Can metadata be altered or supplemented?

Thanks, that's an interesting suggestion but seems to be iPhone-specific.  I'm just using a regular eReader (Sony, in this case) via ADE.  Does anyone know of a more general-purpose tool that can modify PDF or EPUB info?

For a PDF generally, you can modify much of the metadata (using Adobe Acrobat directly with ctrl-D), though I can't identify what field maps to the ADE "Publisher" field.  (Is there a correspondance table anywhere?).  This does not work on documents that are password-protected for writing (e.g., downloads from PoemHunter).  And, of course, you need more than Acrobat Reader to do that.

For EPUB files, I'd rather do this from within ADE, but will certainly use external tools if available even though that introduces another step.

This post summarizes the problem nicely: http://ipadtest.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/the-epub-ebooks-metadata-mess/ , even though it's Apple-specific.  For bibliophiles, it's like for photographers -- we're talking about tens of thousands of books, ultimately, and we need reliable/modifiable metadata accordingly.  I understand that ADE is an early version, but I'd like to see it improve drastically in this area or someone will come along and do it better -- the metadata requirements issues are too important and probably too easy to do.

One recommended tool I have located is Sigil.  Let me show you some of the problems...

A) Inadequate author field information and display

1) I downloaded "Some Experiences of an Irish R. M." from Project Gutenberg as an EPUB file (free).  The authors are Somerville & Ross or, more explicitly, Edith Somerville and Martin Ross.

2) When imported into ADE, the Author field displays: "Martin Ross".

3) When examined under Sigil, the Author field displays: "Ross, Martin; Somerville, E. Oe. (Edith Oenone)"

Apparently, ADE pulls only one item from the Author field, and the creator of the EPUB book filled it in alphabetical order by last name, rather than in the proper order, bibliographically speaking.  So there are multiple problems, not all of which are ADE's fault, but ADE should at least display (and make searchable/ssortable) all Authors, and should provide a way to modify the fields they display.  I have downloaded 3 books by Somerville & Ross (there are many more) and no two of them display the same authors so they don't sort together.

B) Inadequate Author sorting

On a related front, I purchased a few EPUB books which were set up by commercial publishers at least (vs Google or crowd-sourced).  Their decisions vary between Author: last-name, first-name and Author: first-name, last-name.  Either ADE should properly interpret alternative sorts on Author by first vs last, or I need to change the metadata to be consistent.  For the example in (A), ADE replaced the provided "last,first" order of "Ross, Martin" with "Martin Ross"; why didn't it do that for the commercial books?

C) Inadequate Title sorting

These are BOOKS not cans of soup.  We all understand that Titles that begin with "the", "a", "an" are more properly displayed with that character at the end ("Fine and Private Place, A").  That should be a sort option, at least.

D) User annotation

I would very much like three or more fields for user annotation.  These could be used for things like: volume/series (as in Volume 3 of 10), publication date, etc.  In this infant field, these are needed both for basic book information to supplement the inadequacies of the publishers and for personal reference data.

E) DRM issues re: metadata

Tools like Sigil won't even open DRM-protected files.  I can understand why external tools might not be proper for this purpose, but it underscores why ADE must supply some basic metadata editing/substitution tools.  Any serious book collector will want to "fix" the bibliographic metadata that is inadequately and inconsistently supplied for their collection.

I was frankly, if naively, shocked to discover that applications like ADE are nowhere near this very basic functionality yet.  ADE should be providing the equivalent of the consistent library card catalogue card entry, modifiable by the user.  There's no excuse for not doing that for a medium that is centuries old and whose requirements are so well understood.  In fact, the content/format of a card catalogue card, plus a few user-added fields, would be an excellent model to follow.

I chose ADE because I'm betting that Adobe will step up to the challenges of books they way they have for photos.  Please don't disappoint me.