News item getting overwritten on Kindle

[partymonkey]

I have six issues of the economist (downloaded using a recipe) that I was trying to transfer to the Kindle 3. They are in MOBI format, and I changed the "Published Date" on each one of those to be the correct one for the issue.

I plugged in my Kindle to my PC, selected all issues and did "Send to device main memory". Only one issue remains on the device, even though the job log indicates that six issues are getting transferred.

What is happening, and I can't figure out why, is that the issue gets transferred to the Kindle with the following filename: "Economist, The_2011-3-25.mobi", in other words, the file is getting named w/ today's date appended to it, rather than the Published Date which is what I want. So, I believe the issues are overwriting each other.

I went to poke around in the Preferences, and I can't seem to find how to change this behavior.

Can anyone help me?

Thanks in advance.

[kovidgoyal]

Change the value in the Date column rather than the published column.

[partymonkey]

Thanks, Kovid. I goofed, I meant to say that I did change the Date column, not the Published Date.

What I see is:
Calibre library view: Date column shows the correct date, the one I set it to. (26-March-2011)
Calibre device view: Date column shows the date I transferred the file via USB using Calibre. (25-March-2011)
Kindle 3 "drive" on computer: Shows one issue under News, with the file name as per my prior post.
Kindle 3 screen: shows one issue, with the Date of when I downloaded the issue (24-March-2011, which was yesterday).

(I tried emailing the same issue that I transferred via USB. The emailed issue gets received into the Periodicals Back Issues on the Kindle, but it has the date that I originally downloaded the issue via the Recipe (24-March-2011))

Any thoughts?


PS. Additional info, I just looked at the .opf file and here's what I see:
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<package xmlns="http://www.idpf.org/2007/opf" unique-identifier="uuid_id">
<metadata xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlnspf="http://www.idpf.org/2007/opf">
<dc:identifier opf:scheme="calibre" id="calibre_id">115</dc:identifier>
<dc:identifier opf:scheme="uuid" id="uuid_id">5650ca96-a9dd-4b03-ba72-c7dbf5746bd5</dc:identifier>
<dc:title>The Economist</dc:title>
<dc:creator opf:file-as="calibre" opf:role="aut">calibre</dc:creator>
<dc:contributor opf:file-as="calibre" opf:role="bkp">calibre (0.7.50) [http://calibre-ebook.com]</dc:contributor>
<dc:date>2011-03-24T06:00:00+00:00</dc:date>
<dc:description>&lt;p class="description"&gt;Global news and current affairs from a European perspective.&lt;/p&gt;</dc:description>
<dcublisher>calibre</dcublisher>
<dc:language>en</dc:language>
<dc:subject>News</dc:subject>
<dc:subject>The Economist</dc:subject>
<meta content="0" name="calibre:rating"/>
<meta content="2011-03-26T06:00:00+00:00" name="calibre:timestamp"/>
<meta content="Economist, The" name="calibre:title_sort"/>
</metadata>
<guide>
<reference href="cover.jpg" type="cover" title="Cover"/>
</guide>
</package>

So the Date column that I see on the Calibre Library seems to be calibre:timestamp. The date metadata being sent to the Kindle is dc:date, and I don't know why the filename on a USB transfer is getting concatenated w/ the date of the transfer.

[CBook]

I have noticed that if I don't plug in my kindle for a few days, that Calibre will try and copy the news (say for the Globe and Mail) for the last couple of days to the Kindle -- but it will overwrite each issue and the only issue found will be the latest issue (as well as all the back issues already on the kindle)

For example: My kindle has July 8, Jul 9, and Jul 10th of the Globe and Mail on the Kindle. I didn't update my kindle on Jul 11th (but Calibre was running to collect the news). I plug it into Calibre, and Calibre copies the Jul 11th and July 12th issues to the Kindle. But if I look on the Kindle then I see the July 12th issue, and in back issues July 10th and older. July 11th is not there - it was copied, and then overwritten. (even in Calibre is shows that Jul 11th is not on the device)

[CBook]

Using Calibre 8.8. I went back and copied the Jul 11th issue to the kindle. Looking in the news folder I see it's called the file Glober&Mail_2011-7-12.mobi --- the date it was synced to the device, not the date of the issue. I can see it is the July 11th issue by opening it (as the title page has the date).

[kovidgoyal]

Yeah that's because when that code was written (in prehistoric times) the pubdate of the news download wasn't available in the device driver. Now that it is, I've changed it to use the pubdate instead of the send date.

[paddyrm]

I am having this problem too: each News is overwritten by the new one, just one Mobi remains on the Kindle. Pubdate does not show as part of the Title.

I am using Calibre 07.24 on a Mac OS X 10.5.8.

Your help appreciated!

[PeterT]

Ugh.... I know one would like to say upgrade calibre to a newer version, but I sense that because you are on OS X 1.5.8 that you have an older PowerPC based Mac , and the newest version you could use is 0.728

[paddyrm]

Thanks Peter: so you think it is my version of Calibre that is causing the problem? I had hoped to tinker with the recipe to bake a better cake... or at least one that doesn't get splatted by a new cake

[paddyrm]

I’ve just discovered all my overwritten News downloads in “Periodicals: Back Issues” just above “Archived items” in the Kindle main menu: I’m sure that was not there before, but all my “deleted” News are in it. So problem solved!