I recently got started with Calibre, and one area of particular interest to me was using the meta data and covers download function.
I had 2 issues with this:
1) if I use the context menu download metadata and covers I often got a bad selection coming back
2) if I try to download for an ebook with a LOT of possible matches (especially the case with old books) it often hangs and fails to download
I've started hacking around the code with some success and thought I'd post my findings/thoughts to see if anyone else had good suggestions for what else I should do. If I get to a good level of success I plan on giving back my code tweaks.
What I've found/done so far:
1) - The method it uses when you right click seems to be to just select the first matched result from the same results you'd see if you used the interactive download and pick function in the edit individual metadata screen.
This list sorted on the basis of the following in the priority order listed:
- Title is an exact match (although code comments imply titles starting with a match)
- books with coverart
- books with longer descriptions
I've changed this a little to
- Title is an exact match
- Title begins with the title
- Author exists in authors collection
- books with coverart
- books with longer descriptions
Which seems to be getting me some success, however I think I might try and work this more towards an overall scoring rather than just a progression down the list.
2) On this item, I did some network tracing and found that it would get a very large list to a maximum of 1000 odd titles (which wasn't too much of a problem) but then it would start gathering cover art and wider details book by book, which if the list was big (an example I was working on was a list of nearly 200) it would time out during the cover art and additional data steps.
Obviously I could just increase the timeout, but that felt painful, so instead I modified the process to do the afore mentioned sorting function (except for evaluating coverart) then trimming the list to 20 items before continuing with the book by book downloads.
Any thoughts suggestions would be appreciated.
SM