slow download metadata

[elricks]

Good afternoon. I am new to Calibre and new to ebooks, but experienced in computing.

I installed the app and selected 200 books for the library. I signed up for an account on the second option imbd. After some dummy runs getting metadata for individual books to get a feel for the process, I chose to edit metadata in bulk. I made sure the book titles were 'correct' - I had to remove the published year which was appended to the title.

I have broadband and I am using XP PRO, and I do not have speed issues with any other net based app.

The process for getting the metadata is very slow. Well over an hour to download for these 190 files, and I am at 59%. I am also wondering why, when doing one book at a time, I do not have the option available to use the other database (sorry of this is the wrong name but Calibre is downloading now and I can't access the option to get the correct name) until the system has finished the google books option. I was trying to test to see if the second option was faster than the first.

Thanks in advance - I am rather looking forward to learning more about this app and ebook reading in general

SHIRLEY

[user_none]

A number of metadata sources throttle calibre.

[jackbrown]

So the feature is effectively useless if you have a large library?

I have about 1500 pdfs I wanted to catalog with calibre. I set up a regular expression that works great with them individually, but it does not work when I try to do the whole database or even a significant subset.

The metadata download job just runs for days and produces no results at all. But as I said if I select 1 or 2 pdfs and run it, it works fine and produces results in a couple of minutes.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by jackbrown

So the feature is effectively useless if you have a large library?

I have about 1500 pdfs I wanted to catalog with calibre. I set up a regular expression that works great with them individually, but it does not work when I try to do the whole database or even a significant subset.

The metadata download job just runs for days and produces no results at all. But as I said if I select 1 or 2 pdfs and run it, it works fine and produces results in a couple of minutes.

No! It is not useless.
Just don't do it (download) all at once.

That Library collection did not happen overnight.
I think it un-realistic that you think that the Meta-data supplier servers, supply bulk Meta-data for free, in truck load quantities.

I catalogued my DTL, a few months back using a bar code scanner and Add from ISBN. I did it in 15 book batches (to allow ease of resolving: 'no finds') with almost no delay in populating the Metadata and covers

[jackbrown]

Thanks for the encouragement, theducks. I turned off Overdrive, which was by far the slowest element of my attempted metadata downloads, rebooted my router to get a new external IP address in case my previous mass attempts had gotten me filtered, and started downloading in smaller chunks, eventually working up to 150 books at a time, which seems to take about an hour and twenty minutes. It's been working fine and I am almost done getting metadata for this library.

In my frustration I had spent two days writing an Autohotkey script to do metadata downloads myself, but still hadn't figured out how to write all the metadata to the PDF, so I am really glad I got Calibre working.