how to mass move publisher to author

[stanmarsh]

hello everyone,

i found out that calibre uses author for folder, i like to move all my publisher to author, is there a way to do it without doing it one publisher at a time?

thanks

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by stanmarsh

i found out that calibre uses author for folder, i like to move all my publisher to author, is there a way to do it without doing it one publisher at a time?

Possibly, but why would you want to screw up your library?

[itimpi]

You are not meant to concern yourself with the way that Calibre stores books within its library. Think of it as a database and you would not be trying to play around with records within that database.

You have complete control over the naming system that is used when you EXPORT books from the calibre library (database). However that would tend to go astray if the right fields do not contain the expected types of data.

Yes - calibre would allow you do what you requested, but you should be seriously questioning WHY you are thinking of doing it.

[stanmarsh]

thanks dwanthy and itimpi for the quick reply

my old external hard drive recently had some problem, luckily i was able to recover most of the file using unstoppable copier plus testdisk. there was some error in the calibre portable folder, some books were not recovered and some files like opf and in calibre settings folder. i like to move the publisher to author so incase this happen again i can manually check if i lost a book.

i have blenderart magazine in calibre that is set to publisher "blenderart", no author because its a community magazine, its in the unknown folder, but if i move the "blenderart" to author then i can see all the blenderart magazine in one folder.

i think it would be better if i put "blenderart" in both publisher and author? how do i copy the text in publisher to author without requiring me to do it one by one?


thanks

[wallcraft]

Rather than reordering Calibre's files, I suggest either maintaining a backup copy (I keep a portable version on USB as a backup) or using "Save to Disk" as a mirror of all your ebooks. In the latter approach, you can arrange the ebooks any way you want, e.g. <publisher>/<author> - <title>. Under "Preferences" select "Saving books to Disk" and setup the "Save Template" to how you want the ebooks to be arranged.

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by stanmarsh

i think it would be better if i put "blenderart" in both publisher and author? how do i copy the text in publisher to author without requiring me to do it one by one?

I have never used bulk metadata editing, but the following should work. Select all these ebooks (single publisher) and use "edit metadata in bulk" (2nd option under Edit Metadata).

[chaley]

Originally Posted by stanmarsh

i think it would be better if i put "blenderart" in both publisher and author? how do i copy the text in publisher to author without requiring me to do it one by one?

Given that you seem to really want to do this, use bulk metadata edit search/replace. The steps:

1. Make a backup of your library in case things go very wrong
2. Select the books for which you want to copy publisher to author
3. Press E to get bulk edit
4. Click on the Search/Replace tab
5. Change the Search mode to Regular Expression
6. Select Publisher as the search field
7. Enter "(.*)" into Search for, without the quotes
8. Enter "\1" into Replace with, without the quotes
9. Change the destination field to Authors
10. Uncheck the box Split result
11. Take a look at the test results to be sure you are happy
12. Press OK.

Do note that there is no undo. Once you press OK or Apply, you will not be able to recover the author information that the above process just overwrote.