Custom GUI plugins for Calibre here...

[kiwidude]

Download, screenshots and features available listed on the original forum post. You will need Calibre 0.7.42 or later to use this plugin fully.

Note to users upgrading from earlier versions:
As I have mentioned elsewhere on this thread this version of the plugin no longer uses "tweaks". So any customised menus you had created there will be ignored. So to be a tidy kiwi you should in fact go ahead and delete your stip_search_internet_menus tweaks value if you had created it.

Instead all of the configuration for this plugin is done via it's own configuration dialog. Hopefully the 100+ website links I have preconfigured with this plugin cover most user's requirements with minimal effort on your part to quickly recreate anything you have already. And that the loads of new features make it worth your while to upgrade...

Note to everyone who PM'd me recently for pre-release versions:
Please go ahead and grab the final zip version above. There were some last minute changes. You should not lose any menu settings you had already made by upgrading again.

Special thanks again to chaley, Kovid, Bertrand and everyone else who helped either code review, test or contribute urls to the predefined list it now comes with.

[JLYates]

I am the person who is a total idiot on computers. I can turn it on and off, do some simple things and that is it. My son has threatened to start charging me for straightening out my computer as I constantly doing something wrong and have no idea of what button I touched. He is not an expert but he can figure some stuff out.

I have no trouble surfing the net but the internal aspect, it is all Greek to me what you guys are saying.

All I want to do is fix it so that books I buy (and have bought) that are DRM'd can be fixed so I can read them and do whatever is needed on Calibre. So, I see all of the links for the plugins at the beginning of the thread and am confused, do I download them all (really my son does) or just certain ones?
I have a fairly good IQ (132) in general stuff, but in computer my IQ would be around 40 if not lower.
I will be reading books for pleasure, reading PDF files of my field (psychology), mabye textbooks for college classes (working on Thesis then on to PhD classes).
I prefer to read series in my pleasure reading (paranormal), some classics and some stand alone books (a wide variety of genres). I have a Sony 900 if that helps.

Simple words, please. Not computer speak. I have read every post and 99.9% of it doesn't make sense to me.



for any help you can give me.

[itimpi]

Just a point - none of the plugins are for DRM removal, they are all for very specific issues and I suspect if any of them were going to be of use to you you would realise that you needed them!

Note that discussion of DRM removal is not allowed under Mobileread forum rules, so answers to that have to be obtained elsewhere.

[nickdma]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Thanks for continuing the legwork on this one and also to Kovid for his thoughts which have confirmed a few things. ...

I lack the skills to write the code, but I'm willing to do the legwork to make it happen if someone else is able to code it

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Look forward to any clarification you are able to glean on that throughput stuff and see what happens...

Originally Posted by GoodReads

We're doing some averaging, any simple goodreads client is fine. Spiders are typically not acceptable.

If you'd doing over 60 requests a minute, this is an issue, but typically we'll warn you before banning.

They vaguely answered me. I think the API statement is there as a KYA to give them a reason to ban an app for abuse, especially since they reference "spiders" in the reply. I think they could have used better wording, since any popular app in use by a sufficient number of users will exceed that threshold.

While I suspect a GoodReads plugin such as this would be popular with Calibre, and I suspect Calibre is popular, I find it hard to imagine it would appear on GoodRead's radar as abusive. If anything, it should bring additional traffic to their site, as users would still need to go there to SEE their shelves.

[garcle]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Download, screenshots and features available listed on the original forum post. You will need Calibre 0.7.42 or later to use this plugin fully.

Special thanks again to chaley, Kovid, Bertrand and everyone else who helped either code review, test or contribute urls to the predefined list it now comes with.

Kudos and Props to Kiwi and the gang for the 1.4 update, this is really slick work and a joy and pleasure to use!

[kiwidude]

Originally Posted by JLYates

All I want to do is fix it so that books I buy (and have bought) that are DRM'd can be fixed so I can read them and do whatever is needed on Calibre. So, I see all of the links for the plugins at the beginning of the thread and am confused, do I download them all (really my son does) or just certain ones?

I'm afraid this thread will be of no use to you for what you want to do. It contains only plugins related to adding new functionality to right-click menus and toolbars in Calibre. None of these plugins are in any way related to removing DRM. If you search the internet you may come across a more helpful answer but due to forum rules we can't discuss it in any way further here.

EDIT: Apologies to itimpi - I started writing something different then realised I have ended up saying pretty much the same as you did. Doh!

[kiwidude]

Originally Posted by nickdma

They vaguely answered me. I think the API statement is there as a KYA to give them a reason to ban an app for abuse, especially since they reference "spiders" in the reply. I think they could have used better wording, since any popular app in use by a sufficient number of users will exceed that threshold.

While I suspect a GoodReads plugin such as this would be popular with Calibre, and I suspect Calibre is popular, I find it hard to imagine it would appear on GoodRead's radar as abusive. If anything, it should bring additional traffic to their site, as users would still need to go there to SEE their shelves.

I agree that provided the plugin does not end up "abusing" their API it would be in their interests to have more people coming to their website by the attraction of using it. As I have read in a number of forum posts it is not on Calibre's roadmap to incorporate social features directly (which is perfectly understandable, it has all but the kitchen sink in its feature list already). Having a hook to a website like GoodReads which is explicitly for this purpose should be a nice compromise.

