[Bradles]

Responding to a post in the "LTMatch Beta" thread (which is now closed).

Originally Posted by jjmcgaffey

So I'm an LT and calibre user - theoretically they match perfectly, since most of my ebooks have been entered by importing a calibre-exported database. Theoretically. I'm delighted to see your plugin!

Once again, thanks for taking the time to test my plugin, and persisting despite frustrations.

First run - very frustrating. The documentation is findable online (in this thread), but it's not reachable directly from the plugin - so I clicked on the plugin and it complained about no librarything_id column, so I made a librarything_id column (of the wrong type - floating point), which meant I had to restart calibre, then I noticed the part about the librarything_rating column...didn't make it, I didn't feel like restarting... The documentation is really necessary, as it's perfectly possible to make a mess pushing random buttons on the plugin. Is it possible to make a button that's a link to the documentation (and somehow point it out, especially on first run)?

It should be easy enough to include a button/link to the first post above. It might end up being in an "About" dialog.

My full LT library is 11,000+ books; my ebook collection is 5,000+. I tried telling LTMatch to look for 10,000 books, and it timed out. So I reduced it to 1000. The loading was pretty fast - less than a minute, I think. The matching took longer, about 5-6 minutes; not unbearable. It's matching very nicely, and finding an awful lot of books I have listed in calibre that aren't showing up on LT (some of them may be matters of edited authors or titles, but determining that will require doing a full check).

One of the limitations of the LT API is not being able to search by collection. So if you use a LT Collection to identify your ebooks (as I do), the plugin has to download ALL your LT books, then filter for books in the "Ebooks" collection.

Many LT users use tags to identify ebooks, or newly added books, and searching by tags is fast. In fact, I also use tags to identify the source of the ebook, e.g. Kindle, Google, Apple Books. This makes for faster searching and the plugin only downloads what it needs.

The first lot matched perfectly - maybe 50 or 90 books, with just a few gaps. Then there were huge blank spaces on the LT side; not sure why, I'm pretty sure those books are in fact there. Also some complete mis-matches, with low probability; in at least one case, there was a much better match higher up, not sure why it was ignored. But it's not hard to force the match (except that with a list this long, just scrolling through it is hard).

Hopefully the "50 or 90" was not from 1000 books! The gaps are simply "spacers" to ensure that matched books are always next to each other in the lists.

Failing to identify the best match is a concern, but this sometimes happens with series, where the series name is part of the book title. If you share the names of the books concerned (by DM if you like) I can have a look.

I think I'll start over using only 100 at a time, now that (having found and read the documentation) I understand that once it's matched it doesn't need to be looked at again. Doing 1000 at a time, there's too much chance of a mis-match. So I closed the window without having it accept matches.

I think the key to successful matching, is to have a LT list that you expect will fully encompass the calibre list. This isn't really possible with small batches, as you'll always be getting the same LT list, and changing the sort order won't help much.

There are a number of ways to filter your calibre list to help though, e.g. Authors whose surname starts with A:

author_sort:~^A

Then B, then C, etc. LTMatch works with the currently displayed calibre list, so you can at least focus your efforts.

Is this useful info? Are there other things you want to know? I'll be trying the plugin again soon, and will check back here to update my experience with it.

Very useful info. I'd be interested to know how you identify ebooks in LT. I haven't actually seen too many users with an Ebooks collection like me.

I'm having some serious frustrations with the forum - I tried a quick reply and it logged me out, tried it again and it appeared as a blank post and then disappeared entirely. Hoping this one will work.

Sorry, I can't help with that.

You may be interested to know, I'm working on a LibraryThing Metadata plugin too. It's like the Amazon, Google, Goodreads, etc plugins, except it downloads your metadata and covers from LT. (If you have a matching book.) It builds on the LTMatch plugin, by using the librarything_id to go directly to your book.

It's not quite ready for testing yet, but I'll surely post something in this thread when it is.