[mgmueller]

Originally Posted by Fungelstein

I just got my Sony-Prs600 today and it works very well so far.

Except, the eBook Library is driving me batty! For some reason whenever I put books on it, it sometimes changes it titles to something else. At first, I thought it was just grabbing the first sentence in the book to use as its title, so I edited a couple of ebooks to check it. Which didn't work.

I have noticed, txt files will use the file name as the title. While rtf or PDF appear to be making up some sort of title for itself. I'm assuming its some sort of internal file title within the file, since the titles are somewhat related to the e-books. For example, I got 2 PDF files called, "DiaryofNathanAdler1" and "DiaryofNathanAdler2", when I import them into the ebook library, the titles change to "Diary of Nathan Adler1.rtf" and "Diary of Nathan Adler 02.rtf". And a Discworld e-book I got has its title changed to just Terry Pratchett.

Although, oddly enough, the poetry PDFs I got from my class have the correct titles attached to them.

And its even more annoying since I can't change the titles in the eBook Library program! You'd think they would have that option in the program. Or maybe it does and I'm not using the program correctly.

It's extremely annoying, I agree.
You legally purchase eBooks. You even purchase them from the very same source. But still, sometimes what you get is way worse than anything you could download from the darknet.
For example, I've bought an official bundle of books: The "James Patterson collection".
Within 5 or 6 books (don't remember exactly, don't use them out of frustration), I found 3 different author's names: "James Patterson, "Patterson, James" and "JAMES PATTERSON".
In other eBooks, instead of author's name I even found "funny" comments like 24/7 or other strange things.
My only explanation: Cheap labor. eBooks being prepared by non-experts.

The book title or author's name are extracted from the metadata.
You can change them in some applications, for example "calibre". Sometimes that's even possible for DRMed (protected) eBooks.
But most of the time, you have to strip the eBook from DRM and then either convert it or change metadata.

In the beginning, I was deleting such eBooks from my library. But after some time, I found myself robbed of about 1/3 of my eBooks.
So, for the moment, I have two libraries:
- The original one, for example in Sony's eBook library or Adobe Digital Editions. Here I keep ALL the eBooks of the respective format, even the "annoying" ones. But I only copy the "correct" ones to my eBook readers.
- The "annoying" eBooks I strip of DRM and put them into calibre. Within calibre, I manage my second library and convert the "annoying" eBooks into 3 target formats: .epub and .lrf for my Sony readers, .mobi for the other readers. Either Mobipocket or ePUB usually can be used on any of my units.

But I really wonder:
- Why isn't there a "standard" naming convention?
Mobipocket for example uses "Patterson, James". Others use "James Patterson".
- Why is the quality of legally purchased eBooks very often that bad? It doesn't seem to be the eBook stores problem, I found it more or less in all the stores. Obviously, the eBook stores only host them, but they're prepared centrally. Probably by the publishers themselves. But it's really strange, how semi-professionally eBooks still are handled. Proofing and other quality instruments don't seem to apply.
But I've found similar in Apple's iTunes as well. As far as I remeber, the guy's name isn't "Schwartzenegger"!