If magazine and Calibre

[Janis1207]

Hi folks!
As some of you probably already know, Internet Archive has made available many issues of "If" magazine.
https://archive.org/details/ifmagazine
So I made the effort, downloaded quite a number of them and only then realized Calibre is rather poorly suited for organizing this kind of literature. You see, every magazine contains several (6 - 10, or so) works, all by different authors.
Sure, I can enter the authors like this "Sam Merwin, Jr. & Robert Abernathy & ...", and do the same thing for the titles, but - this doesn't seem a very elegant way of doing this.
So, does anyone know a better way to do this? So that I could have a nice searchable index of authors and their corresponding works?

PS I could use my BookCollector software I use for my printed book management for these magazines, but so far I have kept my e-books and printed books separately and didn't want to start mixing them right now.
PPS Only the .pdf version of the "If" is readable. Sadly, all other formats are very poorly done.

[eschwartz]

Um, what would you prefer to do?
Where do you expect to store authors and titles if not in the authors and title fields?


Although re: titles, if you want individual titles rather than just the anthology titles, maybe you should consider splitting the ebook e.g. with EpubSplit.

[dwig]

My personal "solution" for collections, either single author or multiple, is to list all of the authors in the standard author column, the collection's title (magazine titiles include the volume, number, & publication date) in the standard title column, and then listing all of the individual included items in the Comments section. I usually fill the Comments section by opening the book/magazine in calibre's ebook-viewer, copying the ToC, and then pasting in the comments section of the metadata edit dialog, usually with some subsequent cleanup.

This this method, a simple unrestricted search for an author or title successfully finds the collected work, whether it is a standalone entry or embedded in a collected work. Also, the collected work is associated with each authors' entries in the Tag Browser

[BetterRed]

For my journals library I put the publication name into the Author Column and the issue identifier (issue number, date, whatever) into the Title. Not sure why I did it that way - but it works for me - the default View Manager view for the library sorts on Author and Title.

I have column for Contributors that I populate if there's something in the issue by someone I like to read.

BR

[Janis1207]

[QUOTE=dwig;3270592]My personal "solution" for collections, either single author or multiple, is to list all of the authors in the standard author column, the collection's title (magazine titiles include the volume, number, & publication date) in the standard title column, and then listing all of the individual included items in the Comments section.

Yes, that is what I did with the first 2 magazines. And then started wondering if there is a better way.
Apparently there isn't.
So, thanks! That's the way I will go with this (although lots and lots of work it will be... )

[Janis1207]

Although re: titles, if you want individual titles rather than just the anthology titles, maybe you should consider splitting the ebook e.g. with EpubSplit.[/QUOTE]

No, not really. As I mentioned, pdf is the only usable format there.
Splitting each and every file into 6 - 10 pieces, and then doing all the metadata manually would be a huge job.
Method proposed by dwig seems the be the most economical one. But thanks anyway!

[eschwartz]

PDF being the only usable format is just a general tragedy.

But... there are tools out there for splitting PDFs as well...
Once you've done all the work, it looks very neat and organized.

[dwig]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

PDF being the only usable format is just a general tragedy.

But... there are tools out there for splitting PDFs as well...
Once you've done all the work, it looks very neat and organized.

The problem with splitting PDFs of this nature is that in many magazines, unlike books, individual stories are not on contiguous pages. This makes splitting the PDF impractical.

It has been a while since I've read a copy of If (I have a few copies) to say whether this is the case with these files, but it is the case with many.