Best Practices: Kindle3, calibre, Amazon PDF Conversion, ebook metatagging...

[lestatar]

Hello all, new here and a new Kindle3 Wifi owner [pretty damm happy too, as I am a prolific reader but have resisted purchasing a true ebook reader until now]. Incredible forum here but I have not yet had a chance to really dig through everything thus far. So, please pardon me if the questions below have already been answered elsewhere - maybe some kind peeps here can point out specific forum threads which may be of use to me. And sorry for the long-winded post.

Anyway, as the title indicates, I am seeking the advice for some best practices/SOP re: Kindle and especially ebook metatagging, etc.

I am excessively anal about my ID3 tags for my music collection as well as my music filenames. Everything is exactly the way I want it and there are no surprises for me when I play music on any digital device. I would like to do a similar thing for my Kindle.

I am very familiar with many of the ebook readers/utilities but have been unclear on any actual metatagging standards [or even how that stuff works for ebooks - there is no actual ebook tagging standard a la ID3 for music files is there?]. calibre, MobiPocket Creator/Reader, ABC converters, etc... are especially old friends to me though.

The free email service from Amazon for PDF/document conversion is great so far as I am not especially a fan of the inability to resize PDF text on the Kindle - the free conversion to adjustable AZW format is terrific. However, I encountered a few surprises in my first batch of PDF conversions, especially insofar as book covers and metatags.

I initially used calibre to exactly edit the metatag info/book covers on my PDFs before sending them to Amazon. When I got the AZW files back and reviewed a few of them in calibre, tags like Book Title and Author had changed, as well as the covers I had put on the PDFs. I then had to go back in calibre and re-edit stuff the way I wanted it so the book listing on the Kindle is consistent with how I prefer.

The questions:
- why does Amazon conversion service mess with my ebook tags/covers and is there any way to prevent this or...
- should I simply edit my tags at the end, when I receive the AZW files?
- what is the best pixel size/file size/image format for book covers on Kindle3?
- it seems a few converted AZW files don't properly display book JPG covers added via calibre...any idea what I am doing wrong?
- what is the normal SOP for most people with regards to tags/covers on Kindle?

Again, sorry to be so long-winded and apologies if these questions are redundant.

cheers and TIA for any help/advice/info,
-les

[DiapDealer]

should I simply edit my tags at the end, when I receive the AZW files?

Yes.

what is the best pixel size/file size/image format for book covers on Kindle3?

600x800 pixel jpeg.

it seems a few converted AZW files don't properly display book JPG covers added via calibre...any idea what I am doing wrong?

Once you change/add a cover via calibre, you have to do a mobi to mobi conversion before the new cover image will actually be written to the mobi file. Make sure you haven't overlooked this step... it's easy to forget.

what is the normal SOP for most people with regards to tags/covers on Kindle?

I rarely remember that tags/covers even exist when using my Kindle.

[lestatar]

^ thanks for the quick answers!

Point 3 above: Not really clear on this. Do you mean I need to convert AZW to mobi to get my covers to stay? Sorry to be a noob...

And lol...yeah, i am just being a bit anal with my new toy. Ultimately, ebook tagging not such a huge deal, but what can I say?

[DiapDealer]

AZW is mobi. I just change the extension before importing to calibre--with personal, converted DRM-Free documents, at least. Then convert mobi to mobi to make any cover changes/additions permanent (viewable on the Kindle). Calibre will happily convert the AZW file to mobi for you, but why convert and have two identical files in calibre when it essentially just needs a file rename?

And lol...yeah, i am just being a bit anal with my new toy. Ultimately, ebook tagging not such a huge deal, but what can I say?

I understand perfectly. I'm anal about formatting... I convert everything to epub, tweak the CSS to my liking and convert back to mobi before reading. Paragraph indents that are too large drive me absolutely insane on a 6" screen.

[lestatar]

Again, thanks a ton DiapDealer. Yeah, just found out today about AZW and mobi being same with only file extension difference. Silly Amazon. Of course, you are right about the dupe files and your suggestion makes perfect sense. Will try ASAP.

For sure, I need to dig much much deeper into the awesome calibre. It is terrific that not only is Mr. Goyal active here, but that there is a good synergy between him and mobileread.

cheers and thanks for the tips!
-les

[CWatkinsNash]

Originally Posted by lestatar

The questions:
- why does Amazon conversion service mess with my ebook tags/covers and is there any way to prevent this or...
- should I simply edit my tags at the end, when I receive the AZW files?
- what is the best pixel size/file size/image format for book covers on Kindle3?
- it seems a few converted AZW files don't properly display book JPG covers added via calibre...any idea what I am doing wrong?
- what is the normal SOP for most people with regards to tags/covers on Kindle?

-les

Les,

I, too, am quite anal when it comes to tagging my music, so I totally get you on this. You know how the tagging specs are different for mp3, ogg, wav, etc? Then sometimes you have to deal with lack of software support for some spec versions or only partial support. It's like that with ebook formats too.

In this case, the problem isn't Amazon messing with your files - the pdf format doesn't support all the metadata you want to use. It's like a wav file compared to an mp3 in that regard. Because of that, most of that info is only in calibre - it's not attached to the pdf when Amazon gets it.

With other formats, it can be a matter of whether or not the metadata attached is readable by the software doing the reading. (For this portion, we can compare the Rhapsody player [sucky tag support] to Mediamonkey [well-implemented tag support].)

What I do is this: I get my files into the desired final format (usually mobi), then finalize the metadata. If the added metadata changes something I need to have attached to the file when it gets to the Kindle (title or author, generally), I do a mobi-to-mobi conversion. Calibre knows what I'm up to, so it doesn't duplicate the file, it replaces it with the new one, committing the changed info to the new file.

Since I pretty much use calibre or the Kindle for everything, I don't do that if the metadata in question isn't going to show up on the reader anyway. Most of my metadata is only of use in calibre.

Hope that helps.

[lestatar]

@CWatkinsNash: Big help/info. Much clearer for me now. Initially the mobi-mobi thing didn't quite compute, but now I understand. Will play/experiment, thanks to you nice peeps.

@PhillipA82: Much thanks! I don't do many forums, but plan to stick around here.