[Statch]

I mostly buy my ebooks at Fictionwise.com. When I download a book, and add it to Calibre, the metadata I see in Calibre usually contains an ISBN, but no book description and often no publisher. To get those, I click on 'Fetch metadata from server.' I've set up the isbndb.com account and put in the access code, so as I understand it, Calibre should be checking both Google books and isbndb.com. However, it rarely finds any metadata using the ISBN supplied from the Fictionwise download, so I usually have to wipe out the ISBN, and try the search again, which gives me other editions of the book. I'm not a purist about this, so I usually just choose the most complete one, even though it's not the ebook version.

It strikes me as odd, though, that what appears to be a perfectly good ISBN from the Fictionwise download doesn't work. Does anyone know why? I know that each format for an ebook is supposed to have a separate ISBN, so is it just that Google Books and isbndb.com don't keep track of all the possible ebook variant ISBNs? (I just read an article saying that the International ISBN agency is reconsidering its policy of having a different ISBN for each format, by the way.) I'd really like to have the correct metadata for my download, if at all possible.

For the most part these are mainstream books from big publishers, so I'd expect them to be in the major ISBN databases. Also, I'm on Calibre version 0.6.19, if that's important. (My primary Internet connection is a mobile modem, which restricts me to 5Gb of downloads a month, so I only download the latest version every so often.)