How to prevent adding tags?

Piper65 · 01-20-2011, 04:06 PM

Hi,
Is there an easy way to prevent Calibre from adding tags when adding new books to the database?
thanks
Don

Maggie-Me · 01-20-2011, 04:25 PM

Delete them... both individually or bulk edit using clear all tags

Piper65 · 01-20-2011, 04:29 PM

I do, but it's a PITA... I'd rather that Caliber just never imported them.
Don

kovidgoyal · 01-20-2011, 04:37 PM

You can turn off reading metadata as a whole, but not tags individually

Maggie-Me · 01-20-2011, 04:42 PM

Hmm I can turn off when I look up MetaData by adjusting the plugin under MetaData Download Plug Ins, is that what you are looking for?

user_none · 01-20-2011, 05:00 PM

No the tags being added are part of the books internal metadata. You can disable the formats metadata reader or the reading metadata on import option.

Worldwalker · 01-20-2011, 05:44 PM

Is it just me, or have certain publishers, to remain nameless because they post on MR, decided to take advantage of calibre's tagging system by attaching a dozen or more tags to each book (including their name, website, etc.)? This has mostly started in the past few months. I'm not talking about potentially useful tags here, mind you -- I'm talking about blatant advertising.

Note to said publishers, should you happen to be reading this: calibre's tag system is not, despite how it may appear, your private advertising mechanism. It's not any kind of advertising mechanism at all. You are not, in fact, driving me to buy additional books from your company. Instead, I have stopped buying books from you unless I can get them nowhere else, and on those occasions I do buy one, I wipe out all the tags without even reading them, because I know right off that they'll be either useless (the author's name) or detrimental (your website, etc.).

user_none · 01-20-2011, 05:48 PM

@Worldwalker, They're not talking advantage of calibre's tagging system. Tags are a part of the EPUB spec.

DoctorOhh · 01-20-2011, 05:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Is it just me, or have certain publishers, to remain nameless because they post on MR, decided to take advantage of calibre's tagging system by attaching a dozen or more tags to each book (including their name, website, etc.)?

I may be mistaken, but the metadata Subject (AKA tags) is not calibre's creation or domain.

Worldwalker · 01-20-2011, 06:26 PM

I know tags are part of the epub spec. But it's only been fairly recently that they're being used for advertising, and by and large, calibre is the primary ebook organizing program that uses those tags. That's why my "is it just me?" though ... curiosity as to whether this particular bit of publisher misbehavior is driven by an attempt to spam calibre users, or just general-purpose asshattery.

CWatkinsNash · 01-20-2011, 06:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Is it just me, or have certain publishers, to remain nameless because they post on MR, decided to take advantage of calibre's tagging system by attaching a dozen or more tags to each book (including their name, website, etc.)?

As others have said, that's not really it. The biggest offenders I've found are on Smashwords, not necessarily authors that use MR. It reminds me very much of keyword spamming in webpage headers. Same awful technique. Whenever I put in three or four Smashwords books into Calibre, I'm guaranteed to have 30 or more new tags in the tag browser. Some use the names of top authors in their genre, or even titles of bestsellers. It's bizarre and I'd love for someone to put a stop to it. Do we need to come up with "white hat" policy for ebook keywording?

theducks · 01-20-2011, 08:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

I know tags are part of the epub spec. But it's only been fairly recently that they're being used for advertising, and by and large, calibre is the primary ebook organizing program that uses those tags. That's why my "is it just me?" though ... curiosity as to whether this particular bit of publisher misbehavior is driven by an attempt to spam calibre users, or just general-purpose asshattery.

ww
Take a look at the Library of congress/catalog boilerplate in a deadtree book
tag=card catalog section
Duoh! why do I need Fiction when the sub-category is Science Fiction
Have you ever looked for a book by "British-Author" (I'm a yank)?
The (lame) meta-data may be in the OPF or HTML
Calibre just converts what is there

Worldwalker · 01-20-2011, 09:22 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by CWatkinsNash

As others have said, that's not really it. The biggest offenders I've found are on Smashwords, not necessarily authors that use MR. It reminds me very much of keyword spamming in webpage headers. Same awful technique. Whenever I put in three or four Smashwords books into Calibre, I'm guaranteed to have 30 or more new tags in the tag browser. Some use the names of top authors in their genre, or even titles of bestsellers. It's bizarre and I'd love for someone to put a stop to it. Do we need to come up with "white hat" policy for ebook keywording?

