Hi,
I have a large Calibre library, but I don’t really need Calibre. Is there an easy way to get the library into Devonthink while also getting the metadata of author name, year and title?
What have you tried so far?
I didn’t want to try anything before consulting with the experts!
I don’t know if there are any experts on that particular topic as we develop DEVONthink, not Calibre 
I installed it and dragged and dropped the manual into DEVONthink. It came over as an .epub document with the author listed in the Properties inspector…
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I wouldn’t dare to call myself an expert on this topic but I actually have moved a huge Calibre library into a DEVONthink database.
Author, title, and year are part of the epub file metadata, they are not stored exclusively in Calibre’s own metadata fields linked to the epub.
So when you import an epub file DEVONthink will show both author and title in their dedicated metadata fields. But not the publishing year, because DEVONthink’s metadata does not have a “Year” value. It has a Created Date and a Modified Date value, but that means the Create Date of the book file, not the publishing date of the book.
If you have a DEVONthink Pro/Server licence, one way to handle this would be to set a custom metadata called Publishing Date. If you don’t need the Create Dates of the files, you could set their Create Dates to the publishing date (so did I).
But how to get the publishing date out of the epub (or other e-book file type)? The route I took is by putting the publishing date into the epub file name in Calibre’s Preferences/Saving books to disk:
Your values most certainly will look different to mine because I moved a huge collection of daily newspapers which have identical names and only differ by their publishing date. And I added “Kindle-Ausgabe” (German for: “Kindle edition”) to the title for proper quoting because the Kindle edition was not identical to the print edition.
Add the publishing date to the file name, and have a Smart Rule in DEVONthink to set it to whatever metadata field you prefer and to chop it from the file name afterwards. (Advanced version: Why just the publishing date? ISBN maybe? Language? Publisher? You could add all of these metadata, separated by a delimiter, and have a script to set them and to remove them from the title. Great idea, why didn’t I do that?)
Another approach would be a Smart Rule with a script that pulls the publishing date out of the epub source code directly, but I have no idea how that would work.
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Thank you, that’s helpful. How do you go about moving the library without al the extra files and folders in the Calibre library folder?
Obviously not the person you asked…
I have my Calibre library indexed, but if I were planning to import it, I would use Hazel to scan the folders and import just the book format I was deciding to keep (e.g., skip AZW3 and PDF and keep EPUB).
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Since July of 2024 I have gradually moved most of my several terabytes of. data into DEVONthink and am very happy with the results. My data types encompass personal history data, research data, music data (scores, cuts, and albums), and ebooks. DEVONthink is the cornerstone of my data handling routine.
However, I have found is that Calibre does a better job with a large set of ebook data then DEVONthink. By a better job I mean ease of use, responsiveness, and utility. My large set of ebooks is hundreds of gigabytes comprising around 35,000 volumes. Calibre is faster in search, including full-text search, and its utilities are specifically targeted at ebook collections for reading and format change. I have tried both importing my library and indexing it in DEVONthink; neither improves on Calibre’s book management ability.
The only exception to this finding is that books which include .zip files are more accessible in DEVONthink. Calibre doesn’t understand that, for example, source code files belong with a book but are not a separate version of the book in a different format. This is also true of audiobooks.
DEVONthink is a truly outstanding product, but so is Calibre. I use what works best for different data types.
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Thank you for this advice. Sounds sensible and I’m inclined to keep Calibre for books.
Calibre ranks close to #2 (DEVONthink is always #1) of my top apps. I keep a back up of my Calibre library in DEVONthink, but if you don’t need Calibre, why do you need to move your library over? The two programs are so different.