Can I *keep* duplicate file formats in a book?

[Groxx]

Greetings! I'm filling out a smallish personal library for the first time, and along the way I discovered that a couple of my ebooks had updated revisions, so I re-downloaded them. Which is fairly common - technical errata can lead to a minor rewrite, or spelling/grammar corrections, etc.

Personally I'd like to keep all of these versions. Ideally as the "same" book, because they really are - often they don't even have a new ISBN. Partly so I can hang onto them and e.g. compare in the future, and partly because... well why not. Disk space is cheap, and ebooks are tiny.
I'd also very (very!) likely end up using something like this to keep variants of epubs for specific devices, as style/etc support is most definitely not consistent. Again, it's "the same book", but the details matter enough to be worth keeping multiple varieties around.

The UI / prompts / manual all seem to assume that I want to *get rid* of duplicates though. Merging books will let me blend the metadata, but it's somewhat ambiguous about what epub file will be retained. I can edit the metadata and + to "add" a new format to a book... but that replaces the existing one if it's a format that already exists. While this is obviously useful while importing a bunch of possibly-duplicate data, it seems like it might be preventing what I want.

Is there a way around this? Can I keep multiple epubs in a single book?
One (e.g. the most "advanced" contents, either by technical capabilities or the newest content) will always be "preferred" for automatic conversions and reading in calibre and whatnot, but I'd prefer not to either lose or visually-duplicate the other ones.

I haven't been able to conjure up a Google search, nor find it in the manual or UI, so I'm hoping the forum knows a trick or two

[theducks]

Simple answer is NO
(besides how would you retrieve the alternate version????)

I simply add (V2) to the title of the seperate book entry
Calibre ignores the stuff in paren when calculating Title Sort, so these should sort {title} together

[ownedbycats]

The one way to do this is to temporarily disable the built-in Archive Extract plugin, then archive your duplicate(s) and add it. That's not the most convenient though.

[Groxx]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

The one way to do this is to temporarily disable the built-in Archive Extract plugin, then archive your duplicate(s) and add it. That's not the most convenient though.

Interesting idea - I'll give that a try.

Otherwise, what I've basically settled on is just renaming the old one to "v1", adding a custom column for "is old revision", and made my default library a query to exclude those old revisions. It's a shame that they'll gradually drift out of sync, but that should be pretty easy to repair by hand if/when I actually care to do so.