[davidfor]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Kindles just show title/author/cover. TBH I am not sure what I would want to look at the filesize/format/language/ISBN for, sounds like the Kobo is spending too much time extracting and indexing unusual metadata.

The Kobo is opening the book to get the title and author. As the rest of the metadata is either in the OPF or comes from the file system, it isn't going to add much time to it.

filesize is accessible via ,,,,,,file browser hacks, if I cared, which I don't, because filesisze is not a criteria tha affects my reading.

Word count, or even page count, would be better as I sometimes choose a book based on size (due to mood, opportunity to read etc). But, I have a fair idea of the book length based on the file size using my experience with the books and the known sources.

format -- it is a Kindle book. AZW3 can be pretty bad quality and MOBI can be good, so it doesn't even tell me what quality the book is.

A format of epub/kepub, PDF, CBR/CBZ, text etc does tell me something - fiction, text book or other info, comic book and "why do I have plain text on the device?"

language -- I read only English books, but if I read other languages the title would be a giveaway. The Kindle only uses language for choosing a dictionary, and that is based on XHTML lang attributes anyway, just like all the other book content.

Same for the Kobo.

ISBN would be a lot more useful if there was any reason to know one outside of cataloging time.

Synopsis -- Amazon expects us to look in the Kindle store for that. I might use it if it was offered, but I am not all that fussed really, it is not *my* priority. And many people across various devices/apps have been using calibre metadata jackets for that.

As the sideloaded books are not directly linked to a shop somewhere, using that method is useless. Plus about half of my read is done somewhere without connectivity, so it wouldn't help. And if I want to look at the jacket, that means I have to open the book which marks it on the Kobo as open. I can unmark it, but, that's extra work. And from what I can see, the reason that calibre metadata jackets exist is because so few of the ereaders support displaying this information separately. There is no way I would buy one that didn't.

Series I do rather want. But embedding it in the title is a fair substitute.

I'll beg to disagree. Embedding the series info in the title is a hack done because the device can't display it separately.

Covers are extracted from the book after it is added, I think. I usually sideload via calibre which creates the cover thumbnails anyway.

The Kobo's generate the cover images as needed. It does waste some space by having different sizes for different places, but it works fine. Or calibre can generate them during the send.

The simple thing here is that the point of the metadata being in the book is that applications can use it. And hopefully in a way that is useful to the user. I am interested in seeing most of the metadata above. I do look at it when choosing a book. So, the time taken in building this is useful to me. If Kobo speed it up, then great. If they add a bit more info, just as good (I'd love to see tags and filter based on them).