MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Looking for an E-book Indexing / Inventory / Cataloging Program

Evadman · 10-21-2007, 05:14 PM

weird, my post said a moderator needed to review it. anyway, when it shows up this will make more sense :P

I installed libprs500, and started playing with it. got some errors on installing the drivers, which I assume are for direct accessing the reader. that explains why the program shows my reader as having more memory than it actually does, and that my card has 0 bytes free when there is actually about 900 mb free.

the metadata edit is a nice feature, that is one of the things I was looking for. It was a pain creating batch files to edit the metadata for bulk files. Metadata is, and will always be, one of the most important parts of any electronic file. Be it a picture, MP3, ebook, database, whatever. The best tool I have found for editing metadata is for MP3's and called 'ID3 TagIT'; All it does is metadata. We need a tool like that for ebooks, where you can take a file, add, modify or find (aka ping library of congress, amazon, whatever) whatever metadata you need, and store it with the file. Obviously this will take a good amount of work, since there is no defacto standard for ebook metadata, though lit probably is the closest. that means there are quite a few different standards the metadata tool must be able to use.

<edit>
Actually, it doesn't edit the metadata, it just looks like it does. I edited the metadata for author on about 40 ebooks in lit format, converted to lrf, and the author did not change. I checked the lit file, and that too is the same, the change I made did not actualy get transfered tot he file, dispite the tool saying the author is now who I specified.
</edit>

integrating the sony reader access into the tool is a damn nice touch as well, it just doesn't work for me. Which is just fine, I don't use the internal memory, as the size is a joke. With how much memory costs these days, ($8 a gig or so) there should be a few gb easily in the reader itself. I just swap microsd cards.

Improvements I can see:
Remove the 'bulk convert' from the menu if it doesn't work. That just makes users angry :P
As near as I can tell, there are only the 6 fields that can be sorted in a collection. (title, author, size, date, rating, publisher) there needs to be user defined fields and values. Something like the tags that you have implemented, but that looks to only be searchable. Along the same lines, there needs to be a 'location' field where the file structure is mirrored in the tool, or the tool makes the file structure, or options to make the tool do that (mirror or make file structure) as most users will already have some kind of structure. Few will have a thousand ebooks in the same directory

The book cover is not read from lit files. The default image is displayed.

There is an ampersand in front of the 'rating' label on the metadata page

adding a book (or set of books) takes a long time. Based on my admitidly brief calculations, it would take about 900 days to add my entire collection if I were to do it in bulk. I doubt it would take that long, as the time probably scales reverse logarithmetically, especially being written in python.

There are usability enhancements that would greatly increase the pen of the tool. The help needs to be more robust. There is not enough information on how to do specific tasks, or, if it is there, it is non-intuitive to find.

Best tool I found so far though

10-21-2007, 05:14 PM	#80
Evadman Member Posts: 10 Karma: 30 Join Date: Oct 2007 Device: Sony Reader PRS-500	weird, my post said a moderator needed to review it. anyway, when it shows up this will make more sense :P I installed libprs500, and started playing with it. got some errors on installing the drivers, which I assume are for direct accessing the reader. that explains why the program shows my reader as having more memory than it actually does, and that my card has 0 bytes free when there is actually about 900 mb free. the metadata edit is a nice feature, that is one of the things I was looking for. It was a pain creating batch files to edit the metadata for bulk files. Metadata is, and will always be, one of the most important parts of any electronic file. Be it a picture, MP3, ebook, database, whatever. The best tool I have found for editing metadata is for MP3's and called 'ID3 TagIT'; All it does is metadata. We need a tool like that for ebooks, where you can take a file, add, modify or find (aka ping library of congress, amazon, whatever) whatever metadata you need, and store it with the file. Obviously this will take a good amount of work, since there is no defacto standard for ebook metadata, though lit probably is the closest. that means there are quite a few different standards the metadata tool must be able to use. <edit> Actually, it doesn't edit the metadata, it just looks like it does. I edited the metadata for author on about 40 ebooks in lit format, converted to lrf, and the author did not change. I checked the lit file, and that too is the same, the change I made did not actualy get transfered tot he file, dispite the tool saying the author is now who I specified. </edit> integrating the sony reader access into the tool is a damn nice touch as well, it just doesn't work for me. Which is just fine, I don't use the internal memory, as the size is a joke. With how much memory costs these days, ($8 a gig or so) there should be a few gb easily in the reader itself. I just swap microsd cards. Improvements I can see: Remove the 'bulk convert' from the menu if it doesn't work. That just makes users angry :P As near as I can tell, there are only the 6 fields that can be sorted in a collection. (title, author, size, date, rating, publisher) there needs to be user defined fields and values. Something like the tags that you have implemented, but that looks to only be searchable. Along the same lines, there needs to be a 'location' field where the file structure is mirrored in the tool, or the tool makes the file structure, or options to make the tool do that (mirror or make file structure) as most users will already have some kind of structure. Few will have a thousand ebooks in the same directory The book cover is not read from lit files. The default image is displayed. There is an ampersand in front of the 'rating' label on the metadata page adding a book (or set of books) takes a long time. Based on my admitidly brief calculations, it would take about 900 days to add my entire collection if I were to do it in bulk. I doubt it would take that long, as the time probably scales reverse logarithmetically, especially being written in python. There are usability enhancements that would greatly increase the pen of the tool. The help needs to be more robust. There is not enough information on how to do specific tasks, or, if it is there, it is non-intuitive to find. Best tool I found so far though Last edited by Evadman; 10-21-2007 at 06:01 PM. Reason: See <edit> tag.