@chaley,
Thanks for the info - I'll squirrel it away. At the moment I'm just interested in seeing what fields/methods are available for querying metadata for a single book in the database.
It all came about because I wanted to tweak the Count Pages plugin more to my liking and I realised I didn't really have a clue about the metadata processing in there. FWIW it turns out I didn't really need to know much to achieve what I wanted ... but now I'm aware of my ignorance I feel the need to do something about it
P.S. Hope you're well. France seems to be having some bad times recently.