There's no excuse for not doing that for a medium that is centuries old and whose requirements are so well understood. ADE should be providing the equivalent of the consistent library card catalogue card entry, modifiable by the user. I was frankly, if naively, shocked to discover that applications like ADE are nowhere near this very basic functionality yet. Any serious book collector will want to "fix" the bibliographic metadata that is inadequately and inconsistently supplied for their collection. I can understand why external tools might not be proper for this purpose, but it underscores why ADE must supply some basic metadata editing/substitution tools. Tools like Sigil won't even open DRM-protected files. In this infant field, these are needed both for basic book information to supplement the inadequacies of the publishers and for personal reference data. These could be used for things like: volume/series (as in Volume 3 of 10), publication date, etc. I would very much like three or more fields for user annotation. We all understand that Titles that begin with "the", "a", "an" are more properly displayed with that character at the end ("Fine and Private Place, A"). For the example in (A), ADE replaced the provided "last,first" order of "Ross, Martin" with "Martin Ross" why didn't it do that for the commercial books? Either ADE should properly interpret alternative sorts on Author by first vs last, or I need to change the metadata to be consistent. Their decisions vary between Author: last-name, first-name and Author: first-name, last-name. On a related front, I purchased a few EPUB books which were set up by commercial publishers at least (vs Google or crowd-sourced). I have downloaded 3 books by Somerville & Ross (there are many more) and no two of them display the same authors so they don't sort together. So there are multiple problems, not all of which are ADE's fault, but ADE should at least display (and make searchable/ssortable) all Authors, and should provide a way to modify the fields they display. (Edith Oenone)"Īpparently, ADE pulls only one item from the Author field, and the creator of the EPUB book filled it in alphabetical order by last name, rather than in the proper order, bibliographically speaking. ![]() The authors are Somerville & Ross or, more explicitly, Edith Somerville and Martin Ross.Ģ) When imported into ADE, the Author field displays: "Martin Ross".ģ) When examined under Sigil, the Author field displays: "Ross, Martin Somerville, E. M." from Project Gutenberg as an EPUB file (free). Let me show you some of the problems.Ī) Inadequate author field information and displayġ) I downloaded "Some Experiences of an Irish R. ![]() One recommended tool I have located is Sigil. I understand that ADE is an early version, but I'd like to see it improve drastically in this area or someone will come along and do it better - the metadata requirements issues are too important and probably too easy to do. For bibliophiles, it's like for photographers - we're talking about tens of thousands of books, ultimately, and we need reliable/modifiable metadata accordingly. This post summarizes the problem nicely:, even though it's Apple-specific. And, of course, you need more than Acrobat Reader to do that.įor EPUB files, I'd rather do this from within ADE, but will certainly use external tools if available even though that introduces another step. This does not work on documents that are password-protected for writing (e.g., downloads from PoemHunter). (Is there a correspondance table anywhere?). Does anyone know of a more general-purpose tool that can modify PDF or EPUB info?įor a PDF generally, you can modify much of the metadata (using Adobe Acrobat directly with ctrl-D), though I can't identify what field maps to the ADE "Publisher" field. I'm just using a regular eReader (Sony, in this case) via ADE. Thanks, that's an interesting suggestion but seems to be iPhone-specific.
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