[eboyhan]

Thanks for the quick response -- this will be very helpful. You didn't comment on the preference bug. Do you need a ticket?

3a. Suppose I have "create metadata from filename" "on", will you then bypass the info dict in PDF files?
3b. If I change the title & author fields in Calibre for a PDF file, will you rewrite that into the info dict?

8. no problem with multiple collections books per se -- are you displaying the names of collections that a book might be in as a comma separated list (similar to tags) or what?
9. One of us is not communicating well here -- it's probably me. Let me try again. I've got a bunch of books on my kindle -- all in collections. Let's suppose the calibredb is empty. I do an add books and bring these books over to calibre; presumably their collections membership comes along too, and is displayed (or perhaps optionally displayed in a custom column). Now I want to do a send to device of all these books back to the kindle -- only now the metadata in the send to device preferences governs where the books are sent to. I have tested this and if the metadata template refers to folder/filenames which don't exist, you create them. What I am asking for is to add "collection" to the list of metadata variables so that the books are placed into folder/filename where "folder" is the collection name and "filename" is the title of the book. Since you already have a book's collection information, it should be possible to do this. Or am I missing something?

10. There have been a number of reports today of users losing their collections. There is an Amazon provided backup facility, but it requires whispernet to be on. I'm wondering if it would make sense for calibre to capture a copy of the collections.json file for backup purposes. It could be restored from an option on the send to device menu. It would still require a reboot on the kindle side; don't know whether you could deliver a message to do that -- perhaps when the KDK goes live later this year. Even if the reboot requirement could only be in the documentation, a user controlled collections backup facility away from the vagaries of Amazon could prove useful. See below:

Today, over in the Amazon communities, there have been some reports of kindle users losing their collections. Amazon customer service is telling these users to deregister/reregister their kindles -- in about half the cases their collections are then recovered from the copy of the collections.json file kept on the Amazon archive.

Since many users run with whispernet off most of the time, this recovery doesn't always work. There is also an "Annotations backup" flag on the settings page of the kindle which governs automatic backup of annotations and collections on the Amazon archive. The annotations part of this is involved with some of the social networking stuff -- so there have been some privacy concerns raised. I only point this out because both calibre and Amazon will be accessing the collections.json file. You will be reading it; Amazon will be copying it to the archive and restoring it from the archive -- it can also be written to another kindle on the amazon account when the user asks for collections to be merged.