Load contents of Project Gutenberg CD to Calibre library

[Chris Jones]

Does anyone know of a quick way to add all the books on Project Gutenberg's Sci-Fi CD to Calibre's library in one pass..?

I was hoping I could find a way to have Calibre list all the books on one screen where I would select them.. hit the return key or click something like "Open".. and voilà..

Each book appears to be provided in html (one text file + images in a sub-directory), text format (ASCII or latin1).. and .pdb files (Plucker Palm document).

Calibre is unable to convert the .pdb files to .epub (either bulk or individual conversion)

I'm able to generate .epub's from the html files but I have to do them one a time.. because I have to go into into each directory separately and select the .html file.

I thought there might be a better way..

Perhaps writing a script that invokes a CLI Calibre utility on each of the html+images directory..?

I'm on debian stable with a rather ancient version of Calibre: 0.7.7..

Here's a link to Pg's CD:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvIew...eature=related

[mbovenka]

Originally Posted by Chris Jones

Here's a link to Pg's CD:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvIew...eature=related

Um, not really...

Does 'Add books from directory, including subdirectories (One book per directory, assumes every ebook file is the same book in a different format)' not work?

[Chris Jones]

Originally Posted by mbovenka

Um, not really...

Does 'Add books from directory, including subdirectories (One book per directory, assumes every ebook file is the same book in a different format)' not work?

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction..!

In case someone needs to batch-load the contents of this CD to Calibre on linux:

$ mount -w -o loop /other/media/ebooks/PGSFCD-032007.iso /other/loop
$ cd /other/loop
$ mkdir ~/tmp/sfcd
$ cp -a Gutenberg\ SF/*-h ~/tmp/sfcd

At this point all the .html books each with its associated images are in ~/tmp/sfcd:

$ tree ~/tmp/sfcd

├── 18172-h
│   ├── 18172-h.htm
│   └── images
│       └── image_01.jpg
├── 18261-h
│   ├── 18261-h.htm
│   └── images
│       ├── 001_01.jpg
│       ├── 001_02.jpg

etc.

So, I opened calibre, per your advice, chose.. IIRC... the third "Add books" option (multiple books per directory) and typed in the name of my top level "sfcd" directory in the popup's field somewhere near the bottom of the screen (otherwise, if I clicked it the linux GUI would open the directory and display its contents).. clicked the "choose" button.. and Calibre uploaded all 64 books in the directory.

I proceeded to do a bulk convert, accepting all the defaults.. and a couple minutes later all 64 jobs had finished executing and the books were available in a nicely formatted .epub format with embedded illustrations and all.

Whole thing only took about five minutes..!

Now I only have to rename the books from nnnnn-h to something a bit more civilized, change such things as the author's name.. and look for proper covers.

Maybe there's a way to make Calibre extract the title and author's name from the contents of the .html file.. but that's way beyond my abilities.

Thanks..!

[Chris Jones]

Oh.. and by the by.. here's the actual link to Project Gutenberg's CD/DVD's:

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenb...Via_BitTorrent

The link I accidentally posted was in reply to some completely different article where someone was complaining about a lot of ready-to-wear clothes manufacturers cutting corners on the quality of the seams.. Sorry about that, folks.. Yet another example of the perils of multitasking..!