I'm looking to automate the metadata handling for books on my Kobo H2O to make searching and organizing my library easier. I think the easiest way to do this is going to be to insert metadata into some field into the epub, import it using Calibre, and then use Calibre to set up collections and put the metadata into another field like subtitle. Setting up a plugboard template to push data into subtitle and to have Calibre create collections based on a column are straightforward thanks to the existing work some great people have done on the Kobo Calibre plugin. I have some questions about automating the earlier steps in the process.
What columns will Calibre automatically populate for me from metadata in an epub? Is there anything beyond Tags? I know that for instance epubs downloaded from AO3 will show up with entries in the Tags column in Calibre. I'd like to be able to add metadata to another custom column, though, because I expect I'm going to have to do a lot of filtering to get the set of possible tags down to something small enough so that the resulting collections won't overwhelm the Kobo. It would be nice if I could leave the existing AO3 metadata field intact so that I can use it later if I need to regenerate tags. I also have epubs I'm generating myself from my own tools and from other sources that I want to tag. Is there a good way of adding metadata to cbzs? What kind of problems am I likely to encounter when automatically converting tags (which may contain Unicode, for instance) to collections?
Just for laughs, I tried earlier with the full set of AO3 tags in my library and confirmed that it will crash trying to load the DB, probably because it runs out of memory. Has anyone played around with how many collections it's possible to put into the Kobo DB before the UI starts to become too slow or crashes?
My goal is to automate as much of this pipeline as possible and to avoid making it too slow. I know there's a calibre-db CLI,but writing code that calls a CLI is going to involve a lot of indirection that will make the script slower and harder to write. Is there a programmatic interface I should be looking at? Has anyone else tried to do something like this and open-sourced tools I don't know about? Are there pitfalls I should be aware of?
This is a follow-up to a previous question I asked about what metadata Kobo's software will read, where davidfor kindly established that it won't pick up useful metadata for sideloaded epubs.
What columns will Calibre automatically populate for me from metadata in an epub? Is there anything beyond Tags? I know that for instance epubs downloaded from AO3 will show up with entries in the Tags column in Calibre. I'd like to be able to add metadata to another custom column, though, because I expect I'm going to have to do a lot of filtering to get the set of possible tags down to something small enough so that the resulting collections won't overwhelm the Kobo. It would be nice if I could leave the existing AO3 metadata field intact so that I can use it later if I need to regenerate tags. I also have epubs I'm generating myself from my own tools and from other sources that I want to tag. Is there a good way of adding metadata to cbzs? What kind of problems am I likely to encounter when automatically converting tags (which may contain Unicode, for instance) to collections?
Just for laughs, I tried earlier with the full set of AO3 tags in my library and confirmed that it will crash trying to load the DB, probably because it runs out of memory. Has anyone played around with how many collections it's possible to put into the Kobo DB before the UI starts to become too slow or crashes?
My goal is to automate as much of this pipeline as possible and to avoid making it too slow. I know there's a calibre-db CLI,but writing code that calls a CLI is going to involve a lot of indirection that will make the script slower and harder to write. Is there a programmatic interface I should be looking at? Has anyone else tried to do something like this and open-sourced tools I don't know about? Are there pitfalls I should be aware of?
This is a follow-up to a previous question I asked about what metadata Kobo's software will read, where davidfor kindly established that it won't pick up useful metadata for sideloaded epubs.