Libra Colour However does metadata syncing work?

[omentic]

Hello!

I recently got a Kobo reader (Libra Colour) and have been learning the ropes. Not sure what kinds of software to install / whether I want to bother with Plato or KOReader yet or not, but I have been encountering some problems.

How does the metadata syncing work? I have a lot of PDFs that didn't have appropriate metadata on them (missing/malformed titles/authors). I only noticed this after loading the PDFs up on the Kobo. I edited the PDF metadata, and moved them back to the Kobo, but the metadata didn't appear to sync. After removing the files and copying them back entirely, only some of the metadata synced - but I have a lot of entries with "Unknown Author" or the wrong title still! It seems almost entirely random whether the metadata updated (though it did for most).

I'm really curious about the details around this. How does the Kobo keep track of books? (presumably not by hashes. is it by filenames?) Is there any way to force an update of the metadata database, for an individual file or for all files, without using something like Calibre?

Thanks for any help.

[DNSB]

Basically to have clean metadata on your Kobo, you are going to need to use calibre. Otherwise, you are going to have to figure out how to update the metadata internal to the files manually. That is dumb grunt work which calls for a computer.

[John F]

OP, if you like to fiddle, stuff is stored in a database on the Kobo that can be accessed/modified with free database tools.

[omentic]

Another question I have is, what is the correct format for the Author field for books with multiple authors? I have tried ex. John Green;Bob Harper , but while Kobo seems to parse this kind of correctly, it wraps the authors list in quotes which it then adds to the author names. So I have in my authors list "John for example.

Another (another) issue I've also run into is the presence of "ghost books" in the Series and Authors tab. I am not sure if this is because I enabled sideloading, but there are series for ex. One Piece, Harry Potter, Kingsbridge that say they have one book in them but do not in fact have any. Does anyone know what is up with this / how to fix this?

[omentic]

Originally Posted by John F

OP, if you like to fiddle, stuff is stored in a database on the Kobo that can be accessed/modified with free database tools.

I do like to fiddle!

I was looking at the database earlier, but was not sure how to go about messing with it. Should I be concerned about corrupting the Kobo? And is there any way to remove the metadata of an entry and prompt Kobo to re-sync it, or is manually editing each entry the only way to go?

[omentic]

Gah, my posts are being eaten by the forums. Hopefully they will show up in a bit. Sorry for the incongruous response.

[bluepeter]

Originally Posted by omentic

Another (another) issue I've also run into is the presence of "ghost books" in the Series and Authors tab. I am not sure if this is because I enabled sideloading, but there are series for ex. One Piece, Harry Potter, Kingsbridge that say they have one book in them but do not in fact have any. Does anyone know what is up with this / how to fix this?

This sounds like the problem I had when I set a new e-reader up in Sideload mode - see this short thread.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by omentic

Another question I have is, what is the correct format for the Author field for books with multiple authors? I have tried ex. John Green;Bob Harper , but while Kobo seems to parse this kind of correctly, it wraps the authors list in quotes which it then adds to the author names. So I have in my authors list "John for example.

The correct format is John Green, Bob Harper.

[John F]

Originally Posted by omentic

I do like to fiddle!

I was looking at the database earlier, but was not sure how to go about messing with it. Should I be concerned about corrupting the Kobo? And is there any way to remove the metadata of an entry and prompt Kobo to re-sync it, or is manually editing each entry the only way to go?

I don't know the answers. I would guess deleting the book on the Kobo device using the UI, and then re-transfering the book should work.

personally, I wouldn't worry about corrupting the database, as the table names and columns should be be self explanatory.

I'm assuming the metadata you are interested in is stored in the database.

[omentic]

Thanks all for the help.

bluepeter, thx for the link - I did not end up doing this and instead manually mucked about with the KoboReader.sqlite file. All of the bogus entries were the first ~1000 entries in the content database, conveniently - deleting them seemed to have fixed the problem.

Sirtel, interestingly, both commas and semicolons as separators seem to have the same behavior. Unfortunately this behavior is still unpleasant and incorrect... the "John issue still occurs. I am going to try and investigate further.

John F, deleting the book on the Kobo device through the UI and re-transferring worked. All of my metadata issues did appear to be consistently caused by having extraneous XMP metadata on books (excluding one PDF which turned out to be corrupted): the presence of such means that Kobo may or may not read the standard author/title metadata.

[Sirtel]

Leave a space after the comma.

No first names as separate authors are present on my Kobos, but then I use Calibre for changing metadata and transferring books.

[DNSB]

A Kobo ereader expects author metadata to be sent as firstname lastname. For multiple authors, the pattern is firstname lastname, firstname lastname, firstname lastname.

This means if you are attempt to send an author name as lastname, firstname your Kobo will interpret this as two single word author names.