Is that set up by the author or the publisher/seller?

And I totally agree. It's spamming, and it's annoying. As I said, I've taken to stripping all tags because the majority are spam.

Not putting the name of the author (there's a field for that), the URL of the website, the title of the book (there's a field for that too), etc., into tags would be a good start on best practices. Of course, the people doing this know that's what they're doing; that's why they're doing it. How they can be convinced not to (aside from, y'know, not buying their books) is another matter entirely.

CWatkinsNash · 01-20-2011, 09:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Is that set up by the author or the publisher/seller?
(snip)
How they can be convinced not to (aside from, y'know, not buying their books) is another matter entirely.

Most of the ones I've gotten were indies, so the author was responsible. But I wondered if they are being encouraged to do so by the upload interface on Smashwords, so I went to the site and looked. In the tagging section of the upload process it says:

Quote:

As you type each keyword, suggestions for common tags used by other Smashwords authors may pop up below the field. You may click one to add it to your book's tags. Tagging this way creates 'folksonomy' that will make it easier for readers to find books about subjects they're interested in. (Tags may contain letters, numbers and spaces.)

So, they start typing and naturally add every suggestion that pops up. And this is just Smashwords. For all I know, there could be a "how to self-publish" blog (or a dozen such sites) or something that's telling people to do this, or to use tags for marketing their sites. Just like web page marketing. I mean, if you think about SEO, what used to be acceptable practice is now considered grey hat or even black hat tactics. And it's similar in that they are pushing their product to multiple sites, which would be the equivalent of multiple search engines.

I don't know how to get them to stop, except to point out that it doesn't work and it's really annoying. The worst is the URLs and addresses, but equally annoying is the "20 different ways to say paranormal romance" crap. I don't mind if an author sticks on 10 tags if they are relevant, but some seem to have no clue what's relevant.

Worldwalker · 01-20-2011, 10:54 PM

Well, for starters, maybe Smashwords should have a search system that's independent of the tags in the epub file.

That's one of the reasons I don't use eBay as much as I could, by the way: the "not" crap in the titles. You'll get something labeled "metric combination wrench set not pliers not screwdriver" because they're trying to get everyone searching for "pliers" or "screwdriver" as well as the people looking to buy wrenches, and despite supposedly banning that practice, ebay doesn't actually do jack. So I try to search for, say, pliers, and I get twice as many wrenches showing up thanks to that crap.

I won't even go into the SEO idiots; I get to deal with them in person, too. *sigh* They're firmly convinced that not only are they smarter than Google's building full of geniuses, but that they can outsmart said geniuses, and the algorithms produced by the same, with some technique that was lame when someone thought it up two years ago.

The funniest, though (one I found, not built a site for!) was someone who had this insane idea that if he hid every possible porn-related term in his pages, he'd get hits from people looking for porn. Which, even if he did ... what good would that do him? Nobody is going to be looking for porn, find his site, and zip up their pants and buy car parts! Yeah, he was selling car parts. I was there looking for a brake light bulb. I couldn't understand why his pages loaded so slowly on my broadband connection, so I looked at the source ... and there were his thousands of keywords. Some of them beyond twisted. Nobody searching for that stuff is gonna be buying car parts instead!

01-20-2011, 04:06 PM	#1
Piper65 Junior Member Posts: 5 Karma: 10 Join Date: Dec 2010 Location: Canada Device: kindle	How to prevent adding tags? Hi, Is there an easy way to prevent Calibre from adding tags when adding new books to the database? thanks Don

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01-20-2011, 04:25 PM	#2
Maggie-Me Zealot Posts: 146 Karma: 2594 Join Date: May 2009 Device: Kindle PW,Sony 700, Sony 950 (Daily Edition),Nook Color,iPad	Delete them... both individually or bulk edit using clear all tags

