Metadata Plugboard problem - Bug?

[Jimbo724]

This has worked many times before:

{series}{series_index:0>2s| | - }{title}

The destination field is "title."

(I grabbed the above from someone else's post and modified it to make the result a little shorter. I don't really understand the syntax.)

For all 28 books, the series is Macbeth[1] - Macbeth[28] in the Calibre list.

I see inconsistent results after sending the files to my Kindle Touch.

4 of the files have this format:

Macbeth 25 - Death of a Witch

but 24 files have this format:

Hamish Macbeth 23 (2007) - Death [truncated without "..."]

The .opf file for both examples above has the following line:

<meta content="Macbeth" name="calibre:series"/>

Neither .opf file contains "Hamish" or the (year).

The word "Hamish" does not appear in the metadata.db file.

The metadata fields for Date and Published are "undefined" for all 28 files, so I have no idea where the years are coming from for the 24 files that use the longer series format. Likewise, since the series name is "Macbeth" only, I don't know where Calibre is getting "Hamish" from. "Hamish Macbeth" is the protagonist's full name, but I am using "Macbeth" alone for the series.

Same problem whether Calibre assigns the series numbers [force start at 1] or I do one by one.

Same problem after having Calibre clear the series info.

Any idea what is causing the inconsistent results? How to fix the problem?

I'm using Calibre 0.8.60 and have the latest firmware for my KT.

P.S. The longer series name appears to be coming from the beginning of each mobi file.

P.S.S. Clearly, something atop Loc 1 is dictating the title displayed on my KT, causing the Metadata plugboard to be ignored or not to work. I know this because I deleted all the books in the series, downloaded slightly different versions with different title information atop Loc 1, and that title information is displayed, not what the plugboard is supposed to show. More specifically, the title info of a mobi file is "A Highland Christmas." That is the exact title I see on my KT, with none of the series info that the plugboard is supposed to insert in the title.

Would it help to see one of the problematic mobi files? I would need an email address to send it to.

I solved the problem by converting the mobi file to an epub file, using Sigil to remove the dross at the beginning of the ebook, and then converting it back to mobi. One down, 27 to go. <groan>

[Jimbo724]

Actually, the Sigil route was too much for my little pea brain, so I just gave up on renaming the Hamish Macbeth series. Something about Loc 1 ignoring the series info that Calibre is supposed to set.

I just had a similar problem with a bunch of Sir Walter Scott books (all mobis) from Project Gutenberg. I assigned "Waverley" as the series name for a lot of books, but only some of them had "Waverley [01] -" etc. added when I sent them to my Kindle Touch. A lot of them in that series had NOTHING added to the front of the title. Again, sometimes the plugboard works and sometimes it doesn't. Strange. BTW, I saw this inconsistency after changing the template to the following, exactly as specified in Kovid's sticky post:

{series:|| }{series_index:0>2s|[|] - }{title}

Also, where the series info was not added to the name of a book, changes that I made to the name in the metadata are ignored. More specifically, I changed the name "The Fair Maid of Perth / Or, St. Valentine's Day" to simply "The Fair Maid of Perth" in the metadata. This book appears on my KT (1) without the series info at the beginning of its name, and (2) with the full, unshortened name, as if I never changed the metadata in Calibre.

Any ideas how to fix these problems?

I am using 0.8.61.

[Jimbo724]

I continue to find Project Gutenberg mobi books which refuse to work with this plugboard. The most recent ones are all six volumes of Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

[kovidgoyal]

Do a mobi to mobi conversion. And then use the plugboard.

[Jimbo724]

Thank you, Kovid. Your suggestion worked!