■ Mass rename your ebook collection using their title/author information

How many books have there been written over the aeons? It is a humbling experience to realize that try as you might you can never read even a fraction of them in your lifetime. Lately I focused my effort on the classic books that stood the test of time. There are many sources of free ebooks for Kindle and other ebook readers like project gutenberg, the internet archive and many many others.

Once your classical book collection starts to grow, you realize that most of these MOBI/AZW/EPUB books have cryptic filenames like PG2529.MOBI so you cannot tell which one is Aristotle and which is Don Quixote. That's why many people use dedicated ebook software like calibre to manage their collection. But if you've been following my blog posts in the past few weeks, there are many shell extensions that can give you thumbnails, author information and text previews for the most popular ebook formats. So you no longer need to install 100MB worth of extra software if you already own and use xplorer² (or windows explorer).

xplorer² can rename files in bulk, using many tricks like automatic counters, search and replace etc (please see the manual). It can also add any file attribute in the name, like author and title; we're going to use this latter trick to rename our ebook collection. Here are the steps:

Download eBook Info WDX plugin and integrate it with xplorer² (see detailed instructions)
Select all the ebook files and press <F2> key to start the bulk rename dialog/wizard
Set the mode to Replace whole name as we don't need the original name
Use file attribute from Special tokens drop down to include the title/author file attributes. You can also type them manually in the Target Name Template field if you prefer:
```
${Title.eBookInfo} - ${Author.eBookInfo}
```
Note the names of the properties include eBookInfo, the name of the plugin that supplies them
Click on Preview button and make sure your template does what it should, and once happy click Rename to change all the ebook filenames in one go.

mass rename ebooks with author/title information

If you have lots of ebooks, a better idea will be to create a separate folder for each author, and in there use just ${Title.eBookInfo} to rename the book using its title alone (author is implicit from the folder location).

If the book titles or author names happen to contain special characters like / and * that are not allowed in filenames, the mass rename wizard will remove them automatically