Titled Corrupted, possible to edit eBooks metadata?

[garywgaryw]

Hi,

Here is my problem, The title on some of the books I have downloaded from eBooks are showing up incorrectly in Digital Editions

For example "America's Secret War" shows up as "America's Secret War".

Is there any way to edit metadata within Digital Editions? Just renaming the file has no effect.

Another issue is book covers. Now eBooks does include a .png image for the cover to display in Digital Editions. However half of the covers are a .png image of the title page of the book, not of the actual cover. Covers help alot when you accumulate a large library and want to associate your eBooks with their respective covers quickly. Again, is there anyway to replace the png file with the correct cover? I tried manually replacing the png file with a png file of my choice with the same name, however this didn't work. Any tips?

Thanks guys, didn't get much assistance on the eBooks site. Got referred to Adobe's support. Looks like this is just a metadata problem. Any advice is much appreciated!

_Gary

[Guest]

ADE doesn't have any support for editing metadata (it's a feature I definitely want to add, however), and the error itself sounds like it is in the book metadata itself.

If you are comfortable editing XML by hand, then for a temp fix you can modify the manifest.xml file (make a backup copy first - and do it with ADE closed),  I would expect that the title would show up as America's Secret War - you can just change this to 'America's Secret War'. This will fix it on your computer, but may not fix it on any devices (or other computers) than you copy it too.

[MWorrell]

You can replace the PNG thumbnail. Grab a copy of the cover from Amazon, resize it to 90 x 130 pixels. Then overwrite the old PNG with the one you just made (in the "Thumbnail" folder where your book is stored). At least you'll have a decent cover in the ADE then. I just tried it and it works.

[morgandival]

I understand this problem as I like having an orderly library and as such, I have done a little bit of experimentation on this with some free eBooks that I got from the Kobo Store.

The 'manifest.xml' file holds all the metadata for every book in your library. This is the file that you will need to edit so that you can streamline your metadata for consistent display within Adobe Digital Editions.

1. Close ADE - The changes you make are not immediately obvious within ADE, which means when you restart it, the changes will be apparent.

2. Open 'C:\Users\<your username>\Documents\My Digital Editions'

3. Open 'manifest.xml' with a suitable text editor - I used Dreamweaver for this purpose, but notepad will do fine.

4. In the 'manifest.xml' file, find the '<dc:title></dc:title>' tags of your chosen book, change it to what you want it to appear as within ADE. This is particularly helpful if you have a set of books in a series and you want them numbered to display in order. eg: <dc:title>Star Wars: The Lost Tribe of the Sith #1 Precipice</dc:title>

5. If you have downloaded a new cover for your eBook; it does not matter if the image is in png or jpg format - ADE will use either (I suspect that it will recognise most other standard image file types). Also, if you have an image that will be larger than the standard height/width, this does not matter either - it will be resized for display within ADE.

6. Open 'C:\Users\<your username>\Documents\My Digital Editions\Thumbnails'.

7. Name your image to reflect the epub filename of the book eg 'Star_Wars_Lost_Tribe_of_the_Sith_1.jpg', then move it into the Thumbnails folder.

8. In the 'manifest.xml' file, find the '<de:thumbnailID></de:thumbnailID>' tags of your chosen book, change it to something that looks like this: <de:thumbnailID>Thumbnails/Star_Wars_Lost_Tribe_of_the_Sith_1.jpg</de:thumbnailID> - This now points to your image file instead of the existing one. You can then delete the existing one if you wish.

9. The most important step - save your changes to the 'manifest.xml' file, then close it.

10. Now open ADE and bask in the glow of your now properly maintained library.

Happy reading!

[gomugomu93]

You sir, are my hero!

[sanada_yukimura]

Thank you for the tip! Unfortunately when I copy the ebook to a device the device would then have the corrupted title. This happens despite going through the fix you have laid out. I have checked my device and there were no manifest.xml to update. Currently my ADE contains the correct (fixed) title and author while my device reverted back to the corrupted title.

Is there any way to prevent this so I don't have to change each ebook twice? I have 200 ebooks with corrupted titles and all I really want to do is fix the metadata.