01-20-2011, 04:29 PM	#3
Piper65 Junior Member Posts: 5 Karma: 10 Join Date: Dec 2010 Location: Canada Device: kindle	I do, but it's a PITA... I'd rather that Caliber just never imported them. Don

01-20-2011, 04:37 PM	#4
kovidgoyal creator of calibre Posts: 43,858 Karma: 22666666 Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Mumbai, India Device: Various	You can turn off reading metadata as a whole, but not tags individually

01-20-2011, 04:42 PM	#5
Maggie-Me Zealot Posts: 146 Karma: 2594 Join Date: May 2009 Device: Kindle PW,Sony 700, Sony 950 (Daily Edition),Nook Color,iPad	Hmm I can turn off when I look up MetaData by adjusting the plugin under MetaData Download Plug Ins, is that what you are looking for?

01-20-2011, 05:00 PM	#6
user_none Sigil & calibre developer Posts: 2,488 Karma: 1063785 Join Date: Jan 2009 Location: Florida, USA Device: Nook STR	No the tags being added are part of the books internal metadata. You can disable the formats metadata reader or the reading metadata on import option.

01-20-2011, 05:44 PM	#7
Worldwalker Curmudgeon Posts: 3,085 Karma: 722357 Join Date: Feb 2010 Device: PRS-505	Is it just me, or have certain publishers, to remain nameless because they post on MR, decided to take advantage of calibre's tagging system by attaching a dozen or more tags to each book (including their name, website, etc.)? This has mostly started in the past few months. I'm not talking about potentially useful tags here, mind you -- I'm talking about blatant advertising. Note to said publishers, should you happen to be reading this: calibre's tag system is not, despite how it may appear, your private advertising mechanism. It's not any kind of advertising mechanism at all. You are not, in fact, driving me to buy additional books from your company. Instead, I have stopped buying books from you unless I can get them nowhere else, and on those occasions I do buy one, I wipe out all the tags without even reading them, because I know right off that they'll be either useless (the author's name) or detrimental (your website, etc.).

01-20-2011, 05:48 PM	#8
user_none Sigil & calibre developer Posts: 2,488 Karma: 1063785 Join Date: Jan 2009 Location: Florida, USA Device: Nook STR	@Worldwalker, They're not talking advantage of calibre's tagging system. Tags are a part of the EPUB spec.

01-20-2011, 06:26 PM	#10
Worldwalker Curmudgeon Posts: 3,085 Karma: 722357 Join Date: Feb 2010 Device: PRS-505	I know tags are part of the epub spec. But it's only been fairly recently that they're being used for advertising, and by and large, calibre is the primary ebook organizing program that uses those tags. That's why my "is it just me?" though ... curiosity as to whether this particular bit of publisher misbehavior is driven by an attempt to spam calibre users, or just general-purpose asshattery.

01-20-2011, 10:54 PM	#15
Worldwalker Curmudgeon Posts: 3,085 Karma: 722357 Join Date: Feb 2010 Device: PRS-505	Well, for starters, maybe Smashwords should have a search system that's independent of the tags in the epub file. That's one of the reasons I don't use eBay as much as I could, by the way: the "not" crap in the titles. You'll get something labeled "metric combination wrench set not pliers not screwdriver" because they're trying to get everyone searching for "pliers" or "screwdriver" as well as the people looking to buy wrenches, and despite supposedly banning that practice, ebay doesn't actually do jack. So I try to search for, say, pliers, and I get twice as many wrenches showing up thanks to that crap. I won't even go into the SEO idiots; I get to deal with them in person, too. sigh They're firmly convinced that not only are they smarter than Google's building full of geniuses, but that they can outsmart said geniuses, and the algorithms produced by the same, with some technique that was lame when someone thought it up two years ago. The funniest, though (one I found, not built a site for!) was someone who had this insane idea that if he hid every possible porn-related term in his pages, he'd get hits from people looking for porn. Which, even if he did ... what good would that do him? Nobody is going to be looking for porn, find his site, and zip up their pants and buy car parts! Yeah, he was selling car parts. I was there looking for a brake light bulb. I couldn't understand why his pages loaded so slowly on my broadband connection, so I looked at the source ... and there were his thousands of keywords. Some of them beyond twisted. Nobody searching for that stuff is gonna be buying car parts instead!