Export of Calibre Books

[Adam-LDC]

I am retired but live and work (volunteer) in a Least Developed Country.

Anything I describe here is Legal under National Copyright Laws and under the TRIPS exemption for Least Developed Countries (both need apply).

Over the past few years, I have built a small database of books (approximately 70,000 - 750Gb) that are of relevance to students attending a Master’s Degree course with a Law major. As the course is English Language based fiction books are included to help students develop their English skills.

I have used Calibre to catalogue those books in multiple Calibre libraries segregated according to relevance. I use Calibre portable for this purpose. Legally, the source of these books is irrelevant as detailed in my first paragraph.

All books have an ISBN number and have been catalogued using the “Download metadata” function of Calibre.

I have now reached the point where these books need to be released to students to assist their research. To do this I need to export the books so that they can be included in the Educational Establishment’s library (multi-user with user identification). The target system is Linux-based.

There is limited technical support available as it is not in the Organization’s budget.

My thoughts are that:

1. To recursively parse the library extracting the Book (there is only 1 format per book entry in Calibre) and save it to an external file.
2. Do the same for the image for the book and link it to the saved item in (1).
3. Do the same as step (2) for the metadata for each book.

This seems logical but the problem I have is that I do not understand the structure of the OPF file retained in the Calibre Library for the Book.

I do not have the technical knowledge to progress. While from a technical background, my time of technical development is from 30 years ago and I recognize both my technical ignorance and my limitations.

Assistance and guidance is requested

[kovidgoyal]

Use the calibredb command line tool to export the books from the calibre library.

In particular

calibredb export --help