Kindle Firmware 5.9.2 Calibre Metadata

[nchall114]

Anyone else having issues with 5.9.2 not showing the date under the title on the Kindle for news recipes anymore?

This is the case with a 7th Generation Paperwhite running 5.9.2, but not with a 6th Generation running 5.8.10 so thought it might be due to a change on Amazon's side not Calibre's.

Thanks.

[kovidgoyal]

If you send periodical MOBI files by email, amazon often reformats them. So send them via USB connection to ensure that the Kindle will see them as periodicals rather than books.

[nchall114]

These are all emailed periodicals, and they show up as personal docs, which isn't the issue. The issue is when they're listed on the Kindle they show the title of the periodical fine, but they used to show the date in smaller font right under the title and now it just says "calibre" under the title. I feel like it's not populating from the correct metadata field in the recipe.

[kovidgoyal]

As far as I know, kindle's only show dates for files they recognize as periodicals, and emailling periodicals causes them to stop being recognized as peridiocals because amazon re-processes them. So as I said before, use USB, it's the only reliable way.

[nchall114]

On 5.8.x emailed .mobi recipe files show the date under the resulting .pobi files when they show up on the Kindle. These files are located under "docs" not "periodicals".

On 5.8.x manually transferred .mobi recipe files are located under "periodicals" and ordered by date as expected.

On 5.9.x emailed .mobi recipe files show the author "calibre" under the resulting .pobi files on the Kindle. These files are located under "docs" not "periodicals".

On 5.9.x manually transferred .mobi recipe files are located under "periodicals" and ordered by date as expected.

So it follows that Amazon changed how emailed .mobi files are handled in 5.9.x to the detriment of Calibre recipe files. Either stay on 5.8.x if you can, manually transfer, or send feedback to Amazon kindle-feedback@amazon.com notifying them that you're unhappy with the change.

Kovid--Is there anything that can be done with the metadata on the Calibre side in the interim that will allow for emailed files to populate the date field rather than the creator field?

Thanks.

[kovidgoyal]

You can use a metadata plugboard to put the date in the authors field. That should fool amazon.

[bobbysteel]

This works great with ebook-meta on the command line I discovered

[jma1]

I've noticed the same behavior on my Kindle Paperwhite software version 5.9.2.0.1. My workaround on the the Kindle (admittedly not perfect) is to open the document info box from the all items list by pressing on the vertical ellipsis at right side of document. The heading in the info box is by example 'New York Post Wed Jan 10 2018'. From there I can open the newsfeed document after confirming its date or delete it or just close the box.

The problem with usb connecting the Kindle as workaround is that calibre then automatically puts the latest version of each of my scheduled newsfeeds on the kindle including any that I have read and deleted from the device (I keep one version of each newsfeed in calibre). So then I have to do cleanup on Kindle once unconnected to determine which feeds were read and delete them again from the device.

Is there a way to include in a recipie a command that sets the document author field to be the feed date? I am not a programmer...

[kovidgoyal]

You can disable automatic syncing of news todevices via USB in Preferences->Behavior and you can put arbitrary metadata in any field when sending to device using Preferences->Metadataplugboards

[bobbysteel]

If you can use a command line, this is an easy fix. I have weekly scripts for all my important news sources so I use this:

coverdate=$(date +"%d %b")
/Applications/calibre.app/Contents/MacOS/ebook-meta -a "$coverdate" "$finished"

Where $finished is the filename