How to Add Audiobooks to Calibre Library ~ LA PENSINE MUTINE (EN)

Until now, I had to store my handful of audiobooks in my Kodi music library since it wasn't possible to add them to Calibre alongside my other books, which wasn't very convenient not to have everything in the same place. Especially when you have the same audiobooks in other formats (digital or hard copies). But now, that's ancient history since Calibre's developer Kovid Goyal finally has implemented this missing functionality.

How to Add Your Audiobooks to Calibre

Click on Add books - Add Empty Book (CTRL+MAJ+E).

Thereupon you need to enter the number of books you wish to add, author's name, series title and book title (these options are especially helpful if you had a whole series or collection of books by a same author and wish to save the trouble of manually filling in these fields for each book) then click OK to valid.
Your book is now displayed in the cover browser (or list depending of how you have configured Calibre to look like) and you may fill in the missing information by clicking on Edit metadata individually and proceed as you would for ebooks.
Once done with the metadata, click on Add Books - Add data files to selected book entries then select all the audiofiles of your audiobook folder and click OK.
Select your book again and right click to Open Book Folder - Open Book Data Folder.

In the data folder where Calibre has previously copied all your book audio files, select all files and open them with your media player to create a m3u playlist which you may save in a temporary folder.
Back to Calibre, Edit metadata individually then Add new format for this book and select the m3u playlist you've just created with your media player and click OK.

You will now be able to play your audiobook by clicking on this format in the book details as you do for ebooks.

NOTE: Same as for ebooks, you may delete original audio files and playlist as Calibre has copied them all in its library.

A New Easier Way to Catalog Your Printed Books in Calibre

Six months ago, I explained how to add printed books to Calibre by creating as many dummy TXT files, which was quite a tedious task. Now there's a much easier and quicker way to do that as we saw while adding audiobooks since all you need to do is Add books - Add Empty Book then edit metadata as previoulsy explained.
If you've used my old method, you may delete the dummy text files using unneccessary space on your hard disk by selecting your books and Delete specific format files for selected books.

Thereupon a list of format will be displayed according to what's available in your selection of books. Just tick TXT then OK and you're done.

NOTE: If you have books both in paper or digital format, no need to create several entries for the same books. Instead create customized columns for printed book formats which you may then fill in manually where applicable. I have also added a field for audiobook length.

Hoping this tutorial will be of any use to you.