New program: EPub Metadata Editor

[autoklus]

Hi BenChen, love the effort you put in!

Too bad my problem with FBReader isn't fixed with version 1.60. I've done some troubleshooting, and believe a malformed(?) header is the culprit - see the attached image.

- I downloaded Tolstoy's War and Peace (with images) from here and changed the title to "War and Peace and more" using your app (that's all I did). FBReader didn't recognize the saved file.
- I unzipped the contents and recompressed them to ZIP/EPUB using WinRAR (starting with the mimetype file). FBReader could perfectly recognize & read this (and it also reads zip files and loose folder structures). Ergo, the metadata is well-formed enough** & you can create a valid ePub using WinRAR - I wasn't sure.
- Lastly, I imported & exported "your" epub file using Calibre. Then I compared all the headers in a hex editor (WinHex).

Your file header looks different from the other three. "META-INF", i.e. the directory structure, begins at a different offset.



I've looked up the ZIP file format on Wikipedia - the order and position of things after "mimetype" shouldn't matter, except I see no reason why ePub...Editor should insert something new before META-INF/container.xml, or what the 16 bytes of "garbage" in segment 2 (3A-49) mean.
In this ebook, only "mimetype" is in the root folder.



I re-tested this with another ePub from Project Gutenberg - your program creates these headers consistently, and always inserts the exact same string of "PK..oa«,........".

** I noticed your app also changes some meta-xmlns attributes, and if a field like "subject" gets cleared/emptied it omits the closing tag, but that's not strictly necessary AFAIK

btw, where are you planning to go with your app? An mp3tag for ePubs would be great - I'd love to batch-remove all the "subjects" (tags) from my collection...

[BenChen]

Originally Posted by autoklus

Hi BenChen, love the effort you put in!

Too bad my problem with FBReader isn't fixed with version 1.60. I've done some troubleshooting, and believe a malformed(?) header is the culprit - see the attached image.

- I downloaded Tolstoy's War and Peace (with images) from here and changed the title to "War and Peace and more" using your app (that's all I did). FBReader didn't recognize the saved file.
- I unzipped the contents and recompressed them to ZIP/EPUB using WinRAR (starting with the mimetype file). FBReader could perfectly recognize & read this (and it also reads zip files and loose folder structures). Ergo, the metadata is well-formed enough** & you can create a valid ePub using WinRAR - I wasn't sure.
- Lastly, I imported & exported "your" epub file using Calibre. Then I compared all the headers in a hex editor (WinHex).

Your file header looks different from the other three. "META-INF", i.e. the directory structure, begins at a different offset.

Attachment 155890

I've looked up the ZIP file format on Wikipedia - the order and position of things after "mimetype" shouldn't matter, except I see no reason why ePub...Editor should insert something new before META-INF/container.xml, or what the 16 bytes of "garbage" in segment 2 (3A-49) mean.
In this ebook, only "mimetype" is in the root folder.

Attachment 155889

I re-tested this with another ePub from Project Gutenberg - your program creates these headers consistently, and always inserts the exact same string of "PK..oa«,........".

** I noticed your app also changes some meta-xmlns attributes, and if a field like "subject" gets cleared/emptied it omits the closing tag, but that's not strictly necessary AFAIK

btw, where are you planning to go with your app? An mp3tag for ePubs would be great - I'd love to batch-remove all the "subjects" (tags) from my collection...

Hi autoklus,

I cannot recreate your problem. When I make changes to the metadata using EPUBMetadataEditor, I can still open the books in FBReader afterwards. (I'm using FBReader 0.12.10.)

I'm not planning on doing anything else with the program besides fixing bugs. It does everything I want it to! And you can already do a batch-remove in the Batch Operations area using the "replace" option with an empty replace string.

Sincerely,
Ben.

[autoklus]

Originally Posted by BenChen

I'm using FBReader 0.12.10.

So do I.
That's strange - what OS are you using, and do the files you create have the same headers that I get?

