Add First Published Date field to books' metadata

[pg111]

Hi everybody,

As still a newbie in calibre, I was wondering how to get the flwg metadata info when importing an eBook to calibre: the date on which the original book was first published (not the eBook's one). For instance, 'The Secret Agent a Simple Tale' by Joseph Conrad was originally published in 1907, and its electronic version was published in December 2014. What matters to me is to display its original publishing date in my library, ie 1907.

Any advice about how to do so?

Many thanks in advance for any useful tip.

Cheers.

Patrick

[BetterRed]

I have a custom date column for 'orig-pubdate/Originally Published' that I update manually. You create custom columns via Preferences->Add your own columns.

Curious: what is 'flwg metadata'?

BR

[pg111]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

I have a custom date column for 'orig-pubdate/Originally Published' that I update manually. You create custom columns via Preferences->Add your own columns.

Curious: what is 'flwg metadata'?

BR

Hi BR,

Thanks for your reply but I was wondering if it were possible to get this Original Published Date info automatically. I guess from your answer it is not possible.

Incidentally "flwg" is short for "following".

Cheers.

Patrick

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by pg111

Hi BR,

Thanks for your reply but I was wondering if it were possible to get this Original Published Date info automatically. I guess from your answer it is not possible.

Incidentally "flwg" is short for "following".

You could write a plugin something like the Extract ISBN plugin. It searches for something resembling an ISBN identifier at the front of a book, if found it injects it into the built-in identifiers column.

An Extract Original Pubdate plugin would search for such a date and inject the value into a designated custom column - it would need to cater for different date representations - eg "Aug. 1897", "1956", "10/5/1979" etc. Whether the last one is the 10th of May, or the 5th of October, will depend where it was published.

I wondered if 'flwg metadata' might have been an alternative for 'dc metadata' - 'Foreign Language Whatever for Geeks", as opposed to "Dublin Core"

BR

[davidfor]

@pg111: The alternative is to download the metadata after adding the book. Exactly what published date will be retrieved will depend on the data source. And that depends on what someone entered as the published date. From memory the Goodread metadata source plugin will get the original published date if that is available. I don't know about the other sources.

[uli]

Like mentioned above goodreads will fetch the original published date. Alternatively there is a check box in Configure Metadata download: Used published date of "first edition" (from worldcat.org)