Scan digital library and extract all Table of Contents from all books?

[bounce]

Is anyone aware of a tool or data extraction method to do this? Anything besides Calibre/plugin?

[BookCat]

What a peculiar thing to want to do! Please explain, I'm perplexed and curious.

[kyteflyer]

Me too!!

[Mistyfarm]

Originally Posted by bounce

Is anyone aware of a tool or data extraction method to do this? Anything besides Calibre/plugin?

I like that idea.

Are you saying there is already a Calibre plugin? If so why not that one?

[maddz]

I can see this being very useful for anthologies.

[Mistyfarm]

Just looking at some Spiralizer recipe books in KU and obviously such an index record of recipes would be great to pull out eg Pad Thai recipes and see which books had them.

But of course my Kindle Reader (1.71 for Mac) won't allow cut & Paste - and Kindle Cloud (just checked) so just keeping a text file that you can search is out as far as Kindle is concerned.

So will continue to watch here for any other ideas.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Mistyfarm

Just looking at some Spiralizer recipe books in KU and obviously such an index record of recipes would be great to pull out eg Pad Thai recipes and see which books had them.

But of course my Kindle Reader (1.71 for Mac) won't allow cut & Paste - and Kindle Cloud (just checked) so just keeping a text file that you can search is out as far as Kindle is concerned.

So will continue to watch here for any other ideas.

If it's not too many books, say 20-30, you can create a temporary omnibus in Calibre in something like rtf. Cut and paste the TOC and you're home free.
If you have a lot of books, do the collection in sections.

This really is a job for a database manager, even a simple one, or a spreadsheet which is why you want the extracted TOC in rtf or Word format. You can then turn it into a table or csv file.

[Mistyfarm]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

If it's not too many books, say 20-30, you can create a temporary omnibus in Calibre in something like rtf. Cut and paste the TOC and you're home free.

Thanks for that - yes Calibre sounds like it might be a possible intermediary step here, as you suggest.

It also occurred to me afterward that if you don't want to/use Calibre, for all sorts of reasons, you can do a screenclip of the TOC and do an OCR to populate a spreadsheet file for lets say, Spiraliser recipes. Then when you search for Pad Thai - you can then reload the original KU title and access the particular recipe.

That way, if indeed KU actually pays authors for "fair use", no one loses. Amazon get their monthly fee and the author gets their "click" benefit

[bounce]

@fjtorres Thanks. Yeah, I was thinking of something like this, but since it numbers in the thousands it might be a little too much manual work. To answer why, basically I have weird research methods
Would be cool if I could run a script to OCR after TOC and then auto-populate a spreadsheet. Probably too niche to expect a tool like that to be out there and a little out of my scripting skills.