If you store e-Book files on your hard drive or external drive (DVD or SD/MMC card), you can use the Scan tool to import books to Alfa Ebooks Manager database automatically.
How it works:
1. Open the Scan tool in the Books menu
2. Select the folder where the files are stored and (if needed) check the "Scan sub-directories" option
3. Select the e-book extensions (you can also add the custom ebook extensions to the list)
4. Start scan. It may take some time before all ebook files will be found. You can press the Stop button to stop the scan.
5. Select neded files (Ctrl+A will select all) and press the Save button. This will create books in the database for the selected files and link these files to them.
Note: when scanning your computer for ebooks, you can at the same time retrieve ebook metadata and create book thumbnails (see details). You can also perform these operations later (after you save the ebooks to the database) using the File Parser.
Duplicates control
Sometimes, when a lot of news ebooks appear in your collection, you may need to import only the new files to your Alfa Ebooks Manager database. For this reason the Scan tool includes the duplicates control. To detect the files, that already exist in the database, you can select to search duplicates by:
- File Path
- ISBN (of course in this case you need to check the Retrieve ISBN box before scanning)
Duplicates are marked in the Scan list and you can remove them before saving ebooks to the database.