Add reoccurring newspaper issues with mainy same fields

[halloleo]

Weekly I add a new issue of a newspaper epub where author, publisher, tags and language stay the same.

Unfortunately they are nor correctly set in the ePUB's metadata, so every week after adding the issue (via `calibredb add`) I copy-paste in the UI the metadata from last week's issue. Tedious!

Is there a way to automate this? Maybe with an "add template"? Or with an template .OPF file next to the epub file on import?

Thanks for any pointer!

[kovidgoyal]

You can set the title/author/tags/languages via options to the calibredb add command. Or you can use the ebook-meta command to fix them in the epub before adding.

[halloleo]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

You can set the title/author/tags/languages via options to the calibredb add command.

Thanks Kovid.

Any way to set the publisher with calibre add?

[halloleo]

Hi Kovid,

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

You can set the title/author/tags/languages via options to the calibredb add command.

I now have tried setting author/tags/languages on the add command like this:

calibredb --with-library http://localhost:8282/ add --authors=Multiple --tags=germany,news --languages=deu -1 <dir-with-pdf+epub>

(My calibre server runs as part of the UI calibre and in Preferences→Sharing over the net→Advanced I have checked Enable Local Write.)

The book with the PDF and ePUB files is added to the library (so the Enable Local Write works), but the added book does not have "Multiple" in the Authors field. Why's that and how can I fix it?

Many thanks for any help.

[kovidgoyal]

Works fine for me. And you can simply use ebook-meta to set the metadata in the files before adding them.

[halloleo]

For me it only works when I add an individual file (say a PDF), but when I add PDF, mobi and epub in a folder with the -1 option, the author field on the book does not get set from the --author option, but is taken from one of the files in the folder.

[kovidgoyal]

Yes when you add many files, the option does not apply, metadata is read from the files, so as I said use ebook-meta to set the metadata in the files before adding. Or use calibredb set_metadata to set the metadata after adding.

[halloleo]

Thanks, calibredb set_metadata works well for me.

However it is slightly cumbersome to parse the new book ID from the natural language response of calibredb add in order to use it with calibredb set_metadata... But once the parsing is in place it works reliably. :-)