Author's name showing as "unknown" when books load

[crich70]

I'm having a little problem with books that I load into Calibre. I'm trying to organize books that I downloaded from here at MR and many of them have the word "unknown" in where the author's name is supposed to be. Is there a quick, easy way to fix that or do I have to edit each one individually?

[theducks]

Originally Posted by crich70

I'm having a little problem with books that I load into Calibre. I'm trying to organize books that I downloaded from here at MR and many of them have the word "unknown" in where the author's name is supposed to be. Is there a quick, easy way to fix that or do I have to edit each one individually?

What is your Add books Metadata source setting: Internal or Filename?
(And what format are you adding?)

[crich70]

Originally Posted by theducks

What is your Add books Metadata source setting: Internal or Filename?
(And what format are you adding?)

I'm not exactly sure what the source setting is but I had the books burned to disk and reloaded them into Calibre to properly organize them by author's. They are in mobi and prc formats. Some of them were in the old prc format for mobi when I burned them to disk.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by crich70

I'm not exactly sure what the source setting is but I had the books burned to disk and reloaded them into Calibre to properly organize them by author's. They are in mobi and prc formats. Some of them were in the old prc format for mobi when I burned them to disk.

@crich70 - see attachment for pertinent settings

If you frequently swap between extracting author/title from inside the book (i.e. the 'embedded metadata') and getting them from the file name then you might want to consider using this plug-in ==>> [GUI Plugin] Quick Preferences

BR

[crich70]

So after installing the plug in do I have to reload the books anew or is there a way to correct the author name problem with the plug in without having to do that?

[BetterRed]

@crich70, the Quick Preferences plug in wont fix your problem, but it might help you avoid it having it the future. If its a few books you could:

• change the author name in metadata edit (single) from "Unknown" to "Felicia Gangtree";
• select a format in the Formats box and click the Blue 'i', that will extract the metadata from the book and update the database;
• press F2 on the author name in the Book list and enter "Felicia Gangtree" there.

If its a lot of books and one of the two basic methods - extract from metadata or from file name is viable - then delete the books and add them again with the appropriate setting in add books.

For me at least Quick Preferences is an aide-memoire. It doesn't change anything, it is more of an error preventer. I have it set up use various patterns, before I add any books I can take a glance at what pattern is currently selected (books, journals, articles, media) and if its not the one I want then I can swap to the one I do want in an instant.

BR

[crich70]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

@crich70, the Quick Preferences plug in wont fix your problem, but it might help you avoid it having it the future. If its a few books you could:

• change the author name in metadata edit (single) from "Unknown" to "Felicia Gangtree";
• select a format in the Formats box and click the Blue 'i', that will extract the metadata from the book and update the database;
• press F2 on the author name in the Book list and enter "Felicia Gangtree" there.

If its a lot of books and one of the two basic methods - extract from metadata or from file name is viable - then delete the books and add them again with the appropriate setting in add books.

For me at least Quick Preferences is an aide-memoire. It doesn't change anything, it is more of an error preventer. I have it set up use various patterns, before I add any books I can take a glance at what pattern is currently selected (books, journals, articles, media) and if its not the one I want then I can swap to the one I do want in an instant.

BR

It is several 100. It was over 1000 but I managed to get some sorted out so now it's 698.

[BetterRed]

crich70 - if the author name & title are in the book file names and its a consistent pattern then it ought be possible for us to help you with a Regular Expression

eg it would be (?P<author>[^_]+) - (?P<title>.+) if the file names were thus:

Felicia Gangtree - 17th century food in Ruthenia.txt
Felicia Gangtree - Wine growing in Upper Silesia.txt

If the books are something like epubs or PDFs you might be able to extract the author names from there when the books are added,

If you want to try either of those ideas you'd have to delete a couple of "unknown" books and re-add them, otherwise you could get duplicates,

Late Breaking Thought - if the books have an ISBN written in them, then you could use this plugin [GUI Plugin] Extract ISBN to extract it and pop into the database and then download the metadata from the net - including the author(s). Install the plug in, make sure its in your tool bar, select all the "unknown" books and hit the tool bar button. Then search for books with identifiers:true and do a bulk metadata download for those books - with a bit of luck, job done.

BR