Calibre: Adding more image sources

JaneEbooksCalibre6 Comments

With more and more box sets being sold, the aid of Calibre and its third party plugins has never been more valuable. Using Calibre and the third party plugin EPUB SPLIT, you can divide the box set into individual stories.

The reason you would want to do this is for a number of reasons.

1. You want to keep track of how much more you have left in the book.
2. You don’t want to end up buying multiple copies of the same book.
3. You want to keep track of all the books in your library.

I’m sure that there are others but those are a few. I posted about using EPUB SPLIT here.

Now I’m going to talk about cleaning up those books. Once you have them divided into their separate and individual files, you will want to ensure that you have the right cover, blurb, table of contents, and so forth.

Calibre has some great tools built in such as the ability to place the blurb of a book right at the front. That helps to remind you what the story is about as you are browsing your TBR pile. You can also add your own keywords to help search and locate books that might pique your interest. Today I’m going to discuss adding additional sources and getting your metadata right.

1) Adding additional sources

Once you have your books split into their separate files, you want to download the correct metadata. How anal you are about this will affect how time consuming this is.

Calibre has a metadata search engine that reaches out to different places like Amazon and Google to pull down titles, author names, series, blurb and categories.

But there are third party plugins that can expand the scope of your search.

There are six resources you should install:

1. Barnes & Noble
2. Fantastic Fiction
3. Fantastic Fiction Adults
4. Fiction DB
5. Goodreads
6. Kobo Books

These additional sources will help  you to locate and then download the covers and metadata for your book.

Read about installing plugins for Calibre here.

2) Less is more

When  using the download metadata function, sometimes you get more results by typing in less information. For instance for this book by S. E. Lund, I’m not certain how the retailers categorize her. Is it SE or S.E. without spaces or S. E. with spaces in between?  Instead of trying to guess and limiting my results, I only use the last name.

As you can see this produces three results. Under the title on the right side, we see where calibre pulled the information.

Select which record you prefer and then Calibre will search for covers.

Calibre returned three results and I got to choose which cover I wanted to use. I selected the one from Barnes & Noble because it has the best resolution for my device.

This will take you all of about ten seconds or however long it takes to type in the title/author.

If this process doesn’t yield you the right cover, it might not exist. You can use  the search internet plugin.

You can use it to search Google for images to match the book by either title or author. If you can’t find the cover that way, the cover likely doesn’t exist.

Next week we have a review of the Pebble from IAMJSON and the week after, we’ll be revising Calibre to talk about formatting for better looking books such as cleaning up the Table of Contents, inserting the blurb at the beginning of a book, and so forth.

Jane

Jane Litte is the founder of Dear Author, a lawyer, and a lover of pencil skirts. She self publishes NA and contemporaries (and publishes with Berkley and Montlake) and spends her downtime reading romances and writing about them. Her TBR pile is much larger than the one shown in the picture and not as pretty. You can reach Jane by email at jane @ dearauthor dot com

→ Jane