Merge books with calibre

[acarus]

Hello eveybody!
I use calibre to manage my (big) books collection.
I have a particular question - problem to solve.

In many case I have several records for the same book in different formats (same formats are in any case different files, not duplicated)

record1: epub, pdf, lit
record2: epub, doc, lit

If I try to merge these 2 records, they will be substituted by a single record containing all formats BUT ONLY 4 FILES

record: epub, pdf, lit,doc

This means that, in the example, one epub version and one lit version are lost. This is a pity because the files, even if with the same extension, are different in content.

How can I do to shrink my books collection generating a single record for book containing all the books I have today (in my example 1 doc 1 pdf 2 epub and 2 lit)?

Thank you in advance for your help.
Acarus

[itimpi]

The merge behaviour is as you describe. It's intended use is to merge records that are duplicates of the same book with a different mix of formats and metadata into a single record.

You cannot keep different instances of the same format via merge. Calibre only allows one example of any given file type to be associated with a book record.

A possible workaround is to put multiple books into an archive (e.g. .rar) and add that to the book reord.

[BetterRed]

@acarus As you've discovered Calibre supports one file of each format.

Aaah, I see itimpi beat me to it, but...

One way of storing 'extra' files (eg in your example one extra epub and one extra lit) in the same book record is to put them in some sort of archive, and add that to the book.

I prefer to use 7z archives for this purpose because I use zip and rar archives in ways that calibre will process them as 'books' - if I see a zip or rar I regard it as an anomaly to be fixed. I then put a note in comments listing what's in the 7z archive - eg a different language, translation, edition etc.

BR