Date tags

[Pancrazi]

Hello,

I'm a new user of ebooks in general, of the Cybook Odyssey and Calibre in particular.

My question is about the date related tags.

I see in the metadata two tags : "Date" and "Published"

"Date" seems to refer to the Date when I have added the book to my library.
"Published" seems to refer to the date when the ebook was published.

Isn't there a tag for the fisrt date of publication, as a physical book ?
I like to know when a book has been published for the first time...

Thanks in advance.

Antonio

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Pancrazi

Hello,

I'm a new user of ebooks in general, of the Cybook Odyssey and Calibre in particular.

My question is about the date related tags.

I see in the metadata two tags : "Date" and "Published"

"Date" seems to refer to the Date when I have added the book to my library.
"Published" seems to refer to the date when the ebook was published.

Isn't there a tag for the fisrt date of publication, as a physical book ?
I like to know when a book has been published for the first time...

Thanks in advance.

Antonio

No
Published is subject to the whims of the metadata download (which leans to most recent) or user input.
If First Published is important to you, you can create that custom column.
You will be totally responsible for data entry

[kiwidude]

@theDucks - as of calibre 0.8 calibre actually attempts to "lean" towards the first date of publication (rather than what the metadata source says is for the specific ISBN edition which it did previously).

However as you say it is at the mercy of a combination of the ISBN and IIRC what WorldCat says is the earliest publication for that ISBN pool. I seem to recall that it doesn't even matter what the metadata sources like Goodreads return, because calibre overrides it - sticks in my mind because someone asked if that could be changed and Kovid said no

So as far as Pancrazi is concerned - it is a lottery, I find that "most" of the time it gets the first published date correct or close enough for me not to notice, but yes there will be times where it is too recent. Now unless Kovid allows the metadata source like Goodreads to pass through its (sometimes more reliable) date there is nothing you can do but manually correct it. I can understand why he has done it the way he has, because the metadata source plugins that ship with calibre like Amazon don't actually have a useful publication date, so the Worldcat approach works better for them. Perhaps it choosing a min date of all sources (Worldcat + actual values returned from metadata sources) might work better. Maybe not...

[kovidgoyal]

@kiwidude: I'm actually fine with a min over worldcat + plugin dates. Though I thought the problem was wanting dates for non first editions. Does goodreads actually get first edition dates correct more often than worldcat?

[kiwidude]

@Kovid - I think I need to come up with some concrete examples for you to compare across the different plugins. Most of the time when I see a date "not right" I use the Fantastic Fiction website page to correct it (which given my plugin scrapes from I know it at least "beats" Worldcat some of the time). It is not something I have looked into in detail, let me gather some "evidence" to see if such a workaround is worth the effort or not...

[Pancrazi]

Thank you guys !

I think I'll put the First published date manualy, in the Published field.

Anyway, thank you for your clear answers.

Antonio