.Title & Unknown Author(s)

[AndyW1691]

I have had a Kindle 3 for almost a year and built up a modest collection of e-books on the device. I also created a few collections to help organise the books. As the number of books is still growing I installed Calibre v0.8.35 on my Mac (OSX v10.6.8). Everything appeared to go well with no errors. I was able to import the Kindle's books into Calibre and export other books from Calibre to the Kindle.

While looking through the library of books I noticed that I had duplicate entries for some books. The duplicate entries all have the book title starting with a dot "." and the Author(s) field contains 'Unknown'. The size (MB) field for the titles starting with the dot contains "<0.1" whereas it is something greater than 0.1 for the entry with the proper title and author. For example:

Title Author(s) Date Size (MB) Publisher Published
Old Nathan David Drake 13 Jan 2012 0.3 Baen Oct 1991
.Old Nathan Unknown 13 Jan 2012 <0.1

Can someone tell me what these entries are? Can I remove them from the library?

Andy

[theducks]

Originally Posted by AndyW1691

I have had a Kindle 3 for almost a year and built up a modest collection of e-books on the device. I also created a few collections to help organise the books. As the number of books is still growing I installed Calibre v0.8.35 on my Mac (OSX v10.6.8). Everything appeared to go well with no errors. I was able to import the Kindle's books into Calibre and export other books from Calibre to the Kindle.

While looking through the library of books I noticed that I had duplicate entries for some books. The duplicate entries all have the book title starting with a dot "." and the Author(s) field contains 'Unknown'. The size (MB) field for the titles starting with the dot contains "<0.1" whereas it is something greater than 0.1 for the entry with the proper title and author. For example:

Title Author(s) Date Size (MB) Publisher Published
Old Nathan David Drake 13 Jan 2012 0.3 Baen Oct 1991
.Old Nathan Unknown 13 Jan 2012 <0.1

Can someone tell me what these entries are? Can I remove them from the library?

Andy

You have a mess on your hands.

When you imported, you probably did not match the import template to the books brought into Calibre by File name.

Try the "Find Duplicates" Plugin
If you only have 1 format, things get easier. Delete (using Calibre) the extra (wrong) title.
If you have multiple formats, you will want to use the Merge books feature.

[AndyW1691]

Thanks for the reply. Could you explain how I match the input template to the book format?

I just installed Calibre and connected my Kindle. I took the defaults when prompted.

Looking at the files present on the Kindle there are an amazing mixture. For files bought from Amazon each book seems to have up to 6 files with different file extensions. I'm a bit reluctant to tamper with these as I don't know what each file extension is used for.

Andy

[tilia]

If you are importing books from the Kindle, you should do it by plugging in the device, and then switch to device-view in calibre. Mark the books you want to import, and add them to the library.

Those <0.1MB-files you have in your library are probably mbp-files. These keep track of thing like highlights, bookmarks and last page read. You can safely delete them from calibre. Or you could merge them with the book-records if you want to keep a copy of them in calibre.

[AndyW1691]

Thanks for the reply Tilla. After my original post I spent some time looking into this. Below is a list of all the file types I have on my Kindle in the Documents folder with explanations of what they are (I got these from other forums, web sites etc.). As you say the best approach is to just delete them from Calibre (but not off the Kindle) or to merge them with the book-records.

.azw - Amazon's proprietary DRM-restricted format.
.ea - an xml file that contains the data for the 'Customers who bought this book also bought' and 'More by this author' lists that now show up after the last page of the book.
.eal - XML file. Seems to contain information on rating and a timestamp.
.mpb - used to store metadata like bookmarks, annotations, last read position and other data.
.phl - popular highlights information.
.sa - binary file, unknown contents and usage.
.mobi - Unprotected Mobipocket format.
.prc - Palm Resource Code format.

.pdf - standard PDF document.
.pdr - notes and highlights for PDF files.

[mbovenka]

Originally Posted by AndyW1691

.azw - Amazon's proprietary DRM-restricted format.
..mobi - Unprotected Mobipocket format.
.prc - Palm Resource Code format.

AZW = MOBI, just with the Amazon DRM added. The file format is the same; if you strip DRM from an AZW file, you'll end up with what is effectively a MOBI file that any device that handles those can read.

PRC files are an older version of MOBI files, at least within the ebook realm. They originated in the Palm world, and there they are most often PalmOS programs.

Treating PRCs as MOBI works most of the time for just reading them, but some stuff won't work if you go deeper. The 'Count Pages' Calibre plugin won't work, for instance, on a MOBI file that's actually of the older 'PRC' type.

I don't know what the actual differences are