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Originally Posted by davidfor
I assume you are talking about purchased books downloaded to the device.
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Actually, it's probably a lot messier than that.
I've got calibre on systems at different sites, and the only communication between the two sites is my ebook, so sometimes I end up importing books into one or the other library directly from the device.
Also, I frequently create covers for books that either don't have any or have worthless covers. (Lots of imported PDFs, but quite a few epubs too.) If I make or update a cover at one site, it would be nice to import it at the other site as well. Keeping track of what has been updated is well beyond anything I would expect, but it would be nice to be able to import them manually.
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There isn't anything at the moment. But, I have recently been thinking about library books downloaded to the Aura ONE. It would be good to have a way to add an empty book to the calibre library to allow tracking these.
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I already do that with the existing Overdrive plugin which does a fairly good job of populating the library with empty books with good metadata. About half the time, calibre automatically matches the empty overdrive entry with the book on device without any help. (Some of which now have covers in my library.) Also, about half of the overdrive books come with poor covers, cropped stupidly or are otherwise worthless, so I occasionally "improve" them and replace the cover on the device.
I rarely bother adding covers to overdrive books; usually if I do it is because I was fixing/replacing the cover that came with the book. This is even more important with the new home screen.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by davidfor
When you resend a book to the device, the driver will delete any existing cover images.
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That's not the issue. The issue is that I import a bunch of books, queue them for send to device, and then plug in the device. While I'm bored waiting for that to finish, I start looking through the set and realize some of them have ugly covers, and start making better ones. Or maybe I sent these books a month ago and I'm just now getting around to fixing the covers.
At any rate, I now have a bunch of books already on the device and improved covers in calibre. I have a custom column that the generate cover plugin updates and I occasionally remember to manually update to indicate that a book has an updated cover.
So, if the book isn't on the device, that column is meaningless, because as you say, the cover will be sent with the book. But if the book is already on the device, it needs updating, but can't be updated if the book was just sent and hasn't been imported yet. I'm not going to re-send the book, because I probably don't need to embed the cover into the actual book, and if it is from overdrive, I can't anyway.
As to updating metadata, updating metadata of recent books won't work for me. I frequently update metadata on books in spurts, or change metadata on a whole class of books at once, or send old books to the device that haven't been recently modified, so there might be books that are not recent that need their metadata updated. I've got thousands of books in the device, and maybe 3x more in calibre, so updating all book metadata isn't very practical, especially when there might be only 20 that need it.
So I use a marker tag for books that need metadata. Books not on the device do not have the tag set. If books are on the device and I update the metadata, I clear the tag. If I delete a book from the device UI, the tag will be set for a book not on the device, and I need to remember to clear the tag before the book is resent so I remember to resend the metadata.
I also have a reading list for each device, but a lot of books get sent to the device without going through the reading list, so I can't really use it to keep track of metadata.
What would be really helpful would be a macro plugin...
So I could maybe select a bach of books and hit a button to run the macro, and the macro would send covers for selected books, send metadata for books, remove books from the selection for which either of those failed, and then remove a marker tag and/or set a column value for the remaining books.
Or something like that. (Maybe not both of those operations in the same macro, but you get the idea.)