Quote:
Originally Posted by craig8128
I'm bumping this thread because I'm having the same kind of issue but haven't seen a good resolution.
Here's the deal: I have a few hundred epub format documents and I'd like to "regularize" the meta info (make author names consistent and add cover pictures). But I'm finding that I seem to need to run an epub-to-epub conversion to update the meta info in each .epub file. This seems rather inefficient and also takes a long time (some files take 30+ minutes).
Is there a way to do this better / faster in calibre? Simply saving to disk doesn't do the job.
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The problem is the definition of metadata. Calibre (and most others) define metadata as that which goes into the OPF file. Metadata is descriptive information, not considered part of the book, which explains why it is called 'meta'data (data about data). The cover is considered part of the book, shown when looking at the book, so it isn't descriptive, and therefore not metadata. Calibre's save/send functions update the metadata (descriptive information) but do not touch the 'book'. That is why the cover is not updated.
(Edit: I just found that calibre does update the cover for epubs when saving to disk/sending to device.)
You can use tweak_epub and do the work yourself. First save to disk, then copy the resulting epub back to the library. This will update the metadata. Second, 'Tweak', copy the right cover into the folder, then rebuild the epub. This process does not touch the book's text (html), css, or other visible data.
Some have argued that for epub, it would be easy to automate the above process; update the metadata and cover without changing the rest of the book. This is true, and there have been discussions about adding some kind of function to do it. Usually the same people lump jacket information into the same easy-to-change category, which is somewhat more problematic because jackets aren't an epub standard item. I don't know the status of these ideas or if anyone is working on them. (edit: it has been done for send to device, but not yet done in place)