Scanning a drive for books
If your books already exist as files, do not add them one at a time. The drive scanner walks whole folders, finds every book file and adds them all in one pass — and it keeps working afterwards, noticing new arrivals and files that have disappeared.
- Choose (Ctrl+Q).
- If a phone, tablet or e-reader is plugged in, pick it from the list of devices. Otherwise choose the disk or folder to look in.
- The scan window opens and starts searching straight away. Under Look for choose E-books or Audiobooks — that switches the list of extensions. You can edit File name extensions to search for by hand and press Enter to search again.
- Trim the list of what was found: Remove drops the selected entries, Remove existing drops everything that is already catalogued.
- Click Add books.
Options worth knowing
| Add all files in the folder as one book | For multi-part books — especially audiobooks. Each folder becomes one entry with all its files attached instead of one entry per track. |
| Open book card before saving details | Shows you every card before it is written. Thorough, but slow on a large batch; leave it off for the first big scan and correct cards afterwards. |
| Perform scan for new book files on program start | All My Books quietly re-scans the same folders each time it starts, so books you download later end up in the collection without you doing anything. |
| Set folders | The list of folders that the startup scan looks through. Changing it also restarts the search. |
| Find deleted | Lists entries in the collection whose files are no longer on disk — the usual result of tidying up folders outside the program. |
| Remove existing | Drops from the found list everything that is already catalogued, so you only look at what is genuinely new. |
| Ungroup folder | Splits a folder that was grouped as one book back into separate entries. |
Details are read from the files themselves where the format allows it — FB2, FB3, EPUB, MOBI, LRF and audio tags all carry title, author and often a cover. PDFs and scans usually give only a file name.
Scan first, then run Batch updating book details over the result to pull covers, synopses and ratings from an online source. A folder of files turns into a real catalog in two steps.
Scanning is a bulk operation, so it is not available in free mode once a collection has grown past the free limit. See Trial, free mode and licence.
Free to try. Catalog up to 100 books at no cost, forever.