[GUI Plugin] Extract EPUB Metadata

[ovillo]

Recover fanfic metadata from EPUBs you already have

If FanFicFare can't reach a story anymore: AO3's down, the fic got deleted, or you got the epub someplace else (browser extension, a friend, an old backup), you can end up with a Calibre entry that's just "Title" by Author, none of the fandom/tags/rating/etc. This plugin tries to fix that by reading the metadata straight out of the EPUB itself.

You choose how it writes the data back: straight into Calibre's standard fields, into your own custom columns, or as raw data ready for FanFicFare's own metadata pipeline to process normally.

It also has a separate action for anthology EPUBs (multiple fics bundled together) that recovers each individual story's own completion status, since the bundle's own status usually just tells you if the whole collection is finished or not.

Built mainly around my own workflows: mostly AO3, with support for fanfiction.net (via fichub.net and WebToEpub).

Early beta, mostly vibe-coded, so caveat emptor.

Feedback and suggestions very welcome.

Full documentation:
https://github.com/wordsandpics/Extract-epub-metadata

[ovillo]

Updated with a few bugfixes and tweaks. Feedback welcome!

Extract epub metadata 0.2.1 beta

[ShoeQueen]

I'm very excited to see this being developed! This is my exact scenario, I have many downloaded fics that I need only metadata for, but fanficfare now struggles with AO3s cloudflare so much that I rarely get it to work.

I'm a Windows 11 user, and not a programmer, but I did give it a try. I couldn't get the plugin to load. It gave an invalid error:

calibre.customize.InvalidPlugin: The plugin in 'C:\\Users\\XXXXX\\Downloads\\Extract-epub-metadata-0.2.1-beta.zip' is invalid. It does not contain a top-level __init__.py file

Not sure if this feedback really "helps", but I figured I'd send it on anyway.

Thank you and all the developers for working on this!

[ovillo]

Thanks for trying it!

That error is actually my fault. I did not attach the plugin file to the latest release, and that file is GitHub's automatic source download, not the plugin zip.

I've fixed it: on the release page, download the zip under Assets named extract_epub_metadata-v0.2.1-beta.zip (not "Source code"), then Preferences → Plugins → Load plugin from file.

I've attached the file here too.

Sorry for the trouble!