How to fix: Search This Book & About This Book oddities with Calibre AZW3s on Voyage

[sun surfer]

Some AZW3 books sent from Calibre to the Voyage do two strange things - when pulling up a book's menu on the home screen "Search This Book" is greyed out, & when first opening a book "About This Book" doesn't pop up automatically. Some books work fine while others do this, and the two strange things always occur together. One book did this and then, after putzing around with it in Calibre for another reason before reloading it to the Voyage, it worked fine, but I can't remember what exactly I did and I haven't been able to replicate it.

I've generally been doing the same things for each book if not always in the same order. Basically, I-

-Import book and fix metadata, including mobi-asin
-Embed metadata/convert
-Use Quality Check to fix asin
-Add to Voyage

What's causing this to happen?

[kovidgoyal]

Almost certainly the asin.

[sun surfer]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Almost certainly the asin.

Thanks Kovid. If that's the case then I'm not sure how to fix this, or what I'm doing differently for some to do this and others not. Other asin-necessary Voyage features work even when these don't, such as goodreads integration and cover downloading (and, conversely, sometimes these were working when I was still trying to get goodreads integration to work properly).

Concerning the asin in these books, I've tried-

-re-using the Quality Check to fix the asin again
-embedding metadata with the asin again
-mixing up the order of some of the pertinent workflow
-converting to start fresh with a new format copy
-starting all over by deleting the book and then re-importing the pre-calibre file

[kovidgoyal]

I haven't the foggiest, sorry. I stopped using all asin dependent features on my Kindles a long time ago. I refuse to take a stroll in Amazon's walled garden.

[HarryT]

If "Search this book" is greyed out, that can be because the book hasn't been indexed. Check and make sure that nothing's got stuck indexing.

[sun surfer]

Thanks Harry - that's at least part of the problem. I've checked and all the books that do this haven't been indexed on the Voyage.

After working to correct it I can eventually get all of the "Search This Book"s to work, though by sometimes strange means. Some will work after re-downloading and giving them time to index, while others will work, oddly enough, only after using the internet on the Voyage (such as by going to goodreads through the "g"). About This Book on first opening is still not working on any of these.

There seems to be a distinct difference here - books that never had these problems seem to index and are ready basically right away while these books need more time or special goading for Search This Book to work while About This Book on first open still doesn't happen.

[sun surfer]

I've found another strange quirk with this while doing something unrelated. If it's a book I'm deleting from the Voyage and reloading, I can save the original .azw3f file and add only it back manually with the reloaded book and then About This Book on first opening will work! I'm baffled. It doesn't seem to make sense.

However with that I can fashion a sort of odd ghetto workaround to make everything work, involving adding a random old file to make a new book feature work and going to goodreads to make a book search work.

I would still like to understand why some books require this for these things to work and others don't. If it's something I can fix about the book while it's in Calibre that'd be preferable to the workaround.

[eschwartz]

Search This Bbook relies on the Search Indexes in the system/ folder.
On my Kindle Touch, books usually take a little while to index, but I've never had a book fail to index after a while.
Usually when downloading from Amazon, a book is immediately searchable -- I suspect Amazon has pre-made indexes.


As for About This Book, I don't seem to have that on my Kindle but I know other stuff like X-Ray, About The Author, etc. depend on (are sourced by) files in the ancillary *.sdr/ folder, which will eventually be downloaded from Amazon's servers. calibre makes no effort to create these.
Perhaps About This Book does the same thing.

I believe I heard mention about a new feature that shows metadata -- series, comments, etc. -- without needing to go through the Kindle Store. Is that what you are talking about?
I wouldn't be at all surprised if Amazon decided to use yet more random data files rather than the ebook metadata.

[sun surfer]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

I believe I heard mention about a new feature that shows metadata -- series, comments, etc. -- without needing to go through the Kindle Store. Is that what you are talking about?
I wouldn't be at all surprised if Amazon decided to use yet more random data files rather than the ebook metadata.

Hi eschwartz , About This Book is a feature that pops up when I first open a new book. It gives me a link to the book in the store, an option to click and mark the book as Currently Reading on goodreads, a link to settings and a link to feedback. I can also navigate to it anytime through the Kindle menu.

It's not really that important to have it pop up when a new book first opens but still nice and since it always happens when the book search won't work they may be related. Though I did chance upon the workaround to make everything work, I've not been bothering with the extra steps of making About This Book on first open work if it doesn't automatically like it's supposed to. I'm happy to just have the book searches work though it would be nice to know what's sometimes causing these thing not to work right in the first place.