MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Saving Meta-data to Books without conversion

craig8128 · 12-09-2010, 09:56 AM

Thanks Chaley!

FWIW, I ended up messing around with it more last night, and I wound up with what seems to be at least a partial solution: I had already entered all of my meta info changes into Calibre (I'm backlevel on 0.6.54, btw). I went into Preferences -> Add/Save -> Saving Books and unchecked "Save cover separately" and "Save metadata in OPF file". I checked "Update metadata in saved copies", and also changed "File formats to save" to "epub" (this last might be optional). I then hit OK and then restarted Calibre.

Long story short: when Calibre came back up I selected all of the books and did a "Save to disk" into an empty directory (ie, I didn't try to overwrite any previously existing versions of the books; I'm not sure why but this seemed to make a difference). About 75% of the books seemed to have updated their meta info.

This was not a perfect solution and I'm still investigating why. I'm using iBooks on the iPad and I've got about 1250 books on the devices and it may be that I'm hitting some kind of limit on the number of covers that can be rendered. When I inspect the contents of the misc calibre-saved books, some seem to have saved the cover inside of the .epub file (yet it's not rendering on the iPad). And some calibre-saved books *don't* include their covers (even though a cover was specified when I edited the meta info). I'm still scratching my head.

As I said, it's not a perfect solution but at least it's drastically reduced the number of "problem" books -- I guess I can attempt an epub-to-epub conversion on those and see if it helps at all.

Craig

12-09-2010, 09:56 AM	#14
craig8128 Member Posts: 17 Karma: 382 Join Date: May 2010 Location: Austin, Texas Device: iPad	Thanks Chaley! FWIW, I ended up messing around with it more last night, and I wound up with what seems to be at least a partial solution: I had already entered all of my meta info changes into Calibre (I'm backlevel on 0.6.54, btw). I went into Preferences -> Add/Save -> Saving Books and unchecked "Save cover separately" and "Save metadata in OPF file". I checked "Update metadata in saved copies", and also changed "File formats to save" to "epub" (this last might be optional). I then hit OK and then restarted Calibre. Long story short: when Calibre came back up I selected all of the books and did a "Save to disk" into an empty directory (ie, I didn't try to overwrite any previously existing versions of the books; I'm not sure why but this seemed to make a difference). About 75% of the books seemed to have updated their meta info. This was not a perfect solution and I'm still investigating why. I'm using iBooks on the iPad and I've got about 1250 books on the devices and it may be that I'm hitting some kind of limit on the number of covers that can be rendered. When I inspect the contents of the misc calibre-saved books, some seem to have saved the cover inside of the .epub file (yet it's not rendering on the iPad). And some calibre-saved books don't include their covers (even though a cover was specified when I edited the meta info). I'm still scratching my head. As I said, it's not a perfect solution but at least it's drastically reduced the number of "problem" books -- I guess I can attempt an epub-to-epub conversion on those and see if it helps at all. Craig Last edited by craig8128; 12-09-2010 at 10:01 AM.