Improve epub download metadata: Include series information

mattashii

Currently, the series of a book is not included in the metadata of the epub, which means that organizing downloaded epubs in a reader is a lot of manual work.

The epub 3.0 spec has support for collections through the <meta property="belongs-to-collection"> meta attribute. Something like the following example would be greatly appreciated for e-pub library management:

 <metadata>
   <dc:title>Ascendance of a Bookworm: Part 2 Apprentice Shrine Maiden Volume 2</dc:title>
   <dc:creator id="creator01">Miya Kazuki</dc:creator>
   ...
   <meta name="cover" content="Cover.jpg" />
+  <meta property="belongs-to-collection" id="collection01">Ascendance of a Bookworm</meta>
+  <meta refines="#collection01" property="collection-type">series</meta>
+  <meta refines="#collection01" property="group-position">5</meta>
</metadata>

[edit] see http://idpf.org/epub/301/spec/epub-publications.html#belongs-to-collection for more info; to the best of my knowledge all major epub readers that support series understand this metadata.

Cooper Cummings.gk5u8qq

@mattashii Thanks for making the suggestion, I would appreciate this. I bought the first 3 parts in bookwalker so it might not help with those, but it should help with organizing the rest.

DarKraD

Yeah, one more for vote from me too. I always have to add both belong to collection and group position manually with Sigil. If JNC provides ePubs with these then I can just download directly with my tablet, much more convenient.

Lily Garden

Yeah I think this would be a good idea, when I downloaded the Tales of Marielle Clarac series they’re all out of order because they don’t have volume numbers and it was a pain the reorganize them each time a new one became available so I just gave up organizing my ebooks

chocolatkey

Currently, premium ebooks are manually-created files on a disk, sent to users for download when they have bought them. Implementing this would be nice but also a very laborious task if not automated. In the future, premium ebooks will be dynamically built based on data in a database, and at that point, it will be much easier to add more metadata easily. Until then, please endure.

mattashii

@chocolatkey

I see that the copyright info page contains my username, so at least some information from the database is inserted into the epub dynamically, right?

Example:

Copyright
Ascendance of a Bookworm: Part 1 Daughter of a Soldier Volume 1

by Miya Kazuki
[...]
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

Ebook edition 1.0.5: August 2021

Premium E-Book for mattashii

myskaros

@mattashii said in Improve epub download metadata: Include series information:

I see that the copyright info page contains my username, so at least some information from the database is inserted into the epub dynamically, right?

Yes, but that's just your login name from your website account, it's not from a database.

chocolatkey

@mattashii Yes, but the data that's needed to make, for example, standard series identifiers does not exist in the database at the moment.

Geezer Weasalopes

@mattashii
Two distinct thingies.
The metadata to describe the 'book as a concept'.
The database of JNC members.

The eBook master copy is currently manually generated in advance prior to publication, and has a field for inserting the member info at the time of download.
When a specific individual copy of an eBook is downloaded, part of the process automatically grabs the master copy and adds to it the information concerning who it was generated for as a download from the JNC membership data.

So it's two distinct processes, with no overlap in what's happening when.

SamW77

I just got the series Lazy Dungeon Master (all 16 so far). It would be nice if the Series Metadata could be added on JNC's end so I don't need to use Calibre to add after download to make them line up better in my Library of ebooks.
Please and Thank You