Simple process to import books without use of metadata

[droodled]

Dear All,

I hope this is not to stupid a question. I'm new to calibre, and am having problems importing books in it. I have been looking in the forum, and on internet, but am not able to find anything on this.

In the past I used an android app moon+ reader, which worked well for me. I renamed all books I have, numbered their titles relative to release date, and put them in a folder with the authors name. So finding something was easy, and logical with regard to hierarchie.

I now have an epaper reader, which works a bit differently, so was looking into using calibre. Whatever I do though, it always imports and orders the books according to metadata in the files, of from the internet. It does not add from filename/folder. This is really annoying, since even books from the same series aquired over the years suddenly have completely different titles, etc.. I can change it using the edit metadata option, but then I have to go over more then 900 books 1 by 1.

-Is there a way to just simply import books by title, and ignoring every piece of metadata?

I can then use tags to combine them into collections easily accessible instead of having to edit metadata 1 by 1.

I've searched the forum, but am thinking that this might not be possible, and if I would want to use calibre, to have edit all my books metadata 1 by 1 :-(

But maybe there's a simpler way that I'm currently overlooking.

Thanks for any insight.

Best regards,

[pdurrant]

calibre/Preferences/Adding books

Uncheck "Read metadata from file contents rather than file name"

Work out what regular expression you'll need to extract book title, author name, series name and series number from your book file names, and enter that in the Regular Expression field.

If you're unfamiliar with regular expressions, give an example of your book files names, and someone will probably help with the magic incantation needed.

[droodled]

Hi pdurrant,

Thanks very much for this one. I'm gonna have a look into it, als the regular expressions you mention. I'd 1st like to try finding out myself before asking, as that's half the fun.

Best regards,

[kacir]

Originally Posted by droodled

I'm gonna have a look into it, als the regular expressions you mention.

There is a book for that ;-)
Called Mastering Regular Expressions from O'Reilly publisher.
Nowadays an AI - I have good experiences with ChatGPT and Aistudio from Google - can craft an AI for you and even explain how it works. Just give them info that Calibre uses Python dialect of the Regular Expression Language.

When I was importing lots of books that required RIs to process the filename I used a plugin that let me quickly select the RI suitable for that particular bunch of imports. That was long before the rise of our AI overlords, but I have been using Regular Expressions for quite a long time for various things.

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=118776