Why doesn't the Sony eBook Library software allow you to edit metadata?

[morpheus]

Files downloaded from Gutenberg and many other places have zero or incorrect metadata so they have no authors and titles displayed on the Reader, instead displaying a cryptic filename.

Why doesn't the Sony ebook Library software allow me to edit the metadata right there on my PC? Wouldn't that be the most effective method?

It's not such a big issue for me, but when my wife wants to read an Agatha Christie mystery, I have to tell here it's 'masac11' rather than 'The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie'. It makes the whole user experience somewhat subpar.

It seems extremely lame that Sony left the feature out.

Morph

[JSWolf]

O you could look in the E-Books section for The Mysterious Affair at Styles and download it already properly formatted for the 500/505.

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11430

Actually, for text there is no way to add metadata to it. But if you were to convert it to LRF using Librps500 or Book Designer or to RTF you could have proper metadata.

[NatCh]

It's one of the whopping 2 Christie titles that are PD, so you're in luck.

It's here: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11430

And the other one, The Secret Adversary is here: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=17993

Enjoy!

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Actually, for text there is no way to add metadata to it. But if you were to convert it to LRF using Librps500 or Book Designer or to RTF you could have proper metadata.

That's not quite true, if you use libprs500 to transfer books to the reader, you can edit metadata for txt files as well.

[NatCh]

That's right, you kind of add that info onto the outside with lipprs500, don't you?

[kovidgoyal]

yeah it goes into the media.xml file on the reader that it uses to create the list of books.

[austintraveler]

Kovidgoyal - libprs500 is a wonderful program. I am having difficulty with setting the metadata. I have about 600 books on a Sony 4gb memory stick in a PRS-505 and I take several hours setting the author names and book titles just the way I want them using libprs500. The problem is that if I do any of several things: like removing the memory stick, rebooting the ebook, or using the Sony Connect software - the author names and book titles revert to whatever they were before I ever edited them. Is there some way to make these changes permeanent?

[kovidgoyal]

You shouldn't use both the sony software and libprs500 to manage books on your reader.

The way libprs500 manages metadata on the device is by writing your custom metadata to a XML file on the reader which the reader uses to present the list of books. Unfortunately, if you reboot the device, remove the card, etc, this file is replaced by an automatically generated list of books that uses metadata from the files themselves, causing you to lose your changes. If you read only LRF format books, one possible solution is to first edit the metadata in the libprs500 library view, and then upload the books to the device. The newly uploaded books will have the metadata in both the book file and the XML file, so the metadata should persist.

NOTE; You should use a recent version of libprs500 for the above.

[morpheus]

Here we are over six months later. I just upgraded to the new Sony v2.5 software and they still haven't added this feature. It just boggles my mind that no Sony eBook product manager has never sat down and figured this out, unless they want to discourage people from loading their own texts.

Ironically I spoke to a Sony rep in the airport the other day who was demonstrating the PRS-505. I told them I thought the PRS-500 was a nice device, let down by substandard software support from Sony. I've seen exactly the same problem with the Vaio laptops we've purchased at the office, where Sony never release updates to fix bugs in their drivers.