PRS-600 Can PDF books be renamed?

[roger64]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

Yes, it is Kovid's policy for Calibre to not modify the original ebook that you import. It makes perfect sense.

Well, maybe it makes sense. Not sure however it's perfect.

I am used to adapt PDF ebooks from a source in A4 size. I then create my own PDFs in 9x12cm size. If I import my brand new PDF in calibre and ask calibre to modify it (add a tag for example), it's just not OK for me if calibre does not execute what I ask him to do.

If there is a technical problem about it (?), I would rather like it to happen on the calibre desktop database first and be dutifully warned about it than see it occur later on the Reader.

This aside, I too does not use calibre classification of ebooks. I use grsync on Linux to save my data on the Reader.

I would not like to give the feeling I dislike calibre. I find it brilliant and invaluable for its numerous recipes and its increasing number of conversion tools.

Its direct support for collections looks very useful too. I realize now that it is possible with calibre to scan and complete directly the needed tags for collections on the Reader -at least for SD cards, I have yet to succeed for the so-called "main memory"-, without using a library on the desktop. All the best. I will just see how long it lasts.

[Haesslich]

One thing to note - even if books AREN'T in Calibre's database, Calibre can still modify the metadata in a limited way; it can edit the "Tag" (Categories), the title of the document, or the author field. If you want to modify anything else, that'll involve importing it into Calibre again.

Just a nice, simple GUI-based way to modify the title shown on the reader (when the metadata shows something other than the file name).

[roger64]

Yes it seems calibre can modify tags "on the fly" for SD cards. I find this great!!. This is what I wrote in my last paragraph above. I did it, just trying my luck with the 2 Go SD card of my PRS-505 which contains 80% of my ebooks.

From within calibre (card and reader recognized), I opened my SD card library and just added tags (and only tags) for a lot of books. It worked!! If this lasts (and it looks like), this is the missing feature I had been looking for a long time.

I tried to do it also for the so-called "main memory" of my PRS-505, but quickly ran into small problems (probably a kind of mild database corruption which later prevented syncing) and had rather restore my files from a backup.

With a terminal, you also can use the calibre tool called ebook-meta to modify metadata. (see man ebook-meta)

For PDF files though, calibre does not implement the "subject" field you can find in the metadata of many PDF files. So when he finds one of these "subject" fields, he just treat it like anothe tag and add it to its "tag" field (at least with a two words subject).

This is not very convenient because I did not find how to get rid of these added "subject" tags using the command line. This -for me- is a faulty behaviour which could induce later some database problems if you are not aware of it.