Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
What's the point of changing your books' metadata in Calibre if the changes don't go through to the actual books?
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Well first of all Calibre is just an "organizing" tool. You can add books to it and these books are being copied over to the "Calibre Library" folder of your home directory.
All downloaded metadata from e.g. Amazon is being stored in the sqlite3 file called "metadata.db" within that "Calibre Library" folder. The metadata.db is actually the file responsible in keeping your database intact, ordered, structured etc.. The database is at the end the visual representation of what Calibre shows the user.
The individual book folders inside the "Calibre Library" contains the *.opf files (individual exported metadata per book basis) and optional a cover image and the book itself.
So basicly "changing" the metadata inside the book is just a matter of personal preference!
I for one don't like Calibre to touch the original e.g. *.epub, *.mobi files as where I downloaded them. This can have various different reasons. e.g. one may be md5sum'ing a backup of individual books and you like the md5sums to match the original books that you downloaded.
Others like to merge and manipulate the content of these book (said *.epub, *.mobi). Often this ends up in people messing around within the structure of the book without really knowing what they do. Sometimes I ended up finding books on the net that had two "table of contents" (one at the beginning and one applied through Calibre at the end). Misaligned or hard removed Tables (there is an option for that inside Calibre). Sometimes I end up getting books with two covers, A cover section put infront of another cover section and so on.
Or people simply applying or pulling wrong metadata from Amazon or other places and have the book end up being an utterly mess. I often find books where the ASIN number got changed a couple of times or the representative ISBN number (10 digits and 13 digits) that was written in the publisher page of the book (at the beginning or at the end) doesn't match the applied ISBN number of the metadata (made by someone) and so on.
So it's kinda philosophical whether you want to do this or not. I for my own decided to *not* touch the books contents once I downloaded them (regardless whether the data is valid or not) and have all metadata information stored in the sqlite3 file of Calibre.
The metadata I only apply when I do a book conversion e.g. convert the book from *.epub to *.mobi during the send process (e.g. sending the book from the Calibre Library to the Kindle).