[GUI Plugin] Kindle Collections (old)

[CWatkinsNash]

Originally Posted by SingleEyePhotos

Uh-oh... That was it - thank you C. Watkins-Nash! I think the 1st post on this thread specifically said to pick the menu item 'manage collections' , at least when I started - maybe it's been changed now to be more clear. If not - hint, hint...

LOL I have no idea if the first post said that or not (right now it's correct) - I was just so eager the first time I installed the plugin, I got excited and selected the first thing that looked right - which was the wrong one. That's why I recognized your issue immediately.

Right now I'm in the middle of reorganizing my library. I wanted to take advantage of the new page number feature in calibre, so I decided to just reset the Kindle to factory settings, re-download active content from my archive and then copy all my calibre-managed books back. That way I'm also cleaning out any old unneeded index files and other stuff. Since it was like a clean start, I figured it was a good time to make some tag/collection changes and housekeeping. I can promise you - if I did not have this plugin to manage my collections, I would not be doing this right now.

[nynaevelan]

Originally Posted by SingleEyePhotos

1. The plugin will only add books that are 'on device' to collections. So, if you have some books in your library that are not on the device, they won't end up in collections. That bit me because about 25% of my books, for whatever reason, were on the device, but Calibre didn't recognize them as 'on device'. I tried sending those books to the device, but it only made duplicates, and if I deleted one (the old one), Calibre said that they weren't on the device any more. I finally took a deep breath, crossed my fingers, and deleted ALL books from my device. I tried running the plugin and kept getting an error. After a few tests, I realized that the books MUST be on the device, not just in the library. Once I loaded all the books to the device, which took some time but went without incident, the error disappeared.

I too have run into this problem but it was usually caused by a crash in Calibre or something that I did, not the plugin. However I was able to recover from the problem by deleting the metadata.calibre file from the kindle rather than deleting the books. Don't forget to have Calibre closed when you do this.

Nyn

[meme]

Originally Posted by SingleEyePhotos

Uh-oh... That was it - thank you C. Watkins-Nash! I think the 1st post on this thread specifically said to pick the menu item 'manage collections' , at least when I started - maybe it's been changed now to be more clear. If not - hint, hint...

Nope, didn't mention 'Manage Collections' in the original post - but I can see why people would use it - when I first saw it I thought I had a typo in the code

Since feedback on the plugin has been requested several times in this thread, I'll provide my experiences and the things I noted.
1. The plugin will only add books that are 'on device' to collections. So, if you have some books in your library that are not on the device, they won't end up in collections. That bit me because about 25% of my books, for whatever reason, were on the device, but Calibre didn't recognize them as 'on device'. I tried sending those books to the device, but it only made duplicates, and if I deleted one (the old one), Calibre said that they weren't on the device any more. I finally took a deep breath, crossed my fingers, and deleted ALL books from my device. I tried running the plugin and kept getting an error. After a few tests, I realized that the books MUST be on the device, not just in the library. Once I loaded all the books to the device, which took some time but went without incident, the error disappeared.

Yep, Kindle will only put books into its collections if they actually exist on the Kindle (when you restart it does a sanity check of what you put there and cleans things up). So when you use the plugin to create collections, it only looks at books that are both on the device and in library.

I've had the issue of sending books to the Kindle twice and getting duplicates - I think the UUIDs don't match. I haven't really looked into it - my Kindle is currently a complete mess of books and collections I'm testing with

Hopefully the plugin's error message was clear that you need to send books to the device - if not, it will be in the next version.

2. Once the issue in #1 was cleared, the plugin worked exactly as described. No problems whatsoever. I did end up with some books that were not in collections, but after thinking about it a bit, I determined that that was a function of incorrect metadata in the library, not the plugin. I deleted them and updated the metadata, then re-did the plugin. That corrected the problem.

Again, hopefully there was a warning about the books that didn't go into collections - it should tell you to reconvert them, etc. I think I'll move those warnings to the top of the report

3. I had a custom 'Collection' column set up, and used that for the plugin. I used that column to mark the ORIGINAL collection the book was in, and used the '+' indicator for the Calibre catalog functon to mark books as read. I would have liked to point the plugin to the Collection column and somehow tell it that if there was a tag '+' to change the data in that column to Already Read. But I couldn't figure that out, and ended up adding 'Already Read' to my Collection column. I think it would be nice if the catalog and collection plugins could somehow be integrated. I didn't want collections built from tags (except for '+'), and I didn't want books listed in 2 collections (Already Read and the original genre collection).

Sounds like you need a new custom column that uses a template that checks if the '+' is set, and if it is puts Already Read, and if not puts the value of the Collection field (or just adds Already Read to the collection, or creates it as collection-Already Read).

To summarize, it took me a while to do the first run-through with the plugin, but once I got those glitches worked out, the plugin was great! I re-did it again today with only 3 new books, and it only took a few minutes from start to finish. So long as I continue to handle the transfer to library and then back to device consistently, going forward, it should be a fairly quick process to update collections using the Calibre plugin.

You're welcome

[nynaevelan]

Hi Meme:

I am trying to get the plugin to create a collection for one of my series, and I have it selected to include the series if it is 'The Wheel of Time' but the collection is not being created although all the books are on the kindle, any ideas why it is not working? Here is what my settings look like:



Nyn

[meme]

The best way to diagnose this is to include the top part of the report that shows the settings - much easier than the picture to read.

If its still not clear, run it in debug mode (calibre-debug -g, or calibre-debug -g > out to save it to a file). Look for Checking calibre book... and the particular book - it should say if its including/ignoring it.

[nynaevelan]

This part?

