[GUI Plugin] Goodreads Sync

[pgun3]

Is there a way to add a book from calibre to more than just 1 shelf at a time onto my goodreads shelves. I would like to add a book to 2 -4 shelves at a time.
Thanks

[Krazykiwi]

Originally Posted by pgun3

Is there a way to add a book from calibre to more than just 1 shelf at a time onto my goodreads shelves. I would like to add a book to 2 -4 shelves at a time.
Thanks

In the window that pops up with the list to choose the shelf you're adding to, just hold ctrl and you can click as many shelves as you like.

[pgun3]

Thanks Krazykiwi!

[MeSue]

Is there a way to only sync books added or changed on Goodreads since the last sync? Every time I sync my read shelf, I get a huge list with a lot of unlinked books because I don't have ebooks for them. Also, it seems like I am linking the same books over and over.

[rifka]

I have a request for an update to this plugin. Right now if you go to link your book to Goodreads it shows you if THAT book is already linked to Goodreads with a blue "I". What it doesn't show you is if a book with the same title and author is already linked. So I have several duplicates where it is the same book but because it has a different ISBN it got linked to a different edition. Could the plugin show if there is any edition of the book already linked?

Thank you

Moderator Notice
Moved post from the Goodreads metadata source plugin thread to the Goodreads Sync plugin thread.

[kiwidude]

@rifka - if you have multiple books with the same Title and Author, you should be using the Find Duplicates plugin to get rid of them (assuming you don't want them).

Having this plugin do the equivalent of Find Duplicates is a scope creep I don't feel comfortable with.

[kiwidude]

@MeSue - I will have to look into it properly but I believe the answer is no there isn't (easily at least). I will have a think about it the next time I work on this plugin as to whether that is something I could incorporate.

As to relinking books over and over, again off the top of my head the only two reasons why this would happen are that (1) you cancel out of the Sync dialog, and (2) you have duplicates in your library and by linking to one of the duplicates it is unlinking the other one. If it isn't one of these and you can isolate it down to a repeatable test case then I can take a look.

[MeSue]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

@MeSue - I will have to look into it properly but I believe the answer is no there isn't (easily at least). I will have a think about it the next time I work on this plugin as to whether that is something I could incorporate.

As to relinking books over and over, again off the top of my head the only two reasons why this would happen are that (1) you cancel out of the Sync dialog, and (2) you have duplicates in your library and by linking to one of the duplicates it is unlinking the other one. If it isn't one of these and you can isolate it down to a repeatable test case then I can take a look.

Thanks, for considering it. Maybe if you can't sync only books changed since last sync, you could allow users to enter a custom date and only sync books changed since that date? Might help with performance on syncing the read shelf. Mine is over 300, which doesn't seem that large, but it does get slow. Part of that might be my slow connection, but isn't it a waste of resources to keep syncing hundreds of books every time when only a handful are changed?

On relinking: I don't think I have dupes in calibre, but I had some on Goodreads, which I cleaned up. I also created blank records in calibre for the books I don't have. That should help. I'll keep an eye on it, check again for dupes, and see if I can find anything repeatable.

Thanks for this great plugin!

[Krazykiwi]

Hi kiwidude,

Funkyone mentioned this earlier, but I don't see a reply to him.

Reviews on the GR site are truncated to ~200 char when imported into Calibre.

I don't know how long this has been going on, because I've never used the feature before, but I guess at least since FunkyOne reported it, September 5.

[arbje]

Originally Posted by Krazykiwi

Hi kiwidude,

Funkyone mentioned this earlier, but I don't see a reply to him.

Reviews on the GR site are truncated to ~200 char when imported into Calibre.

I don't know how long this has been going on, because I've never used the feature before, but I guess at least since FunkyOne reported it, September 5.

+1 on what he ^ said. It seems like unwanted behaviour.

Also, I noticed that when linking a book to Goodreads (great feature btw ) that the "Switch Edition" screen only shows a part of the available editions.
Could be because there are to many and the plugin only retrieves the first page? I had this problem with e.g the james bond books (over 60 editions).

Secondly, maybe it's a good idea to add the language of the version and year of publication (and perhaps a link to the webpage) to the overview of editions? It's quite hard to find the dutch (or other language) version of a book if they all have the same title.

[arbje]

Just one more suggestion: Allow column-based ordering in the Sync overview? I have a lot of books to sync and not all of them have a match in my library, but right now the sorting does not make sense to me.

[BookLo]

What a great plug-in! I do most of my work on GR so the sync feature is awesome. The only problem is that when my reviews sync, as several people have already reported. Only the first paragraph or so gets imported.

