Calibre No Longer Downloading Metadata

[moviedood22]

Hi friends,
I recently purchased a Kobo Clara BW and have resurrected my old "stack' of epubs that I used to have for my BN Nook years ago. I have a months old new laptop and have downloaded and upgraded Calibre to the latest version. Have made no tweaks to the software. Everything has been going well, but Calibre suddenly will not download any metadata from any source. For the past few days I've noticed that I get an error string in the Kobo source saying it can't get past cloudflare, and then two days ago it will no longer download metadata from BN or Amazon as well. Anyone else having this issue? Again, I have made no changes or tweaks to the software, it simply does not fetch the data. BTW, yes, I have tried restarting Calibre and my laptop as well, and have tried using a VPN to bypass any issues Win 11 may have thrown out there. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!

[theducks]

There are dozens of Cloudflare posts here at MR and suggestions.
I will leave it to you tou look for those.

Cloudflare is a tool hosts use to reduce (automated?) traffic.

But WHY do you need to get metadata AGAIN? If you had transferred your old Calibre Library and settings properly (see the FAQ), it would still be there?

[moviedood22]

I had Calibre years ago on my old laptop. I stopped using it and my old Nook many years ago and only recently decided to revisit ebooks. I did not transfer any information from the old laptop to the new one, but I did keep my books. I just wanted to update my epubs to have the latest info. Back when I was using it (over 8 years ago at this point) information was not as robust as it is now, so I thought I would update the info. Is this relevant? Apologies, but I'm over 55 years old and not very knowledgeable about such things.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by moviedood22

I had Calibre years ago on my old laptop. I stopped using it and my old Nook many years ago and only recently decided to revisit ebooks. I did not transfer any information from the old laptop to the new one, but I did keep my books. I just wanted to update my epubs to have the latest info. Back when I was using it (over 8 years ago at this point) information was not as robust as it is now, so I thought I would update the info. Is this relevant? Apologies, but I'm over 55 years old and not very knowledgeable about such things.

It is hard on the FREE servers to do so many bulk metadata updates. That is why they have probably resorted to cloudflare.

Instead, consider using the Quality check plugin to help identify candidates that need help and just do those.

search the field lookup name for those missing data
eg pubdate:false (Published)

hover over the column title for the lookup name

(BTW I am well past 55. Don't ever slow down, as bouncing back is difficult.)

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by moviedood22

Hi friends,
I recently purchased a Kobo Clara BW and have resurrected my old "stack' of epubs that I used to have for my BN Nook years ago. I have a months old new laptop and have downloaded and upgraded Calibre to the latest version. Have made no tweaks to the software. Everything has been going well, but Calibre suddenly will not download any metadata from any source. For the past few days I've noticed that I get an error string in the Kobo source saying it can't get past cloudflare, and then two days ago it will no longer download metadata from BN or Amazon as well. Anyone else having this issue? Again, I have made no changes or tweaks to the software, it simply does not fetch the data. BTW, yes, I have tried restarting Calibre and my laptop as well, and have tried using a VPN to bypass any issues Win 11 may have thrown out there. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!

I don't download metadata for my eBooks because usually there are errors that need to be fixed and I'd need to double check the metadata to make sure it's correct and since I'm having to verify what was downloaded, I may as well update the metadata by hand.