Aim: To import my ebooks collection from calibre (a brilliant piece of software) into Bookpedia (BP). Note that I am working on a Mac running OS 10.6.6.
Why? Because I still hang on to my precious Pocketpedia app that I use on my iPhone. I want to be able to tell at a glance which ebooks I already own so I don’t end up buying the same one.
I wanted a quick and painless way (don’t we all) to import the information from calibre into BP. Specifically, I wanted to import the following information about each book.
1. Author
2. Title
3. The release date
4. The series protagonist
5. What number the title was in the series
6. The date added to BP
7. The plot summary
8. The tags
9. The cover
10. The format of the ebook (pub, mobi etc.)
Background:
Calibre stores the ‘Series’ metadata like this: Hercule Poirot [36]. So the entry for ‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles’ by Agatha Christie has in the ‘Series’ column: Hercule Poirot [1]. This means that this book is the first in the series featuring Hercule Poirot. But on exporting from calibre, a column is generated for the “Series” and a column is generated for the “series_index” i.e. the number.
So, in the resulting exported csv file from calibre, there will be two columns when the file is opened in Excel: One column with the heading “series” with ‘Hercule Poirot’ in that cell and another column with the heading “series_index” with ‘[1]’ in that cell.
When importing into BP, this needs to be taken into account.
Procedure:
1. First, make sure you have the calibre command line tools installed on your Mac. To do this, in calibre, go to:
Preferences>Advanced>Miscellaneous and click on ‘Install command line tools’ then hit Apply in the top left hand corner and close the panel. Note: you might have to scroll down to see the ‘Advanced’ part of the panel.
2. On your desktop, create a new folder and call it, say, Test.
3. Now start up Terminal on your Mac.
Type:
calibredb catalog /Users/XXX/Desktop/Test/file.csv --fields=authors,title,pubdate,series,series_index,format,comments,cover
Note 1: Replace XXX with your short username.
Note 2: In this example, you would get the file named file.csv which will contain the data from calibre.
Note 3: The fields that can be exported are: all, author_sort, authors, comments, cover, formats, id, isbn, ondevice, pubdate, publisher, rating, series_index, series, size, tags, timestamp, title, uuid, plus user-created custom fields. Please see this http://calibre-ebook.com/user_manual/cl ... rt#catalog (from which I have copied the above).
So in this example, the file.csv file will contain the authors name, the title of the book, the publication date (i.e. Release in BP), the series (the series ‘name’; using the above example ‘Hercule Poirot’), the series_index (using the above example, the number ‘1’), the format of the book (i.e. whether it is an epub, a pdf, a mobi file etc.), the comments (i.e. the Summary as it is known in BP), and a link to the cover.
4. Open the file.csv (or whatever you named it) in Excel or other editor.
5. Change the headings in the appropriate columns to the following (I describe these in the column order I found when I opened the file.csv file):
authors becomes author; comments becomes summary; cover becomes cover (i.e. no change); pubdate becomes release; series becomes notes; series_index becomes series; title becomes title (i.e. no change).
6. Save the file and close it.
7. Now go to Bookpedia. Select File>Import and choose the file.csv file.
8. A series of drop down menus appear.
9. Make the following choices:
Import from Import to
author Author
title Title
release Release
notes Notes
series Series
summary Summary
cover Image URL
10. Click ‘Import’
11. Voila! Make sure that in Info view, you select the above columns to appear so that you can see the data!
12. Rearrange the columns in the order your prefer. However, I suggest you place the Series column to the right of the Notes column so you will see something like Hercule Poirot 1 for the series information. In this way, you will know that this title is the first in the series featuring Hercule Poirot.
13. One problem I haven’t resolved as yet. The Summary contains all the html formatting tags. I am hoping someone can help me remove them while exporting from calibre.
Acknowledgements:
Many times people have helped me find my way around problems. Bruji support emails are second to none. Many people helped me achieve what I have described here from their knowledge of calibre. I felt it was time for me to give something back.
1. DO NOT think for one second that I managed all this on my own. Oh no! I am very new to calibre. This little tutorial would not have been possible without:
2. the website: http://www.mobileread.com/forums
3. the unselfish help provided by all the forum members at this site, in particular Griker, dwanthny, theducks and Manichean. A huge thank you to all these people that have helped me along the way.
4. If you’re interested in my learning curve, see: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showth ... ost1363835
5. Bookpedia, DVDpedia and calibre are my three favourite hobby software programs. I look forward to seeing a rebirth of Pocketpedia without the stupid limitations imposed by Amazon.com. I have decided that I will always try to source by ebooks elsewhere, if I can, just because they are been so pettish about their data.
I sincerely hope that people find this post useful.
Cheers to all.