Series Number not showing up in metadata

[shmn]

I have many books that are parts of series and have never had an issue until one particular series. David Weber's "Honor Harrington" series of which I have the first six books.

When I added them to Calibre I assigned them all "Series: Honor Harrington" and then a number from 1-6 like I usually do. And they show up correctly in the library with series name and number.



But when moving the books to my devices, KOReader only displayed the series metadata for the first book correctly as "Honor Harrington #1" and all the rest were only displaying "Honor Harrington" without a series number. (BTW...I save each book to disk as EPUB file only into a folder on my NAS and then copy to devices from there. No opf files are used.)

I selected all six books in Calibre and cleared all series metadata using the bulk metadata editing feature then went into each book and, starting fresh, re-entered series name and numbers and downloaded all the books to KOReader and selected each book and hit "Refresh book metadata info from cache" but still no series numbers.

I then used the "Edit book" feature in Calibre to look at the html code of the metadata.opf file and saw the first book had

 <meta name="calibre:series" content="Honor Harrington"/>
    <meta name="calibre:series_index" content="1.0"/>

but all the other books were missing the second line "calibre:series_index" so I copied that line into the five other books with appropriate series number and now it shows up in KOReader.

Anyone know why Calibre was not writing the series number into those books even though it was showing up in the metadata in the GUI?

[kovidgoyal]

metadata is updated in ebook files only when you export from calibre using the save to disk or similar tools or run the embed metadata tool.

[shmn]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

metadata is updated in ebook files only when you export from calibre using the save to disk or similar tools or run the embed metadata tool.

I said in my post that I use "Save to disk" and that metadata is ok for hundreds of other books so that's not the issue. It's only once I manually edited the metadata.opf file and used Save to disk it that it worked. So why did I need to manually edit these five books even though the GUI was displaying the correct information?

[theducks]

Manual?
Did you use Calibre's Save to disk to send the book to the device?

My workflow once I have the Calibre Metadata My Way
is to use the Polish tool to embed (and de-clutter)
so the Library copy is ready .
This is what I see in the (Library copy) Books OPF

<meta name="calibre:title_sort" content="Field of Dishonor" />
    <meta name="calibre:series" content="Honor Harrington" />
    <meta name="calibre:series_index" content="4.0" />
    <meta name="calibre:author_link_map" content="{&quot;David Weber&quot;: &quot;&quot;}" />
    <meta name="calibre:timestamp" content="2009-10-18T07:00:00+00:00" />

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by shmn

I said in my post that I use "Save to disk" and that metadata is ok for hundreds of other books so that's not the issue. It's only once I manually edited the metadata.opf file and used Save to disk it that it worked. So why did I need to manually edit these five books even though the GUI was displaying the correct information?

Impossible to say without access to the books in question. Most likely they have some invalid OPF files.