Pocketbook Series Number metadata

[stomate]

The pocketbook lux is managing both series and series number metadata in order to display it in the library.
Unfortunately when the "calibre:series_index" field is located before calibre:series in content.opf, Pocketbook is no more taking into account this metadata.
And that happens quite often.
Would it be possible to have the plugin pocketbook to reorder the content of opf file before the epub is sent to the reader?
Thks in advance

PS : running in Window 7, calibre 2.35

[stomate (sabine-thomas)]

By the way, polishing the epub is useless

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

Fixed in branch master. The fix will be in the next release. calibre is usually released every Friday.

 status fixreleased

[Mia (mia-kosche)]

I am using the Pocketbook Touch Lux 2 (Pocketbook 626) and I have the same problem.
The result is, that metadata about series are missing. I guess this could also be because of some custom metadata I am using (namely subseries, which I use just for naming the books, so they are sorted in the right order).
Here is an example of the metadata how they appear on the ebook reader:

Titel: Zauberer [09] - Der Club der unsichtbaren Gelehrten
Autor: Terry Pratchett
Serie:
({"is_custom":true,
"kind": "field",
"#extra# ": 9.0,
"is_editable": true,
"display":{},
"search_tems": ["#sub_series"],
"rec_index": 22,
"is_multiple": null,
"is_category": true,
Genre: Fantasy, Scheibenwelt
Dateiname: Zauberer [09] - Der Club der unsichtbaren Gelehrten

I guess, the Pocketbook does not like it, when any metadata field is located after the series field.
Would it be possible to fix that, too? Or am I facing here another problem?

Thanks in advance and sorry, if my English is not always correct. It's not my native tongue. ;)

p.s.: running in Windows 10, Calibre 2.41.0

[stomate (sabine-thomas)]

Hello

English is not my native tongue either...
Yes you are right when metada field is located after the series field , Pocketbook loose the information.
I opened another bug on this but Kovid told us that it was too complex to change all the metadata fields and advised to go back to Pocketbook.

We (from a French forum) picked up the name of the marketing guy in France ... as the support in France tends to answer all complex requests by "reinitialise" and sent him an email in September. We were contacted back to provide samples. No other news so far.
I would advise you to send similar requests to German support... and the more the better.
German market for pocketbook is much bigger than the one in France and Pocketbook might put more stress on the request if it realises that it is important for a lot of people.

Here is the email we sent (more or less)

Dear Sir,

I had the pleasure to meet you 18 month ago at the "Salon du Livre" in Paris and we had a really nice conversation about the Pocketbook.

As I am part of a forum group which gather thousands of readers (and pocketbook lovers!) you gave me your business card and asked me to send you any feedback our members could have about their use of the Pocketbook or any bug they could face.

This is why I would like to report you some bugs that we find really inconvenient.

Most of us have chosen the pocketbook not only because it is an excellent e-reader but also because it can be an excellent e-library for large amount of books.

Unfortunately, we detected some problems with Pocketbook software in the way it collects metadata in epub files for indexing the e-library.

The software seems to be unable to pick some data in the opf part of the epub file, if the fields are not in a specific order.

To get a little bit more technical, the series information is lost if the meta element with name="calibre:series_index" is located before meta element with name="calibre:series".
The software also seems to ignore meta elements with name "calibre:series" and "calibre:series_index" if "content" attribute is located before "name" attribute (e.g. <meta name="calibre:series" content="test"/> is ok while <meta content="test" name="calibre:series"/> is ignored.
Also, "dublin core" (dc) elements (such as "dc:title", "dc:subject", etc.) located after meta elements (such as the series ones for instance) are simply ignored.
To sum up, analysis for ebook metadata retrieval is unnecessarily strict with opf xml structure.

This behavior is the same from PocketBook Lux 1 software FW 4.4 to Pocketbook Lux 3 FW5.9

We tried to get around through calibre but received a "wont fix" from Goyal for technical reasons. He advises us to go rather through a Pocketbook firmware update.

The truth is that the small free add-on application named "epubinfo" is always collecting perfectly all data whatever the opf metadata elements order is. And it might be also a good idea to integrate it into future release as the summary of the book it gives (DC description field) is useful for all of us.

We noticed that since the lastest firmware releases, Pocketbook is able to handle more than one genre...

[Lucas Hernidez (hernidez)]

I have the same problem on Pocketbook Lux 3 FW5.9. Actually there is no easy way to work around this issue. Kovid is right that this is Pocketbook firmware issue, which is incorrectly handling the XML information passed by Calibre. Especially custom metadata fields are really messing things up. I was looking for some Pocketbook driver specific options to filter out metadata when generating .epub file, but I was not lucky yet.

[stomate (sabine-thomas)]

Bug corrected for Pocketbook lux 2 and 3 with new FW 5.12
You can update your firmware. normally no need to resend books, the library is recomputed ... and so far, we saw that now title, gender and series are correctly handled