Amazon Books on Kindle Not Matching Books in Calibre

[enuddleyarbl]

I re-downloaded all my Amazon books from Amazon to one of my Kindles. When I plug it in, Calibre says the vast majority of them don't match anything in my library. I'm pretty sure why: Amazon includes series/book# information in a set of trailing parentheses in the title. Over the years, I've removed those trailing parentheses. So, as far as Calibre is concerned (correctly), the titles don't match.

I'm trying to come up with some way to get these things to match. I know (now) that I should have left the title alone when I first imported my books (and perhaps just created my own title column based on title_sort with the parenthetical stuff stripped out there). But, horse, barn, door and the horse is buried in the cemetery.

I've "fixed" my titles as much as I can (by removing my series/book# prefix and moving the definite/indefinite articles back to the front) using bulk metadata edits (and using a plugboard to display them my way when I send them to my devices). But, since Amazon's parenthetical series/book# don't necessarily match mine, I can't come up with a way to edit that information back in. Any suggestions?

I'm wondering about setting up a blank library, importing all the books from my Kindle to that, stripping off the parenthetical stuff, putting that back on the Kindle and then matching THAT to my real library. But, that's sort of a band aid. Is there some way to restore the actual Amazon titles to my Calibre library?

[Sirtel]

Why don't you just use the Match Book to Library option? You wouldn't have to change the titles in your library then.

[enuddleyarbl]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Why don't you just use the Match Book to Library option? You wouldn't have to change the titles in your library then.

I didn't even know that option existed. Thanks. But, with 521 books not matching, individually manually matching them would take quite some time.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by DaveLessnau

I didn't even know that option existed. Thanks. But, with 521 books not matching, individually manually matching them would take quite some time.

Yeah, but it's an one-time operation. If you don't forget to save the cached metadata on the device, Calibre will recognize the matched books in the future.

The second option is to just sideload everything from Calibre (that's what I do). You'll lose syncing between different devices and apps then, of course.