Quote:
Originally Posted by Hawk
Anyway, if you want the cover, author, title, etc to all stick and work well with the Kindle, here is one way. This also lets you reconstruct the metadata painlessly using online searching. You will need to end up with kindle-compatible .MOBI files instead of .AZW files - but who cares as long as they work great on your Kindle?
1. Download Calibre (its free and open source)
2. Use Calibe to (relatively) automatically reconstruct book title, author, series, book# in series, and Cover image from your files.
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As far as I can tell from my own experience thus far, Calibre works great with one caveat -- you really need to fix the metadata BEFORE you make any notes or marks on your Kindle. In Mobipocket Reader you can make new notes and your Kindle will recognize the book or document as still being the same book or document you started with, but in Calibre when you edit metadata you then have to add it back onto your Kindle, losing all your notes and marks in the process. For most people, fixing the title and author first thing probably isn't a big issue, but it's something to be aware of.
And if anyone knows how to work around this caveat, I'd be grateful -- I'm a writer and I'd like to keep old drafts of my novels on my Kindle, as it's nice to have one backup that's so usable and easy to read. Unfortunately, I can't save my latest draft that way, because I didn't realize the title issue when I put it on my Kindle and it's just titled by the name of my novel. I thought I would change it to the draft name later. And since saving the annotations is the whole point of the way I have my draft system set up, I don't want to delete those, either.
(In my pre-Kindle days, I'd print out a draft of a novel, edit it with red pen, and later file it away labeled as, say, Draft 2-3 -- Draft 2 for the original printout and Draft 3 for all the handwritten edits which turn it into the new Draft 3 on my computer. I wouldn't necessarily go back and look at old versions a ton, but it's nice knowing they're backed up in one more way and I can see changes at a glance if I want to. Thus far I've only used Microsoft's track changes feature for edits I enter directly into my computer, with no paper intermediary. Now that I have a Kindle the original document is like the original printout and my annotations are like my red pen. It's much easier to move those edits back into my computer, while I keep the increased productivity from being able to do my editing anywhere and not having to psych myself up for a long session at a keyboard. And if I wanted to add a whole scene or something I could just use Mobipocket. I wanted to save those files the same way as my old paper ones, as Draft 2-3 etc., and I still can I guess... just not my latest draft, at least, not on my Kindle.)