Add addition format and auto-merge to existing books!?

[hrundivbakshi]

I manually converted all books of my Calibre library which are other than epub to epub format (to have an common format which all my devices support). II did this via script and Calibre's commandline executable 'ebook-convert'.

Now I want to add the new variants to the existing book records of my Calibre library. Each converted files resides in the same folders as the source file.

Preferences for 'Adding books' are set to:

• Read metadata from file name (rather than file contents)
• Regex to extract metadata is default: (?P<title>.+) - (?P<author>[^_]+)
• Auto-merge added books if the already exist: Ignore duplicate incoming formats

But in most cases new records are created (and added books' files are copied to a new folder). I guess this is because Calibre cannot match the shortened title/author strings from file names to it's metadata records.

Any ideas?

[chaley]

You should have added the new formats to the book records when you did the conversion using calibredb add_format. That would avoid the book matching problem and guarantee that the new epub is added to the correct book record.

Are you saying that the new epubs are already stored in the calibre library directory structure? I don't know what would happen if you did an add_format of a file that already exists in the correct directory. The add_format command could easily fail by trying to copy the file onto itself. You could try it with one to see what happens. EDIT: or you could move the format out of the calibre file structure then use calibredb to move it back.

Personally I would clean the library then redo the conversions, adding the formats one by one as they are created using add_format. If the new epubs are in the calibre library structure then you can easily remove them using Library maintenance / Check library. EDIT 2: Or just do it en mass in the GUI, avoiding all the scripts.

[BetterRed]

From the GUI, I would run Library->Maintenance->Check library, that will find the "Extra book formats"; from there I would use the mark and delete options to remove the 'extra' EPUBs.

I would then redo the conversions in the GUI, i.e. the library manager interface.

Which is @chaley's last suggestion - I think

BR