ebmeta is a tool for editing metadata in an ebook file (Epub,
Mobipocket, or PDF). When the first edit is made, the entire ebook file
is backed up to ./.backup/FILE.backup under the folder where the
working file is, to allow for safely resetting.
Calibre and exiftool are used to write metadata changes to the ebook
file, but ebmeta doesn't interact with any databases like your Calibre
library. ebmeta allows you to edit metadata in your ebook library
directly in your file collection.
Fields that are available for editing in Epub files are:
- title; title sort
- authors; author sort
- publication date; publisher
- book producer
- isbn; uuid; language
- tags; rating
- series; series index
- description
Fewer fields are available in Mobipocket and PDF files.
- Beautiful Soup -- HTML/XML stream parsing and manipulation for Python
- Calibre (Calibre's
ebook-convertcommand is used to manipulate and build EPUB package files.) - exiftool -- for writing Title and Author fields in PDF files because Calibre seems to fail at that
- pandoc -- all purpose converter to and from Markdown syntax
- Python 2.7
- YAML for Python -- minimal config / serialization syntax
- zenity -- dialog boxes for scripts
- zip -- command line tool for writing/updating Zip files from the InfoZip package
Install Calibre on a Unix box:
sudo python -c "import sys; py3 = sys.version_info[0] > 2; u = __import__('urllib.request' if py3 else 'urllib', fromlist=1); exec(u.urlopen('http://status.calibre-ebook.com/linux_installer').read()); main()"
Ubuntu packages for the rest of the requirements:
sudo apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perl pandoc python-beautifulsoup python-yaml zenity
No installation script is provided. The simplest way to install ebmeta
is to download the source as a .zip or .tar.gz, or git clone. Put
the package files in ~/Apps/ebmeta and then do this:
chmod +x ~/Apps/ebmeta/__main__.py
ln --symbolic ~/Apps/ebmeta/__main.py__ ~/bin/ebmeta
(Make sure ~/bin is in your $PATH variable when you run ebmeta.)
ebmeta might work in Windows as well. Make sure all your requirements
are installed and make sure you can run python, pandoc, and
ebook-meta by just calling their name from the command line. (You
probably will have to edit your $PATH environment variable.)
Your biggest hurdle will probably be finding a viable Zenity build. I did see one after a quick search but I have not evaluated it. Alternatively, you could edit zenity.py in this package and adapt it to call WordPad instead. YMMV.
To invoke ebmeta, you can either do
python -m [path to...]\ebmeta.zip [ebmeta arguments]
Or create a batch file in your $PATH that calls Python in this way and
passes command line arguments through to ebmeta.
Backup an ebook file:
ebmeta backup FILE
Copies FILE to ./.backup/FILE.backup under the folder containing
FILE. If you screw up the outer FILE later on, you can just extract
the backup using a Zip archiving tool.
Display metadata on the command line:
ebmeta display FILE
Edit metadata in a popup dialog box:
ebmeta edit FILE
Reset metadata to state before first edit with this program:
ebmeta reset FILE
Get all command line help:
ebmeta --help