============ Create Kindle Collections Preview Report ============

Never delete or overwrite Kindle collections matching these patterns:
    Amazon

Preserve existing Kindle collections not updated by Calibre:
    True

Ignore prefix when checking if Kindle and Calibre collections are the same:
    True

Ignore case when pattern matching:
    True

Include Calibre columns:

    sectag
        Prefix:         -
        Minimum:        3
        Ignore:         
        Include:        
    series
        Prefix:         _
        Minimum:        1
        Ignore:         
        Include:        The Wheel of Time
    tags
        Prefix:         --
        Minimum:        1
        Ignore:         News
        Include:

[meme]

Well that looks ok. So if your series really is named The Wheel of Time it should get included. Time for debug mode, and then search for a book in the series to see what it says.

I think I might include the book processing details as part of the report at the bottom in the next version - although if its a large collection, it'll be a long list so I'll need to test it - especially since I'll be putting the report into the messagebox details.

[Huku]

Hi meme,

I was so enthusiastic about your plugin that I read and tried almost everything described as functionality :-) And even registered in the forum to ask a question :-)
Something I don't understand is how to make collections by two or more columns not making separate collections for each of the columns but making collections which contain both of them. Ok, that was not very clear :-)
I have:
Title1 Auhtor1
Title2 Auhtor1
Title3 Auhtor1 Series1
Title4 Auhtor1 Series1
Title5 Auhtor1 Series2
Title6 Auhtor1 Series2

And what I am trying to achieve, are the following collections:
Author1
Auhtor1 - Series1
Auhtor1 - Series2

The first collection would contain all books which are not in series(Title1 and Title2), the second collection should contain all books with Series1 (Title3 and Title4).... etc
Is that possible just using the plugin? May be I have to make a custom column in the lib containing both Author and Series? And then make collection by this custom column... Or may be there's a better (automatic) way to do that :-) ?
Thank you.

[nynaevelan]

Originally Posted by meme

The best way to diagnose this is to include the top part of the report that shows the settings - much easier than the picture to read.

If its still not clear, run it in debug mode (calibre-debug -g, or calibre-debug -g > out to save it to a file). Look for Checking calibre book... and the particular book - it should say if its including/ignoring it.

How do I get it to output to a file?

EDIT: Either the debug method worked or there was a typo somewhere in the plugin, when I pasted the exact name of the series into the plugin from the series field, it worked. I am not sure where the problem came from but it is working now and I am 99.99% sure there problem was me and not the plugin. Thanks for your additional assistance.

Nyn

[meme]

Originally Posted by Huku

And what I am trying to achieve, are the following collections:
Author1
Auhtor1 - Series1
Auhtor1 - Series2

The first collection would contain all books which are not in series(Title1 and Title2), the second collection should contain all books with Series1 (Title3 and Title4).... etc

Huku, welcome to Mobileread

The plugin will only create collections from the exact text listed in Calibre columns (with a prefix if you want). So what you need to do is use Calibre to create a custom column to look exactly how you want it. This is a popular request so I think I'll add something to the first post - but for now see this post above: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...&postcount=213

Be aware - this only works on version 0.7.45 of Calibre. version 0.7.46 has a bug in custom columns, and 0.7.44 and earlier didn't save custom column values to the Kindle. (Funnily enough I'll be changing the way I get column info to use the library instead of the Kindle for the next version...)

[Huku]

Originally Posted by meme

Huku, welcome to Mobileread

The plugin will only create collections from the exact text listed in Calibre columns (with a prefix if you want). So what you need to do is use Calibre to create a custom column to look exactly how you want it. This is a popular request so I think I'll add something to the first post - but for now see this post above: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...&postcount=213

Be aware - this only works on version 0.7.45 of Calibre. version 0.7.46 has a bug in custom columns, and 0.7.44 and earlier didn't save custom column values to the Kindle. (Funnily enough I'll be changing the way I get column info to use the library instead of the Kindle for the next version...)

meme, thank you for your answer. Unfortunately I updated to 0.7.46 two days ago. I will check for older versions (0.7.45) and try to make the custom column. What actually is the problem with 0.7.46 ?

[meme]

Just a bug that will be fixed in 0.7.47 according to chaley

[Huku]

Originally Posted by meme

Huku, welcome to Mobileread

The plugin will only create collections from the exact text listed in Calibre columns (with a prefix if you want). So what you need to do is use Calibre to create a custom column to look exactly how you want it. This is a popular request so I think I'll add something to the first post - but for now see this post above: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...&postcount=213

Be aware - this only works on version 0.7.45 of Calibre. version 0.7.46 has a bug in custom columns, and 0.7.44 and earlier didn't save custom column values to the Kindle. (Funnily enough I'll be changing the way I get column info to use the library instead of the Kindle for the next version...)

That works GREAT! Thank you. Now I have all my collections exactly as I want them :-)

[jesscat]

I've been through this entire thread and don't think this has been mentioned - about half the time, after clicking the Create Kindle Collections icon (or whatever it is - I don't have my Kindle connected right now so can't remember the exact wording!), the plug-in does its thing but then Calibre "disappears" - the first few times I thought it had crashed, but then I realized it had been minimized to the system tray (this is windows xp). The first time I click "restore" from the system tray Calibre icon, the plug-in report (txt file) appears; then when I click "restore" again Calibre re-opens

The other (roughly) half the time, this doesn't happen - the report just appears over the open Calibre application when the plug-in is done running.

This isn't an enormous problem, though it's kind of annoying - but it seems like it shouldn't be happening. Any thoughts about why or ideas about fixing it?

Other than that, I'm having no issues at all; definitely find this a very useful and welcome plug-in!

[meme]

I'll test it out, although in the next version of the plugin I change the way the report is done so it may not have this minimize/restore issue - I'll compare.