When you need to change the title or publication date of an EPUB you already exported, you edit the settings and rebuild, rather than opening the EPUB and editing it. The EPUB is an output, not a master. The master is your manuscript plus your settings.
Once that idea settles, exporting becomes something you can redo freely. This article covers how to separate series-level information from volume-level information, and what has to happen for an edit to take effect. First-time entry and where metadata lands inside the file are covered elsewhere.
Decide the scope of each field before rebuilding
In a general EPUB workflow, the publisher decides which values will be reused and which will change with each edition. The storage model depends on the production environment; even a title or author spelling is not guaranteed to remain fixed forever.
rune Studio stores the following two scopes separately.
- Fixed across the work — title, author, publisher, language, writing direction, and how output file names are formed
- Changing per volume or version — version number, publication date, cover image
A series makes the difference obvious. The author name is the same at volume ten as at volume one, but the publication date is not. Fixing typos in volume one and re-releasing changes only the version number.
Without that separation, every new volume means re-entering everything.
Editing the EPUB directly
An EPUB is a bundle of files, so you can unpack it, edit the metadata file, and repack it. Dedicated EPUB editors exist for the same purpose.
For one small correction, that can be the end of it. The time required depends on the editor and the extent of the change.
The problem is that masters start to disagree
Edit the EPUB directly and it drifts away from your manuscript and settings.
The next time you export from the manuscript, that edit is not there, so you make it again. By the third round, nobody can say which file is current.
There is a second trap when the same value appears in more than one output. The EPUB specification defines package metadata; a publisher may also include a separate, reader-facing colophon page. If your workflow creates both, editing only the record can leave the shelf entry current while the colophon shows an old date. A colophon is not a second required EPUB metadata store.
For a series this multiplies. Change the spelling of the author name after five volumes and you are editing five records and five colophons — ten places.
rune Studio separates series information from volume information
rune Studio holds title, author, publisher, language, writing direction, and output file name as series information, and keeps version, publication date, and cover per volume. You edit the settings; the EPUB is rebuilt.
I verified this by driving the development build from the command line. After setting the series information, reading it back returned exactly the values entered. The volume record carried volume number, version, publication date, cover, and last export time, and version and date could be set against a specific volume.
Reading inside the exported EPUB, the record held title, author, date, language, publisher, and a unique identifier, while the colophon page carried the same date and version, the author, and the publisher as readable prose. Nothing was entered twice.
After an edit, you simply export again
Changing the publication date from 5 September to 1 October and exporting again put the new date in both the machine-readable record and the colophon. Neither is left behind.
Raising the version from 1.0 to 1.1 at the same time left the previous version's line in the colophon and added the new one beneath it. Successive revisions accumulate a publication history there. Whether that is intended was not something I could confirm, so export once and read the colophon before you issue a revision.
The exported file is named with a timestamp. Exporting with a fixed clock value produced exactly that value in the file name. Because the name changes every time, a previous export is unlikely to be overwritten by accident, so you can put the before and after side by side.
Missing fields surface before the export
Try to export with the metadata blank and the export stops, naming what is missing. Running that check on an empty setup returned three items — title, author name, output file name — and no EPUB was written. After filling them in, the check returned zero.
Who this suits, and who is fine without it
It suits anyone re-releasing the same book, and anyone publishing a series. Bumping a version on each revision, or changing date and cover per volume, is exactly what the separation is for.
For a single book you will never revise, editing the EPUB directly is fine. If the edit happens once, there is no need to adopt a master-file discipline for it.
Scope note: what was verified is that the EPUB file is built correctly. Whether a store updates the listing for a book you already published depends on that store's own process.
Summary
- Edit the settings, not the EPUB; treat the EPUB as a rebuildable output
- Decide which fields your production environment reuses and which change per edition
- In a workflow that includes both package metadata and an optional colophon, direct edits can leave the two disagreeing
- rune Studio rebuilds both from your settings, and timestamped file names let you compare before and after
For a first step, write your book's metadata fields in two columns: fixed across the work, and changing per volume. If the second column is empty, you do not need the separation at all.
See the current product scope on the Rune Studio product page.
