Easist way to modify IMP books internal header info?

[askyn]

Hi all ( ill bet you all are getting tired of seeing my posts by this point )

I have another question for those that have gone thru all this before.

What is the easist way to edit a IMP file to change the author / title / catagory information?

WITHOUT using ebookwise librarian. ( If install it after epub and all the other addons etc things get messed up )

Just looking for a quick and easy way, mainly so I can change / add the catagory field on books so that they are sort on the 1150 the way id like.

Thank you.

[nrapallo]

EDIT: I've now written a little dos command line utility in Perl called impmeta available here.

In our wiki pages, you will find IMP software, which lists

Imp Librarian - windows - to catalog a collection of .IMP files and produce .csv files for import into MS Excel or equiv.

With it you can edit selected .IMPs (I found some files edited by Imp Librarian that could not be edited properly afterwards with GEBLibrarian - use with extreme caution & use on backups until you're sure this works for you!)

Also, I've been meaning to write an impedit utility for some time now (EDIT: see above), but have been distracted writing plugins for some program here ). It would be written in perl and have a similiar GUI interface to Mobi2IMP/PDFRead. (btw, that GUI was the brain child of ashkulz; I just copied it!)

In essence, the .imp ebook has fields after the first 48 bytes that are null byte terminated (dot represents that 0 byte):

ID . Category . Subcategory . Title . LAuthorname . MAuthorname . FAuthorname .

The only problem editing these directly with a hex/binary editor is that if the length changes for any field, the size of this header record in the imp file must be recalculated along with the offset to the .RES TOC entries. Not hard, but will take some time to code and perfect. I'll look at this soon, if ashkulz doesn't beat me to the punch.

For more information, see IMP and the detailed reverse-engineering work done by Jeffrey Kraus-yao in 2002 here.

If you promise to not get tired asking questions, I promise to not get tired answering them...

[askyn]

Originally Posted by nrapallo

If you promise to not get tired asking questions, I promise to not get tired answering them...

Thans not a problem, im sure ill have more questions then answers for a long time.

[ashkulz]

Looks like I'll have to add a new command-line utility called 'impmeta' to ebookutils ... expect to see it in a release tomorrow.

[askyn]

Originally Posted by ashkulz

Looks like I'll have to add a new command-line utility called 'impmeta' to ebookutils ... expect to see it in a release tomorrow.

cool .. with maybe a gui wrapper in the future? ( hey a guy can wish cannt he ? )

woot =)

[ashkulz]

Originally Posted by askyn

cool .. with maybe a gui wrapper in the future? ( hey a guy can wish cannt he ? )

don't look for a GUI wrapper from me ... if you want to contribute one, I'm willing to integrate it

[derrell]

It wouldn't be too hard to add impmeta to the list of things that the gui I've been tinkering with can call. It is just a front end for several other tools anyway.

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by ashkulz

Looks like I'll have to add a new command-line utility called 'impmeta' to ebookutils ... expect to see it in a release tomorrow.

It should also allow the name of the .RES directory (and thus its length) to be changed; as a default, use the filename.

I have so many Lit2sb .imp conversions that ALL have 'o_sb' as their .RES directory name. This is the name you see (given) to the folder that gets exploded on the memory card! I can never find which 'o_sb' is the one I'm looking for.

The reader's internal os allows idential mutiple names and the only way to differentiate them is to look at the RSRC.INF; yeah, right, like I'm going to do that for 100+ titles...

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by derrell

It wouldn't be too hard to add impmeta to the list of things that the gui I've been tinkering with can call. It is just a front end for several other tools anyway.

I have some perl code that extracts the header info and stuff but doesn't allow the meta data to be edited via GUI. I can give you the starting point, if you would finish it off.

email me at 'nrapallo (at) yahoo (dot) ca'

[ashkulz]

Originally Posted by derrell

It wouldn't be too hard to add impmeta to the list of things that the gui I've been tinkering with can call. It is just a front end for several other tools anyway.

Do you have any plans of releasing the GUI in the near future? I'd prefer to delay the 0.9 release to include that ... maybe even call it 1.0

BTW, were you able to get the browsing under linux using eb1150 working? it worked for me with the later versions....

[derrell]

The gui is the one that I've working with for impfind. It sort of grew past just displaying imp files. It has some basic bookshelf management and will search for imp, lrf, mobi, zipped oeb and html books as well as epub and display some of the meta data for all of them. I need to change the name to something other than impfind now. As for releasing I'm in no hurry what I have now needs some serious cleaning up and I'm not real sure it will work under windows anymore. So waiting for the next release of ebook utils is not a problem.

As for the browsing haven't tried it yet with the newer versions. I think I'm still using 0.4. So I'm just a little behind the times.

[askyn]

Ill be waiting excitedly for these utilities for sure.

im not SURE its ImpLibrarian, but after using it to edit information on a selected batch of imp files, I dont seem to be able to load those files onto my 1150 ! ( for those intersted see the posting I made this morning (9/24/09) under impserv)

Not sure if its a problem with imp librarian or something that its done that imserv doesnt like etc.

so ill have to keep looking for a alternate way to edit that information.

thanks for all the help and suggestions tho!

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by askyn

Ill be waiting excitedly for these utilities for sure.

im not SURE its ImpLibrarian, but after using it to edit information on a selected batch of imp files, I dont seem to be able to load those files onto my 1150 ! ( for those intersted see the posting I made this morning (9/24/09) )

Not sure if its a problem with imp librarian or something that its done that imserv doesnt like etc.

so ill have to keep looking for a alternate way to edit that information.

thanks for all the help and suggestions tho!

It may be that Imp Librarian fails to recalculate the revised size of the fields header. Can you try editing a .imp using the same *length* for the fields, i.e. don't add/delete any letters, just replace existing ones.

I suspect that for this case it WILL work and maybe that's why Imp Librarian may work for some files.

[askyn]

ROFL ok.. imp librarian is way flaky and im going to drop using it for now.

reason?

It wont even open the shelf directory now were the imp files it edited last night are at !!

errors out with the error:

Runtime error '5'; invalid procedure call or argument

considering the only thing ive done with the books in that directory is a) copy them there b) edited them with imp librarian .. then c) tried to load them

I think imp librarian is a great concept program but has a few bugs.

[GeneS]

Originally Posted by askyn

ROFL ok.. imp librarian is way flaky and im going to drop using it for now.

reason?

It wont even open the shelf directory now were the imp files it edited last night are at !!

errors out with the error:

Runtime error '5'; invalid procedure call or argument

considering the only thing ive done with the books in that directory is a) copy them there b) edited them with imp librarian .. then c) tried to load them

I think imp librarian is a great concept program but has a few bugs.

Askyn and I seem to be running into each other in a number of threads.

I have not experienced any trouble seeing, transferring, or using .imp files that have been modified by ImpLibrarian. I am, however, going to stop using it in light of Askyn's experience.

I really do hope for a way (GUI?) to modify the header data so that I can quickly find a book once it's on my 1150. Thanks to those of you who have the knowledge and interest to work on making the 1150 more useable.