CLI: can I swap author and title in metadata?

[Tazling]

I can do this the hard way, by embedding invocations of ebook-meta in a higher level scripting language like Tcl or whatever. But it would be nice if I could do it with the syntax for ebook-meta command.

I have a whole whack of epubs, obviously formatted by amateurs, in which the author name is in the title metadata field and vice versa. Maybe 60 or more. Really messes up my author-based library index in Marvin . I don't feel like fooling around with a GUI (Calibre) for hours to deal with this problem... by loading all the books and manually editing the fields (gosh, carpal tunnel here we come).

I checked the manpage and have to admit I don't see anything obviously encouraging... But given how incredibly common (and vexing!) this type of problem is, wouldn't it be nice if the command honoured a syntax like

ebook-meta -a -m title -t -m author

(set field Author (-a flag) to Metadata (-m) "Title" field value)

or even

ebook-meta -switch -a -t

I'm probably dreaming here and so am about to go off and write Yet Another Tedious Script to parse the output of ebook-meta, find the relevant fields, and then reissue the command to swap the values. Or maybe parse the filenames and then brute-force the metadata... But it really is quite un-fun, boring coding either way (yaaaawn), and it seems to me (from googling) that this problem is very common indeed, so wouldn't it be nice to be able to juggle the metadata directly using one invocation of ebook-meta, instead of having to extract and then re-set?

[kovidgoyal]

Load them all into calibre, select all books with ctrl+a, click edit metadata, select swap title and author, click OK. done.

[Tazling]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Load them all into calibre, select all books with ctrl+a, click edit metadata, select swap title and author, click OK. done.

Wow, bulk editing in Calibre! OK, that's a nice feature that I don't remember from previous use (recently added?).

Still, I really prefer CLI :-). I used Calibre the app just about one time years ago, then discovered the CLI tools and never fired it up again. No offence to the devs, I'm sure it's a cool app and works great, I'm just CLI-oriented. And I do all my e-reading with Marvin on an iPad.

I absolutely love ebook-convert which lets me bulk-convert any number of mobis or pdfs with one command :-). For those who haven't discovered how easy this is:

find . -name '*.mobi' -exec /Applications/calibre.app/Contents/console.app/Contents/MacOS/ebook-convert {} .epub \;

And I wish the metadata swap-2-fields function were available similarly through ebook-meta. In the meantime, just another script. ... even bulk edit in the app won't tempt me to go through all that dragging and clicking :-)

[theducks]

AFAIK those Bulk edit has been there since at least 1.x

[kunkel321]

I had a similar question here:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...=330037&page=2

My "solution"

I was going to put together a little AutoHotkey automation script that would quickly run through the series of actions for a swap, but it turns out that it's already so easy I didn't bother... Neither the Individual, nor bulk, MDE have hot keys by default. So I assigned Alt+E to the bulk one.
Now I
1. Manually select one or more books that need Author <-> Title swapped.
2. Hold down Alt and press e, then w.
3. Release Alt and press Enter.

Still it would be slick to have this done programmatically so that the MDE gui didn't have to open.