Calibre + Plugins = One Happy Reviewer

When Booklikes gave us the scare last month about being sold and Leafmarks announced it’s shutdown, I was doing some serious hunting for offline programs that I could save my reviews to.

I had considered Collectorz, but the monthly/yearly subscription fee was way more than I was willing to invest.

I settled on Calibre, since I was already familiar with it in regards to managing my ebook collection. It took me about a day to figure out how to create a separate section [library] just for my reviewed books. I simply had to add the books as empty books and then add all my data.

With over 2800 books under my belt though, the task of manually adding and editing them was a bit daunting. I started and figured I’d just make it a long term project that I did a little bit on each week and maybe in a year or 3 it would be done.

This evening I was poking around in the Plugins part of the forum for Calibre and came across one that was called “Import List”. It allows people to add a list of books to Calibre from various sources. One of those sources is a CSV file. So I installed it, figured out how to actually use the bloody thing and am now currently adding all my books to yet another new and empty library. I’ve got author, title, series, date read, tags and comments[review]. Automatically.

Even with going through and editing the series number, this just saved me about a years worth of work. Even if there are other issues I have to edit, just having them all there makes a huge difference.

Now, I have only started this project. Still in the testing phase. The actual import is still working away in Calibre, as I’ve added 6 different things and the plugin how to create a whole structure for those 2800 books. I’m just going to let it run over night. But even if this doesn’t work out “quite” how I want it, I can mess around and try again.

I am pretty pleased at the moment.