Thanks for your effort, Ben - I understand your priorities (and Calibre can do all that your tool does, and more). Nevertheless I'm curious to know what causes this issue...

[BenChen]

Originally Posted by autoklus

So do I.
That's strange - what OS are you using, and do the files you create have the same headers that I get?

Thanks for your effort, Ben - I understand your priorities (and Calibre can do all that your tool does, and more). Nevertheless I'm curious to know what causes this issue...

I'm using Windows 7. After taking one of my EPUBs and converting it in Calibre, I took an image of the resulting headers. And I've taken a screenshot of FBReader, showing that both EPUBs are visible and they are also both readable.

[BenChen]

Latest Update: The current version is 1.6.1
Recent Changes:

• Better handle calibre meta tags (title_sort, series, and series_index)

[ovinio]

Originally Posted by BenChen

Latest Update: The current version is 1.6.1
Recent Changes:

• Better handle calibre meta tags (title_sort, series, and series_index)

series is showing same value as series_index, and after changing adds another value to content.opf.
And file size changes quite a lot even without any new data.

[BenChen]

Originally Posted by ovinio

series is showing same value as series_index, and after changing adds another value to content.opf.
And file size changes quite a lot even without any new data.

Hi there,

Can you attach an EPUB where you are seeing this behaviour? (You can attach an EPUB if you first change the file extension to JPG.)

As for the file size, I've changed ZIP libraries, so that might account for that. Not totally sure, though...

Sincerely,
Ben.

[PeterT]

why not rename it to zip, seeing thats what an epub is...

[BenChen]

Originally Posted by PeterT

why not rename it to zip, seeing thats what an epub is...

Actually, I realise now you don't have to rename anything. You can simply attach an EPUB to a post using the "Manage Attachments" button. I guess I never scrolled down that far!

[BenChen]

Latest Update: The current version is 1.6.2
Recent Changes:

• Fix regression with Calibre series

Thanks to ovinio for noticing the bug!

[last1left91]

Hi there,
As the title suggested, I have some requirements from the customer related to the content of the metadata.
Among others, I also have to add Edition of the Publication(it is on page i, History section) but I don't know where to put it inside of the content.opf file(in which metadata tag). I looked through all the metadata database but couldn't find anything relevant in that direction.





As you can see, the History section has many forms related to the language of the document, first one:arabian and the second one: english.

Here is how my current .opf looks like...



Thanks in advance for all your help. If I haven't been clear with what I'm asking for, just tell me

Ps: I have a clue that this information the client asks for is related to some series which involves some <meta property="dcterms:modified">2011-01-01T12:00:00Z</meta> but I'm not sure at all

[last1left91]

NO ONE CAN HELP ME!?

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by last1left91

NO ONE CAN HELP ME!?

You'll have to define these publication specific metadata entries yourself using refines properties. For more information see the epub3 specs.

[BenChen]

Originally Posted by last1left91

NO ONE CAN HELP ME!?

Wow, you didn't give me much time to respond. We don't all live in the same timezone, you know!

If you want to add "Edition" to an (EPUB 3) OPF file, I'm guessing that you could do it like this:

<meta property="edition">2nd. Ed.</meta>

(See http://www.idpf.org/epub/31/spec/epub-packages.html, section 3.4.3.4, for more info.)

But reading systems won't recognise it, so the only way you would know it was there would be by looking at the OPF file.

Sincerely,
Ben.

[last1left91]

Originally Posted by BenChen

Wow, you didn't give me much time to respond. We don't all live in the same timezone, you know!

If you want to add "Edition" to an (EPUB 3) OPF file, I'm guessing that you could do it like this:

<meta property="edition">2nd. Ed.</meta>

(See http://www.idpf.org/epub/31/spec/epub-packages.html, section 3.4.3.4, for more info.)

But reading systems won't recognise it, so the only way you would know it was there would be by looking at the OPF file.

Sincerely,
Ben.

THANKS A LOT!! SORRY FOR NOT BEING PATIENT ENOUGH!!