Hacker News Reader

Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

Every time I drag a book file (whatever a format, whatever a source) to Calibre it can only guess the title and the author from the file name (although ebook formats like fb2, epub and mobi usually have this data embedded inside them). It can't even extract the cover (something CoolReader on Android does easily). Then I have to copy-paste ISBN manually and click "download metadata". I have always suspected the feature is there (it seems unreasonable to be missing from such a tool) but doesn't work for some weird reason. I use Calibre 3.39.1 from AUR on Manjaro.

View on HN

I use calibre from community packages on archlinux, it has absolutely no problems reading metadata (authors, titles and covers, and tags etc when present) from epub / mobi / pdf / etc.

I'm using Calibre 3.35 on Debian Testing and I have all authors, tags, categories, series, everything automatically imported to my library for many books from many sources. Maybe there's a library dependency missing somewhere? Any debug logs?

I'm not at my main workstation at home, so I cannot compare now, but it's a very strange situation.

Perhaps you mean you use Calibre to download books from particular sources so Calibre exchanges metadata with the source server directly? I add files manually by dragging them to the Calibre window and expect it to extract metadata (like the book autor, title, ISBN and cover picture) from the file.

No, I download books with my browser, and drag them into the Calibre. It harvests the metadata embedded in the file automatically.

I usually buy ebooks through Humble Bundle, download all formats and then import them into calibre. For 2 of 3 formats the metadata will be extracted without problems.

Only one is usually lacking. I think it's mobi or epub, but never bother to pin it down because I just combine then in one entry anyway, and then the metadata will be merged together.

Calibre has usually no problem with extracting metadata from files, independant from the source.

It's possibly .mobi. Calibre reads all metadata from my HumbleBundle ePubs just fine. :)

I download my epub and mobi files from my browser and IRC, and Calibre has always picked up the cover and metadata just fine.

In the import/add books settings, there is an option to use the filename instead of the metadata. Try changing that?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com