Quote:
Originally Posted by lestatar
The questions:
- why does Amazon conversion service mess with my ebook tags/covers and is there any way to prevent this or...
- should I simply edit my tags at the end, when I receive the AZW files?
- what is the best pixel size/file size/image format for book covers on Kindle3?
- it seems a few converted AZW files don't properly display book JPG covers added via calibre...any idea what I am doing wrong?
- what is the normal SOP for most people with regards to tags/covers on Kindle?
-les
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Les,
I, too, am quite anal when it comes to tagging my music, so I totally get you on this. You know how the tagging specs are different for mp3, ogg, wav, etc? Then sometimes you have to deal with lack of software support for some spec versions or only partial support. It's like that with ebook formats too.
In this case, the problem isn't Amazon messing with your files - the pdf format doesn't support all the metadata you want to use. It's like a wav file compared to an mp3 in that regard. Because of that, most of that info is only in calibre - it's not attached to the pdf when Amazon gets it.
With other formats, it can be a matter of whether or not the metadata attached is readable by the software doing the reading. (For this portion, we can compare the Rhapsody player [sucky tag support] to Mediamonkey [well-implemented tag support].)
What I do is this: I get my files into the desired final format (usually mobi), then finalize the metadata. If the added metadata changes something I need to have attached to the file when it gets to the Kindle (title or author, generally), I do a mobi-to-mobi conversion. Calibre knows what I'm up to, so it doesn't duplicate the file, it replaces it with the new one, committing the changed info to the new file.
Since I pretty much use calibre or the Kindle for everything, I don't do that if the metadata in question isn't going to show up on the reader anyway. Most of my metadata is only of use in calibre.
Hope that helps.