Importing, exporting, and metadata?

[dkperez]

I'm looking at streamlining my book management. Currently, I keep my authors in a Word document, with books for each author, newest to oldest. So, periodically I can run through the authors and the library, and see if anything new is available.

Lately, I've been managing e-books in Calibre, so I figure I should move EVERYTHING over there... So, a couple questions...

Is there ANY effective way to export the Calibre data to another form? By effective I mean it'll provide me with something like a .csv file of all the data I see on the screen so I can recreate from a spreadsheet if I have to.

How do I get publication date for books into Calibre? And once I do, how do I have it sort by author, and books within author sorted newest to oldest?

Unfortunately, it looks like with all the publisher garbage going on, it's going to be a while before I DON'T have to keep reading on paper as well as electronically, so it'd be useful if Calibre could be set up to handle everything.

[Synamon]

Originally Posted by dkperez

Is there ANY effective way to export the Calibre data to another form? By effective I mean it'll provide me with something like a .csv file of all the data I see on the screen so I can recreate from a spreadsheet if I have to.

You can create a CSV catalog of all your books in calibre. The option is in the Convert Books dropdown menu. You can even select what data to include in the catalog.

How do I get publication date for books into Calibre? And once I do, how do I have it sort by author, and books within author sorted newest to oldest?

You can download metadata for each book (or bulk) which might have the correct publication date, unfortunately ebooks often have their own creation date as the publication date so if you are looking for original paper book publication date you might have to manually enter that.

To sort by a specific category, click the heading and the entire calibre library view will sort that way. So if you want the books sorted by author, click on the author heading of your calibre library. If you want them sorted by author's last name then display the author_sort column and click on the heading for that. If you want a combination of author and the date published, click Published and then Author before clicking anything else. Clicking on a heading a second time reverses the sort, which might come in handy for date if you want recent first instead of chronological. You can also use the search function to narrow down the list to a specific author (type author:king in the search field for example to get all the Stephen King books displayed) and then do a sort within that list, by whatever criteria you like.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by Synamon

So if you want the books sorted by author, click on the author heading of your calibre library. If you want them sorted by author's last name then display the author_sort column and click on the heading for that.

To clarify, sorting on the authors column always uses author_sort. There is no need to use a second column to get this behavior.

You might want to use a second column if you are using "FN LN" author names and "LN, FN" author_sort values, and you want to be able to sort by author instead of author_sort. You would do this if you sometimes want David Gemmell sorted next to David Weber, both under 'D'.

[Synamon]

Sorry, I meant to say displayed by LN,FN.

[dkperez]

OK, I think I"m having a really slow morning, 'cause I had to read the first reply at least six times before I got how to create the csv export! I kept opening the convert books and trying to do a bulk convert instead of creating a library... Once I finally READ the reply correctly, it worked perfectly and is exactly what I wanted to do. Thanks...

As far as the sorting, I'm STILL not getting it.

>If you want a combination of author and the date published, click Published >and then Author before clicking anything else.

So, for example, I want to see each author alphabetically from A-Z. Within that I want to see all the author's books sorted by publication date from newest to oldest.

I click publication date twice to get all books ordered by date in descending order, then click author. I now only have books sorted by author.

Is there a key I need to hold down (I've tried shift, ctrl, alt) or something else I need to do so I get the descending date sort within the ascending author sort?

[chaley]

Originally Posted by dkperez

I click publication date twice to get all books ordered by date in descending order, then click author. I now only have books sorted by author.

You have books sorted by date within author. Or at least I do when I try your scenario.

[dkperez]

OK, let's just go with "I'm the dumbest human that ever lived!"

Kept trying, still didn't sort multiple columns... Clicked the little button to update to 0.8.39, tried it with the new version, and it does work correctly...

I don't know what I did to the old version (which wasn't all that old), but I must have clobbered something that goofed up the sort......

OK, I have a csv output, and sortable stuff!!!!! Happy day!