📚 isbnx

This is a fork and enhancement from amigatomte/isbnx.

💡 Overview

isbnx.pl is a Perl script to help organizing large collections of arbitrarily named, ebooks (PDF/EPUB) by extracting the ISBN-13 identifier – if available – from the contents and using it as filename (and optionally, to use the ISBN number as a unique identifier for online meta data fetching).

Internally, the script utilizes poppler-utils for PDF-to-text conversion and calibre for EPUB and meta data handling.

🛠️ Usage

isbnx.pl 
	[--parallel NUMBER_OF_PROCESSES] 
	[--sleep SECONDS_TO_WAIT] 
	[--write] 
	[--copy] 
	[--move] 
	[--completed-dir <target-dir>] 
	[--failed-dir <target-dir>] 
	<filename> [filename2 [...]] 

This Perl script takes a set of book files as input and tries to extract the ISBN number from each file. If successful, the ISBN number is shown for each file. In addition, the script also allows the following further actions:

• --parallel -ize the execution to N parallel jobs
• --sleep to add waiting time (in seconds) before fetching the online meta data
• --write new meta data into the book file based on online sources and by using the ISBN
• --copy successfully and unsuccessfully resolved book files into different target folders
• --move successfully and unsuccessfully resolved book files into different target folders
• --rename successfully resolved file in-place

The target folders can be specified via --completed-dir and --failed-dir. If --copy or --move is used, the ISBN-13 identifier is used as the target filename for successfully resolved PDFs.

🛑 Caution

• ⚠️ This script can be run to modify and move book files. Please backup original files before usage.
• ⚠️ When using this script with a large batch of book files, it is recommended to disable parallelism and add a sleep time to prevent running into rate limiting.

✅ Requirements

The following dependencies are required on a Debian/Ubuntu-based system:

• libparallel-forkmanager-perl
• libfile-slurp-perl
• libsys-info-perl
• libbusiness-isbn-perl
• poppler-utils (for pdftotext)
• calibre (for fetch-ebook-metadata and ebook-meta)

🧩 Example Usages

$ perl isbnx.pl --move --completed-dir okay/ --failed-dir oops/ *.pdf *.epub

Will process all files in the current directory. If the ISBN number can be extracted, the file will be renamed to the ISBN identifier and moved to folder okay/. Otherwise, the file will be moved to oops/ for manual review.

$ perl isbnx.pl --write *.pdf

Will replace (overwrite!) the PDF meta data of all matching PDF files by online-fetched data in case the ISBN can be extracted from the PDF.

$ perl isbnx.pl --replace *.epub

Will rename all matching EPUB files to an ISBN-13-based filename when the ISBN had been resolved.

🤝 Acknowledgements

Thanks to amigatomte for the original script.