Import ebooks

polyex · Post by **polyex** » Tue Oct 02, 2007 3:36 pm

Is there a way to import ebooks as a list? I have hundreds of ebooks (I read a book a week) that I have collected over the years. I would like to import a list of my ebooks and there location as the book title and link. I manually added one with the demo version and it involved me typing the book title bringing up the info for the title and manually adding the link via drag and drop. This took some time and it was for one book. With my hundreds of them its really going to be prohibitive to add them one at a time. Any suggestions on how I can make the process more efficient?

Spad · Post by **Spad** » Tue Oct 02, 2007 5:56 pm

I share your problem, and I don't think there's an easy solution, at least none that I've learned. I archive my ebooks and audiobooks to optical media--CDs for ebooks and DVDs for audiobooks. I then catalog the ebooks using CDFinder (a simple drag and drop process) and manually enter the audiobooks into a BookPedia library.

polyex · Post by **polyex** » Wed Oct 03, 2007 1:48 pm

I put together a little grep/awk script which does most of the job. The problem is the Amazon search fails in many cases with a correct title that also contains the author name against simply having the same title without the author name (or other data). So what should awk remove becomes more of the problem. But anything that removes enough for Bookpedia to do a proper search is my goal. You can look at awk and grep in order to develop your own solution.

-Adam

Post by **Conor** » Wed Oct 03, 2007 1:48 pm

I am not sure what information is stored in the ebook files metadata. But if you can create a tab delimited file of the URLs for the links and the title as well as any other information you like to include, you can then import this file into Bookpedia. The Terminal and TextWrangler with it's support for regular expressions comes in handy when trying to generate a list with this information.

polyex · Post by **polyex** » Fri Oct 05, 2007 12:52 pm

Thats correct, some have meta data, but some do not, its not really a reliable source. I am using the ebook filenames. Some filenames have the author name and edition date etc. These fail in the Amazon search, so it makes it tricky to come up with a regular expression that will extract JUST the title, as the order of this information in the filename is not consistent. I am pretty much at a place where you can probably get most of the files down to a title which will at least find some match in Amazon, but some manual tweaking will be required. You do not need to use TextWrangler, as you have grep and awk etc available for free, and they can be used from the terminal. If I come up with something that might be useful to others I will post it here, as its a real hassle for people with eBooks.