Managing multi-file eBooks

[larabell]

Hi,

I've searched this forum and Google in general for the answer to this question but given that "Safari" and "chapter" are pretty common words, I couldn't see the forest for the trees.

I'm a long-time subscriber of O'Reilly's Safari Bookshelf. I have a number of books that I've downloaded chapter-by-chapter in PDF form. The filename format varies but one example is:

CSSCookbookThirdEditionChapter1UsingHTMLBasics.pdf
CSSCookbookThirdEditionChapter2CSSBasics.pdf
CSSCookbookThirdEditionChapter3WebTypography.pdf
...etc...

Obviously I can rename the files if there were a scheme I knew Calibre would be able to grok. But one problem seems to be that the PDFs all have the same title and author as part of the embedded metadata and I can't easily change that without doing it manually to every chapter of every book I have (and I have a lot of these files). Moreover, I'd like to have the chapters from any given book grouped together as though they were one book. I'd prefer not to have to merge them into one file -- the PDFs match the typography of the original book and taking them to EPUB or MOBI and back again might result in losing the images and tables (even O'Reilly's own EPUB and MOBI files don't have the quality of the original PDFs).

I wonder if there's a recommended way to handle these kinds of books. Maybe a plugin or just a series of steps that would recognize them as different parts of a single book rather than as duplicates (which is what happens now).

Thanks in advance...