Calibre metadata plugboard + email

[jselby]

I'm having some issues with plugboards and email output to my send to kindle address.

I have the following plugboard set up to update the title:
any format, any device : {series:|| }{series_index:0>2s|| - }{title}

When I use the "email to" option to send the book to my kindle, the series information will prepend to the title for some books, but not for others. It seems to be simply that some books work, and other don't. I've tried two books from the same series, one gets the series information added and the other doesn't.

So a couple of questions I have off the bat:
Are metadata plugboards used by the "email to" option?

Will Amazon sometimes monkey with the metadata, or maybe have issues with some information (special characters, etc) that can cause parts of the title to be lost?

I appreciate any help I can get on this.

[eschwartz]

Yes, Send-to-Email makes use of metadata plugboards.

However, updating metadata in the AZW3 component of a dual-MOBI (contains both legacy MOBI and new AZW3 components) has never been implemented.
So if some of your files are dual-MOBI, then that would explain your problem.


(This is due to the difficulty in robustly modifying a potentially limited-size dual header. )

[jselby]

Thanks eschwartz. All of the books are dual mobi, and I had come to the realization not long ago that there might be some weirdness in using that format. I did a couple of tests just before i saw your reply and that does seem to be my issue.

Do you know if using kindlegen to convert to dual mobi will resolve this issue, or will I need to switch to the old mobi format?

[eschwartz]

All you need to do is make sure the dual-MOBI is converted with the title initially set to your desired title.

The problem is updating an existing dual-MOBI.
Kindlegen won't update the metadata in an existing file at all -- it is a converter only, so you'd have to convert from an EPUB that was saved with the right plugboard. You could do that with calibre's ebook-convert too.
The problem is doing automated conversions in the calibre GUI when plugboards only apply during export.

...

This is a bug, it is just not a high-priority one so no one has really bothered to fix it (and/or spend the time to test it). You generally should use MOBI or AZW3 on its own, dual-MOBI is not a very popular output format.
It basically only affects people who both use plugboards, and send dual-MOBI to Amazon's Personal Documents service (in order to make sure their AZW3-supporting devices get an AZW3 delivered to them).

The intersection of those two groups is not a very large group. And Kovid says the solution is fiddly and also would need testing -- by someone who actually uses dual-MOBI -- to make sure nothing breaks horribly. So it isn't worth the time for him to figure out how to implement it given how few people would benefit.