Forcing the Reader to update title/author

[pepak]

Is there some way to force a Reader to update its title/author data for a book while retaining everything else (especially the id)? All methods that I know lead to a generation of new id:

- modify the book file's creation date and/or size and/or filename
- delete the book's record from the cache XML
- modify date/size/name of the book's record in the cache XML

(I have written a tool which generates collections, but I can't set title and author - except maybe by decoding them from each particular file, which I don't want to do - I would have to write a parser for each filetype, for one thing...)

[kovidgoyal]

Set the title and author directly in the XML database.

[pepak]

That's what I would rather avoid, because

Originally Posted by pepak

I would have to write a parser for each filetype, for one thing...

[kovidgoyal]

Then the answer is no. I thought you meant you wanted to change the collection information for books already on the reader.

[pepak]

Updating the collection information for books that are on the Reader is easy and my application does that. It's just that with my usual "modus operandi", it means plugging the Reader in, uploading a book, unplugging the Reader (so that it creates the metadata), replugging it, running my application, unplugging. I was hoping for a way that would avoid the unplug-replug, but I am certainly not going to write a parser for all supported ebook formats just to achieve it.

[kovidgoyal]

Why dont you just use the commandline metadata parsers in calibre?

[pepak]

Because I didn't realize they are there :-)

Btw., it would be quite useful if their output was standardized. E.g. LRF-META will output:

Title: An Awesome Book

While PDF-META will output:

Title    : An Awesome Book

Of course I can parse it easily enough, so no big deal, just a tiny little annoyance :-)

I'll see about adding these calls to my utility and if it works, see about updating it into a releasable state.