If this feature was developed as an optional GUI plugin like others in this thread rather than coming with Calibre by default then the actual volume of user hits will be miniscule by comparison. I can't help but wonder if perhaps part of Kovid's previous investigation was looking into GoodReads as a metadata reader source, which would most definitely hit the volume issues.

So - sounds like it might be feasible to give it a try then. I have a few other plugins I am in the process of updating so won't look into it further for a few days but provided no-one else jumps in first I don't mind taking it on as a challenge. I could well end up bugging a few people like Kovid/chaley again for words of wisdom such as how to include a library in a plugin though

[JLYates]

"Note that discussion of DRM removal is not allowed under Mobileread forum rules, so answers to that have to be obtained elsewhere"

This is where my lack of understanding of computer speak comes in. Doesn't these plugins help Calibre to work better with DRM'd books so that I can read the books?

I'm not asking MR to help me remove the DRM, that I know is not allowed, but help me be able to read the books.

I learned that I had to download the ADE, have done that. I need to do something with the .ascm (?) and so am going to do that.

I read somewhere, not sure here or elsewhere, that Calibre has some problems with DRM'd books. Imaging or something. That to get them to be able to read the DRM'd books you need to put in a plugin. I am figuring that it is something like a patch I had to get with a software I bought a few years ago to get it to work with something, MS sent it to me to help it work.

Aren't these plugins doing something similar? Letting Calibre work better with DRM'd books so that my reader can read them? If so, then what ones do I need to use?

If I am getting the wrong idea, I'm sorry.

[kiwidude]

Originally Posted by JLYates

I read somewhere, not sure here or elsewhere, that Calibre has some problems with DRM'd books. Imaging or something. That to get them to be able to read the DRM'd books you need to put in a plugin. I am figuring that it is something like a patch I had to get with a software I bought a few years ago to get it to work with something, MS sent it to me to help it work.

Aren't these plugins doing something similar? Letting Calibre work better with DRM'd books so that my reader can read them? If so, then what ones do I need to use?

If I am getting the wrong idea, I'm sorry.

There are different types of plugins for Calibre. Some help with reading information about books (such as lookups on ISBN, reading data from Amazon etc). Some help with converting books. In this thread we only discuss plugins that add features to the GUI.

As two of us have now said, what we cannot do is talk further about DRM here or anything related to a Calibre plugin that may help with removing it. I'm sorry if this seems unhelpful and frustrating, but it is the rules of this particular forum.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by JLYates

If I am getting the wrong idea, I'm sorry.

You are getting the wrong idea, none of these plugins in this thread have anything to do with DRM. It seems that the questions you need help with have nothing to do with this GUI plugin thread. Please open a new thread (see attached) with any specific questions you might need help with.

[kiwidude]

Download, screenshots and features available listed on the original forum post. You will need Calibre 0.7.42 or later to use this plugin fully.

Note to users upgrading from earlier versions:
As I have mentioned elsewhere on this thread this version of the plugin no longer uses "tweaks". So any customised menus you had created there will be ignored. So to be a tidy kiwi you should in fact go ahead and delete your ofep_open_with_menus or owp_open_with_menus tweaks value (depending on version you had installed) if you had created it.

Instead all of the configuration for this plugin is now done via it's own configuration dialog. I've preconfigured a number of common applications in the list with default application paths for Windows 32-bit and 64-bit. Hopefully this may be useful to some or require minor tweaking for others with different versions or install locations. You can of course add your own applications to the list.

Besides the configuration dialog, menus are now more dynamic, disabled as required based on the selected row.

Note to everyone who PM'd me recently for pre-release versions:
Please go ahead and grab the final zip version above. There were some last minute changes. You should not lose any menu settings you had already made by upgrading again.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Note to everyone who PM'd me recently for pre-release versions:

When I go to use the new Open With plugin I get the below repeatable error every time I right click a empty book. My goal is to open the cover in PSP but I never get to click on the menu item. As soon as the menu starts to open I get the below error. Once I close the error window the open with sub-menu is there and I can use that sub-menu as would be expected. But every time I start to look at the open with menu in an empty book the below errors occurs.

ERROR: ERROR: Unhandled exception: <b>AttributeError</b>:'NoneType' object has no attribute 'split'

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\My Dropbox\CalibreConfig\plugins\Open With.zip\open_with_plugin_code.py", line 690, in about_to_show_menu
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'split'

Switching back to the version you PM'd me eliminates the error.

[kovidgoyal]

@kiwidude: db.formats will return None when no formats are available, an annoying holdover from legacy code.

[kiwidude]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

@kiwidude: db.formats will return None when no formats are available, an annoying holdover from legacy code.

Oops, sorry about that, I didnt test it on any books with no formats. New version up shortly.

EDIT: New zip version up, apologies for the inconvenience. Rushed to make one last change and get it up when I shouldn't have - my young nephews here pestering me to help them paint a wooden truck and I took some shortcuts which bit me.

[dasimser]

Kiwidude,

Love the new versions of the Search the Internet and Open with plugins. I do have one suggestion/request for the Open with plugin. For a book with no formats, it still should be possible to edit the cover. I frequently use empty books to track my pBooks, audio books and books on my wishlist, and it would be nice to be able to edit their covers too.

I had used the previous Open with plugin, but I don't recall if it had this ability or not.

Thanks again for all the great work!

Dave.