Mantano reader metadata problems

[dacrayzblaze1]

I use mantano reader premium on an Asus TF101.

I also edit my metadata in Calibre.

My problem is the following: I will edit my metadata in Calibre and it register in Mantano reader.

Does anyone have any solutions?

[Adoby]

If you change metadata in calibre you have to delete and import the changed book again in Mantano.

I send books to Mantano on my Xoom in four steps:

1. First I save the books to a shared folder on my NAS, used as a device. I have a custom field that I use to store the name of the future collection in Mantano. Almost like genre. I use this field to create subfolders for the books. I also use a plugboard to change authors to author_sort and add series information to the title.

2. Then I use a sync app (FolderSync) to sync a folder on my Xoom with the folder with books created in the first step. The sync is done automatically every hour, on the hour, if my Xoom is charging. Or on demand.

3. After that I do an import in Mantano, and import all the books. If any books have changed name, series information, author_sort or subfolder, then it is missing as far as Mantano sees, and there is a new book to import instead. I delete the missing books from Mantano and import the new/changed. Unchanged books that Mantano has imported earlier are ignored.

4. After the import I filter out all books without collections in Mantano, and assign them to collections. Works fine manually if there only are a few changed books. To speed this up, if there are many changed or added books, I can also open whole subfolders and add all the books in a subfolder to one of Mantanos collections.

I currently have around 4 000 books in Mantano, in 40 different collections.

The only problem I have is if I have updated metadata other than author_sort, title, subfolder or series. The tags for instance. Then changes will not be shown in Mantano. The only workaround I have found is to periodically delete and import all books again. Since I have the sync app and subfolders for genres/collections this is relatively easy to do. It takes less than 10 minutes to reassign all the books to collections based on the subfolders. But I loose annotations and other information registered in Mantano. I also loose this information from changed books. I don't mind, since I don't really use those features, but I suspect that this may be a problem for others.

It would be very nice if you could ask Mantano to re-read metadata and if you could have Mantano to automatically assign books to collections during re-read of metadata and import, perhaps using the tags. One way could be to associate each collection in Mantano with a set of tags. If a book has tags that match, then the book is added to that collection. If you could have Mantano re-read metadata data then you could keep annotations and bookmarks and so on.

[dacrayzblaze1]

even when I've changed metadata and I reimport the book in to Mantano, it doesn't read th changed metadata. I was wondering if there was anyway to make the metadata file and the ebook file not be separate

[Adoby]

It seems that Mantano only read the metadata once, when the book is imported the first time. The only way to update the metadata in Mantano is to delete the book entry in Mantano, and then import the book again.

[dacrayzblaze1]

I see. That's annoying. I think I have done that before for teh metadata to still be read incorrectly. For example. I put my whole library on mantano reader on my phone, and the metadata still isn't changed after I edited it.

Mantano reader is pissing me off with this. i can't edit the metadata there. (Even though the manual INSISTS THAT I CAN), and I've tried a lot of other readers for the android and I didn't like any of them.

-_-

What else can I do?

[Adoby]

You can make sure the metadata is correct, before you import the book to Mantano. Or do as I described above, to minimize the inconvenience. However, if you update the metadata from Mantano, then it is changed ok. But only the copy on the device. Not the metadata in the Calibre library, obviously.

Yes, this is annoying. It would be very nice if you could update books without having to remove them and reimport. Obviously if the book change name, then Mantano can no longer keep track of the book.

But I still think Mantano is the best ereader app I have tested.

I also know that representatives from Mantano seems to keep an eye on this site. Perhaps they can add a metadata rescan?

[dacrayzblaze1]

How to make sure if it's correct if I've already changed it in calibre, delete itoff the tablet and then put it back in and doesn't pop up correctly anyways?

[Adoby]

As long as you do a correct save to disc or send to device, the metadata should be correct.

If you manually copy the books from inside the Calibre library then you commit a grave sin and the immediate punishment is bad metadata. (Calibre updates the metadata in the books only when you save to disc, convert or send to device. The books in the library typically don't have correct metadata. The updated metadata is stored in metadata.db, not in the books in the library.)

[dacrayzblaze1]

Ah! Thanks. I have been enlightened.