I like arbje's suggestion. If you could sort the columns in the sync window, that would be really helpful. I also have a lot of books on GR that aren't linked to books in calibre and I usually scan through the list before I sync. If I could sort by Status, that would be really helpful.

[kiwidude]

To all of you who are noticing the review text length issue. This is a limitation of the Goodreads API, which intentionally only returns up to 300 characters of the review text comments.

There is a separate API call which "can" be used to retrieve the full review text for a single book - in fact it is what is used by the "Upload tags to shelves" and "Download tags from shelves" features, which have to deal with calling each book individually.

However the problem is that this is another individual call to Goodreads, and as has been documented countless times on this thread there is a real problem with the T&C of Goodreads around how many calls a plugin like this can make. I have already been through one "warning" phase from them a few months ago (which ultimately came to nothing when they didn't get back to me with any details about which "calls" were causing them issues) but it is not something I want to have to repeat.

So the problem if you think about it is there are a number of you who have hundreds of books on a shelf, that you then want to sync from. Every time you choose to "Sync", I do a number of calls to get the summary list of available books for the selected shelve(s). If I then had to do an additional call for each and every one of the books on the shelf to pull down the full review text not only will the plugin become intolerably slow but undoubtedly we would instantly jump back on the Goodreads radar again.

I don't know quite know what the solution is from the very brief look into it tonight. I haven't read back on this thread recently but I recall someone asking whether it would be possible to somehow identify only books that have "changed" on a shelf. There is a "date updated" field in the xml that the Goodreads API returns for each book for your review. One possibility is to take that date and store it in your calibre library for each book (in some hidden data you don't need to worry about), and then compare that the next time you sync with the shelf. So any books which were linked it could lookup the last sync date for, and compare whether the goodreads record has changed, and that way you are only presented with a list of changed books.

However apart from the fact that there is quite a bit of development work involved to support that, it doesn't solve the problem of every user for the first time doing a sync and it then having to do this extra call I mention above for every book that you have review text that is truncated. Unless I deliberately make it run very, very slowly, which you as users will have to accept is the only way Goodreads are prepared to let people pull data off their servers. A long operation like that will inevitably beg for a some sort of progress dialog, and the work involved in all of this becomes even bigger.

To all the others of you who have posted requests and suggestions (such as sorting etc) - I haven't forgotten about them, I just don't have the time right now to action any of them. This plugin is one of the most complicated I have written and needs a significant chunk of time in order to make any changes to it. Which I don't have for the next few weeks at the very least - when or if that changes I can consider revisiting it.

So I'm not saying this will "never" be fixed, but right now it won't happen in the very short term. Not unless someone else out there wants to step in and supply a patch for it themselves. Sorry but that is just the way it is at the moment - that I have only ever written one review myself on Goodreads (and it is short enough to not be truncated) does not help your cause as I am not impacted by this limitation personally . In fact I don't use the Sync feature at all - I do all my book manipulation from calibre by just using "Add to Shelf" and never worry about trying to bring review data back in...

[Terisa de morgan]

Hi:

I've just begun to use your plugin and I have a question. Is it possible to get the info about owned books? I know that you need user and book_id, that you can get in a specific column, but I could try to setup it.

[arbje]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

However the problem is that this is another individual call to Goodreads, and as has been documented countless times on this thread there is a real problem with the T&C of Goodreads around how many calls a plugin like this can make.

I understand this problem, we could possibly contact Goodreads to see if they could update their API to allow for full review texts (or maybe just longer to start with).

Originally Posted by kiwidude

I don't know quite know what the solution is from the very brief look into it tonight. I haven't read back on this thread recently but I recall someone asking whether it would be possible to somehow identify only books that have "changed" on a shelf. There is a "date updated" field in the xml that the Goodreads API returns for each book for your review. One possibility is to take that date and store it in your calibre library for each book (in some hidden data you don't need to worry about), and then compare that the next time you sync with the shelf. So any books which were linked it could lookup the last sync date for, and compare whether the goodreads record has changed, and that way you are only presented with a list of changed books.

That is indeed a great idea, wether or not we see this in light of the review text sync. Having your latest update date would be nice.

Originally Posted by kiwidude

So I'm not saying this will "never" be fixed, but right now it won't happen in the very short term. Not unless someone else out there wants to step in and supply a patch for it themselves.

Well, I'm willing to have a look to see what I can assist with. Is this plugin open-source (I didn't immediately find anything about this, so I'm guessing 'no')?