MOBI format, Baen Books and Kindle questions.

[NormHart]

I’ve been reading this forum for a short time although I’ve been reading ebooks for several years in html and text formats from both Baen Books and PG on my PCs. I have looked at several ebook reader devices and decided on the Kindle 2 based on ease of use, availability of new books, and compatibility with my existing e-library (I am able to download PRC/Mobi formatted copies of my Baen books).

This decision lead to the discovery of the MobiPocket Reader which I downloaded and have been exploring. One of the first things I noticed was that apparently a large number of the Baen books (252 out of 296 files) did not include full metadata. I was unsure if this represented a failure of MobiPocket Reader or a problem with the files themselves. Today I downloaded Calibre and found that it had a similar problem with the files. So, I am assuming that older Baen files have issues with the metadata and I’ve been using the tools mobi2mobi.exe (win) and Mobi2Mobi_GUI.exe to update the Baen files’ metadata for my own use.

I did about thirty or forty books so far when I realized that there might be compatibility issues with the Kindle and that there seemed to be issues with the format of several metafile data fields. I hope you all can help clear up my concerns.

So questions;
1) Since there are apparent problems with the Baen metadata how do current Kindle users see Baen books? That is to say do you see and can you sort by the Author, Subject, and other fields?

There appear to be varying opinions as to how the Author(s) are entered in the MOBI format. Examining various source files I see “first_name last_name”, “last_name, first_name” and others; not to mention the question of how multiple authors are entered (most typically separated by an “&” although I’ve also seen the “;” used).. Exploring with MobiPocket Reader lead me to discover that it apparently has no capability to parse the author field and sorts based solely on the field’s alphabetical order without regard to first_name last_name order which is how the few Baen books I have with working metadata author fields are organized.
2) Is there a generally accepted format for the Author metadata field?
3) How does the Kindle sort on this field since they claim to be able to sort by the author’s last name?
4) Does the Kindle parse the Author field and extract the last name or are the Kindle files organized in some other format? (my understanding is that Kindle’s AWZ format is a super or sub set of the MOBI format)
5) How can I (or is it even possible to) organize the author field to permit both the Kindle and MobiPocket to recognize secondary authors in the author field?

Well I have about ten-thousand more questions but that will do for a start.

Thanks in advance for any answers.

Norm

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by NormHart

So, I am assuming that older Baen files have issues with the metadata

Yes, the older Baen mobipocket books were created without metadata.

I'll have to leave all your other questions to Kindle authors, except to note that the Mobipocket format does allow for multiple copies of the Author metadata, so if the meta data is written correctly, the Kindle should have access to all the author names without any clever parsing.

Unfortunately, I don't think there's any standard for how the mobipocket author field should be formatted.

[wallcraft]

I always download the LIT (MS Reader) version of Baen's books. You can convert them to MOBI using Calibre (I have not tested this), or explode them to an OEB (HTML, IMAGES, .opf metafile) using ConvertLIT GUI and then convert to MOBI using Windows MobiPocket Creator Publishers edition (point it at the .opf file). Both Calibre and Creator allow you to edit the metadata, but it is usually better already in the LIT version than the MOBI. If the original PRC did not have metadata, then the LIT version will probably also have larger images than the PRC.

I'm pretty sure First Last and Last, First both work on the Kindle and get sorted on Last. I don't think there is any standard for multiple authors. Last, First; Last, First. Would be my guess at the way to do this.

I see that pdurrant suggested multiple author entries. This should be possible with Creator, but I'm nor sure how Calibre handles multiple authors.

[Strether]

I download all Baen books in RTF format and put them through Book Designer and then Mobipocket creator. When I first started buying Baen's books, I had a Sony PRS-500, so when I got the Kindle, I was able to put the books back in BD and make them in the new format without much trouble.

Most of the time the processing through BD goes really fast, but occasionally you get a book with weird formatting issues and you have to spend a bit of time. Worth it to me.

Jim

[slayda]

Don't remember where I picked this up but using Mobipocket Creator I somewhere picked up that the authors and multiple authors should be listed as "last, first" & "last, first; last, First".

Don't have any idea about the Kindle way of parsing authors or if it does.

[srmalloy]

Originally Posted by slayda

Don't remember where I picked this up but using Mobipocket Creator I somewhere picked up that the authors and multiple authors should be listed as "last, first" & "last, first; last, First".

Don't have any idea about the Kindle way of parsing authors or if it does.

I've been collecting the chapters of Ceres that L. Neil Smith has been putting up each week into a single HTML document; when I used Calibre to set the metadata for the Author field and convert it to MobiPocket format, having the Author field set to "L. Neil Smith" made it show up on my Kindle in the 'L's; setting the field to "Smith, L. Neil" made it show up correctly with the 'S's.