[Enhancement] Virtual Books

[Balthanon]

I would like to have the ability to create "virtual books" in my Calibre library that can point to an actual book or a subsection of a book without actually copying the file in question into a new entry or splitting the original book. (Other than perhaps when exporting books using the Save to File option.)

The primary use that I have for this is when I am dealing with Anthologies. I frequently acquire an anthology primarily for the purpose of gathering a short story or novella that is included within because it is part of another series that I read. Ideally, I would like to keep the anthology in its original state, but I would also like to have an entry under the series that a given short story falls under. There are work arounds for this (I could split out the short story into its own file, I could handle it with tags potentially or maybe a new column), but for the purpose of browsing through my collection I like the idea of having a line item in Calibre for this value.

The other thing that I think virtual books would be useful for is actually in handling books with multiple authors. It would be very nice if when I was browsing my library I could scan down through the list of books by author and see, for instance, Good Omens under both Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. This is something where I could also see a setting somewhere in Calibre on how to handle multi-author books (do you create virtual entries for each book, or just use the current method of sorting the book based upon the first author and listing them all in the list view.)

Anyway, I think this has a fair amount of potential to enhance Calibre, hopefully without being excessively difficult to implement, so I thought I would recommend it.

[Dalibor Nedeljkovic (nedeljkovic-dalibor)]

Hi, I wanted to ask for a feature request, and in a process of doing so I stumbled on this request that is similar to mine. I managed to do something similar with a workaround, but its a little raw.

Explanation: I also wanted to have separate entries in library for short stories and the anthology that the story is in. So I entered the anthology book in library, and then created shortcut to the physical file in my library. Then I added that shortcut as a new entry in library, renamed it to name of the short story that is in anthology and it works.
Problem with this workaround is that if I change name of the anthology I lose all targets for .lnk files that point to the anthology.

Request: Add feature for library entries that would be just *.lnk which would point to another book in library. I know that there is a problem of tracking and changing which entry is linked to which book, but perhaps we can settle it with a hierarchy category: something like> entry_that_is_target.entry_that_is_link

I know that it is a problem, but that would solve big problem: users wanting to have one source for duplicate book entries (either for linking short stories to anthologies, linking books from series to book omnibus, linking books from one series to book from another series, linking books from several authors to single book)

Thankful in advance for any feedback on this request.
Dalibor Nedeljković

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

I'm afraid I dont see why virtual books is a superior soution to just
using existing metadata facilities to link book records. For instance, for the
case of anthologies, simply create a column named "Anthology" then
create as many empty book records as you like for individual stories in
the anthology (right click add books and choose add empty books). Give
all those book records the same value in the anthology column. Then if
you want to see all entries for an anthology, just click the anthology
name (the value you gave the book records) in the Tag Browser.

Similarly, multiple authors are already handled. If you click Neil
Gaiman in the Tag browser, you will see Good Omens in the resulting list,
and the same thing if you click Terry Prtachet.

Clicking the Tag Browser just performs a search. The search facility in
calibre is extremely powerful, I suggest reading up on it int he manual
or watching the advanced calibre usage tutorial video.

 status wontfix

[Balthanon (balthanon)]

I'm familiar with the Tag Browser and search capabilities, the request was more because I like browsing through my collection by scrolling through it as well as for exporting potentially. I don't always know which author I'm really looking for, I'm just scanning the collection to see what I have available (and what I'm missing periodically). With the existing multi-author implementation, you can't really see all of the authors for a book at a glance. (Or see the book at all for other authors as you're skimming past.)

Empty book sounds a lot like what I was looking for actually though, just with the ability to link it to another book. It is in part because I want to track other values (like setting, genre, or read status for individual stories) that I wanted this. If you could clone an existing book for all values rather than just author, title, and series when you created the empty book that would be pretty close. A column type that could link to other books would pretty much fill it out.

Thanks for the reasponse, I'll have to see what I can do to workaround things. The empty books should be a good start.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

Use the merge function to copy metadata from an existing book record to
another record.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

Not to mention that the add empty book dialog has a make exact duplicate
of current book button.

[Balthanon (balthanon)]

I was apparently behind on updating (way behind somehow actually), since I didn't have the duplicate book button. That is more convenient.