Hello forum members,
Alright, I'll have to admit that i haven't been very active on this forum since I started to use Media Center in 2007.
Therefore I was really surprised to receive a mail from a long lost Spanish college reprimanding me that, in the good old days, i would not have left it with just a statement.
And he is right, I should be more specific and since I haven presently, being locked down, a lot of time on my hands i will stand corrected.
The subject is the tagging of e-books, that, we, according to popular belief, al do, or have done, in Calibre so the question is" why would we convert our existing e-book metadata to Media Center and, if yes, how would we do that.
First of all I like to say that Calibre is a very complete piece of software and it does everything any e-book enthusiast wants and probably a lot more, however, it has one setback that is a topic that's almost permanently on the their forum and that is that the user has non, or very little, control over how, or where the book files are saved.
I've been reading lots of posts on this subject and it seems that the more Multimedia files one has the more important it becomes to have complete control over filename conventions , placing and footprints.
secondly, I don't think is a good idea to obtain the relevant data from existing Calibre databases cause that's sounds a bit unfair to de developers and would only make you completely dependent on it for future expansion or updates.
And, in regard to user "WER"'s excellent post I've to say that I'm well aware of the fact that most e-book formats contain some metadata of their own but i think editing that data is not what's at stake here.
If you would do the editing of e-book files in MC you would need a lot of code because there are so many e-book formats and it would also require a lot of maintenance and therefore be an expensive future.
What is, i.m.h.o. a good starting point is de ability to obtain metadata on e-books in MC' library and corresponding sidecar files so managing and searching your e-book's could be done in MC and therefore in a familiar, and excellent, interface.
If you must edit the metadata in the book files itself you can use a external editor, dedicated to that task, but i would not bother about that because many e-readers don't handle this data anyhow.
So, what's the solution. Indeed, persuade JRiver to create a e-book scraper for Media Center from scratch that can be used to obtain much, if not all, of the metadata that we desire for our e-books and is easy to maintain.
Fortunately Media Center has already most of the required software on Board in the "Get movies en Tvshows info" sub-section of the program. Al that is needed is a media type called e-book to enable the choice between video and e-books and the lookup of all available data from an external source, based on , say, author and name tags, in to the relevant fields, just as movie data from the IMDB.
A good candidate for a source would be goodreads.com.
It has metadata for some 70% of the 40K e-books in my MC library and supplies developers with a very good API to access the relevant data based on a search string provided.
This data could then be examined and saved in the relevant MC tags and therefore in the sidecar files.
But, if you prefer a co-existence between an Calibre installation and your MC library? consider that Calibre database is actually an SQLite database which has a public domain API and could therefore be used to obtain data from Calibre to MC but data synchronization could be complex after an initial data-transfer.
So, in my opinion the focus of obtaining e-book metadata in MC would be in a once only transfer from relevant (looked-up) data from an external source into MC and not in editing the e-book files themselves.
And, if such a future would be made available I'll be happy to test it against my 40K e-books and i would not complain if it resulted in a higher price for MC anyway.
Please feel free to (dis)agree or comment on the above and stay in good health.
