without regard to whether the authors were the same. I wanted to answer "yes" for duplicate book titles with different authors, "no" for (nearly) duplicate titles with the same author, but if it was a new format for that author/title, add the new format to the existing record. I didn't want to have to answer a separate question for every case or look at book content. Automerge was basically just a way to automatically answer the "Do you want to add duplicate titles?" question the way I wanted it answered.

Now if you are only adding a single or small number of books, an interactive choice might be desirable - don't put off until tomorrow what can be done today and all that.

But what if you need to stop/do something else partway through? What does Calibre do with all the "unresolved" conflicts? Any kind of "abort" in the process can leave you with a messy mish-mash of partially imported books from a subfolder tree, and an absolute nightmare to "continue on" from.

So one approach to this which I briefly mentioned in a previous thread would be an additional option for the automerge. Currently when you turn it on, any new formats for an existing book get merged, and any duplicate formats get thrown away. What I would like is the same behaviour for new formats, but that duplicate formats get created as a new book entry in Calibre, and that the two books then get marked as being duplicates. For instance just add a "Duplicate" tag to both entries.

Yes, I can see that option. Also it would be nice to have the "reverse" option of just overwrite the existing format with the new format for when I knew I was adding better copies. I think I'd actually rather have improved duplicate finding options for all of Calibre instead of tagging during automerge with "duplicate" that I would have to manage. If I think the new formats might be better, but I'm not sure, I could turn on the "keep all formats, and create new book record for duplicate formats" option, then run the improved duplicate finder with viewer, which would let me view duplicates located and merge or throw away those I didn't want. An improved duplicate finder would be great for existing libraries that needed work.