Little by little electronic books or ebooks are reaching the whole world, although many prefer the traditional paper format of a lifetime. These digital books that we are talking about have some advantages over paper, as you know. But with everything and with it it is always advisable to use a program to manage them, where Calibre comes into play.
Keep in mind that on many occasions we have a library that contains hundreds or even thousands of titles, so we must handle them with care. Otherwise we can find a huge amount of files corresponding to ebooks , but in no order. Therefore, locating what interests us at a certain moment can turn into a nightmare.
We currently have at our disposal several software solutions that can be of help to us in these tasks that we are commenting on. But with everything and with it, there is no doubt that the most used and popular in the world is Calibre, a program that you can download from this link.
Many of you who are already used to dealing with these electronic books, it is more than possible that you have used or heard of this program. With everything and with this, for those of you who do not know it, we will tell you that it is a free application that has been with us for a good number of years.
Reasons why we should use Calibre on the PC
Specifically, here we find an application of great power and versatility that works locally on the computer .
Its developers created it with a primary objective, and it is none other than to allow us to create and manage our own library of digital content of this type. Therefore, what this program does is offer us an innumerable amount of functions , all of them related to the world of ebooks. As we told you, for all this it offers us a wide number of features that allow us to carry out all kinds of work with electronic books.
With all this that we comment, we will have the possibility of managing the content of our ebook libraries in different ways. We also find integrated functions to edit the books, read them, modify their metadata, convert them to other formats and much more. Due to everything that it offers us by default, from Calibre we can perform almost any task that occurs to us related to electronic books.
Therefore, there is no doubt that thanks to this free application , we will have almost absolute control of both our own personal libraries and their contents. To give us an idea, when we talk about content here, we are referring to the electronic books that we add to these libraries over time.
How to find duplicate ebooks in Calibre
As we mentioned before, here we sometimes find libraries that house hundreds or even thousands of titles. It is true that Calibre presents us with many functions so that we can manage all this in the best way. But at the same time we must also do our part. For example we have to configure the program well, as well as add books in the correct way.
But of course, if we deal with thousands of titles , for example, sometimes we can add repeated ebooks. To say that to add these elements, we just have to click on the Add books button. In the drop-down list that appears at that time, we can see all the options that we have in this regard.
Well, as we said, when we have a virtual library in Calibre with several thousand titles, it is quite common to find several duplicate books . These, in addition to taking up space unnecessarily, spoil the structure of the library as such, so we are going to see how to solve it.
It is worth mentioning that in the event that we have opted to use Calibre to manage our library of books, this is a function that it does not include by default. But at the same time we can use it in a simple way in order to find and eliminate these duplicate books that we are talking about. For this we only have to install a plugin that will be very helpful in all this.
How to install plugins in Calibre
Specifically for this that we tell you in these lines we are going to use the plugin called Find Duplicates , which as its name suggests, is the right one for this. Therefore, to be able to install this add-on in the program. This is simple, since we only have to go to the Preferences / Get add-ons menu to improve calibre. To say that this option may be hidden from the start, but to see it, just click on the button with three vertical dots that is located in the upper right corner of the program .
In the new window that appears on the screen, we look for the one called Find Duplicates from among all those that appear in the list of add-ons. Therefore we no longer have to select it and then click on the install button.
The program will warn us of the risks of installing additional elements to Calibre, and then choose the location of the interface where we want to see this plugin. For example we can choose the main toolbar. Once it has been installed, for the changes to take effect, we have to restart the program.
And we have it ready. Now we just have to close and reopen Calibre for the changes to take effect and we can start looking for duplicate books in our library.
Find and remove duplicate ebooks with Find Duplicates
Once the program restarts, on the screen we see that a new button has appeared, which corresponds to the plugin that we have installed. Therefore we only have to click on it so that the process as such is put into operation. By clicking on the button called Find Duplicates, we will see that a new window appears that allows us to customize the search. It is worth mentioning that from here we can search for repeated books depending on their title, ISBN or by binary comparison. We can also specify the similarity of the title of the book or the author , and order the display of results on the screen.
Once the parameters that we are commenting on have been specified, we only have to click on Accept to display the results found. That is, the duplicate books that meet the parameters that we configured before in order to delete them.