Plugin ideas... add yours here

[roloway]

hi calibre community,
while organizing my sf-collection and classics collection, I thought it'd be nice to be able to sort your books according to lists.
For example: The plugin has several lists by default included like the top 100 sf books or must read top 100 classics. They can vary from reading lists for college or high school or university courses or the NY-Times top 10 or even user generated lists.
Even better would be a hub to download and share these lists.
The plugin should be able to display the full lists, with the books I have in my collection, the ones I have not and maybe some field for ticking off the ones I've read. Maybe there could also be some device interaction... so that one could send all the books off a certain list to the device or only the unread ones.
That would really kickass and probably help many students. If there's already something like that (especially something with integrated or downloadable lists), please let me know.
Let me know what you think.
cheers

[kiwidude]

@roloway, welcome to MobileRead.

The closest existing plugin to this is the "Reading List" plugin which you can find in this forum. With that plugin you can build your own lists of items to send to your device or store a preferred reading order.

However it has no external integration for sharing with other users - you cannot give your list to someone else or import someone elses. There are a whole bunch of issues you would have to figure out answers to. Things like how does a book on someone else's list get "matched" against a book in your calibre library (there would have to be some kind of manual comparison or "fuzzy" search). There is no single "id" that you can use to automatically match books between different libraries and book editions.

Also if you are sharing publicly you would have to have some hosting involved for the "hub", and preferably some kind of search facility so you could find lists of interest etc. Perhaps something along the lines of Amazon listopia or something.

It is a very nice idea though - I would love to be able to download a list of people's favourite scifi/fantasy/classic titles and compare that against my library to see what else I should be buying.

[ujujinsan]

Is there? Was there? Will there ever be?
A plugin that lets you view ebooks not in the usual list style with columns but in a way such as in Adobe Digital Editions: an array of covers?
like so:
One could set number covers in rows and columns.


It's kinda tedious to search again and again for the same titles or by viewing a category and then searching the list for a title. It would be much easier to search in this matter (for me anyway) .

Any thoughts?

Edit:
In the meantime I've submitted an enhancement request:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/843723

Edit:
Apparently it's on the TODO list.

[roloway]

@plugin-wizard kiwidude :-)
Thanks for the heads-up. Now that you explained it, it sounds pretty complicated. The problem with the centralized "Hub" could be circumvented, if the plugin accepted (or was able to parse) user generated txt, excel or html files or something like that (numbers and titles). This forum has a nice "recommended reading" section where users could upload their list files (maybe the plugin could produce these based on their choice, so there would be only one predefined format involved). Maybe the plugin could also have the ability to extract lists from webpages (universities, sf-organizations that have top100 lists online, the NY-Times) just like the metadata from other sources, but that would be the icing on the cake. Maybe one could get the some form of top100 from official vendors also just like the metadata.
anyway, this is just a suggestion.
Thanks for zour plugins and keep up the good work.

[kiwidude]

@ujujinsan - welcome to MR. You are not the first to request that kind of cover view, it has been requested in the other forums here a few times if you do a search there. The last I heard it is on Kovid's wishlist to add to Calibre one day, but there is no timeframe for it happening. It isn't really practical to implement this as a plugin imho.

@roloway - I haven't done much other than "maintain" my plugins for a while due to time constraints but this idea is definitely something I would make use of so it is still lurking in the back of my mind. Forgetting the complications of scraping lists from the web for the moment, just trying to support being able to clipboard paste in a list of title/authors and having a button to press for the plugin to try to automatically find matches in your library where it can to show what you have. I can see it all getting very complicated fairly quickly though but I haven't had time to sit down and think it through.

It would be nice perhaps to incorporate it into the Reading List plugin somehow, but it would need a lot of changes to do so. Sure would be nice to have though, excellent suggestion.

[Vandeervecken]

A plug-in I would love to see would be one that updates metadata, cover etc from Calibre to your Kindle. To do so now I have to change it on Calibre, deleted the book from my Kindle, and then put the book back on. Just seems an "Update Data" plug-in would be easier.

[Debby]

I am working on cleaning up a library that is very unorganized for my cousin. Every file is saved as a number and the title and author are not importing as expected. The ISBN plugin has been a tremendous time saver.

Would it be possible to have something similar to ISBN plugin that reads the Title and Author? As I am going through each book manually, I realized that most books seem to have a page that list the title and author. Of course the challenge is some list the author first, some after the title.

I am probably dreaming that it could be that simple

Regardless, thank you for the ISBN!

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by Debby

Would it be possible to have something similar to ISBN plugin that reads the Title and Author?

If you have the ISBN then set the configure download metadata to fetch Authors and Titles (check marks in those boxes too). Then select, maybe, 50 at a time and download just metadata to fill in your Author and Title based on the isbn number.

[Debby]

Sorry if I wasn't clear. Many of the books have been scanned. In order to save steps, she only copied the title page or in other cases it is not legible. For those that did have the ISBN, the ISBN plugin has been a tremendous time saver, which then made me realize if the same could only be done for the title and author.

[kiwidude]

@Debby - no that would not be possible. The ISBN plugin only works because it is constrained to look for a sequence of numbers, that conform to a particular standard (certain prefixes, specific number of digits etc). Even then it works on a "best guess" scenario.

However when it comes to title and author, there are no "rules" as to how they can be found, they could be on any page and frequently will be graphical images rather than text.

[bauerhjb]

I have the Metadata Source Plugins for Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Fant.Fiction and they are are truly terrific. However I was curious if anyone could, would or has created one that pulled information from AllRomance and Fictionwise? Amazon has been really good recently about adding older ebooks but I have been buying ebooks for a while and find that lots of them are still not in their catalogs. Thanks in advance for any help. (I'm not new to MobileReads/Calibre, I usually just "lurk", but this is my first inquiry, so forgiveness is requested.)
Oh yes, I also wanted to give the creator and developers of calibre a HUGH thank you for this program. It took me a while but once I got the "hang" of it I totally fell in love with it. Please, please keep up the great work you all do!

[schuster]

request:

is this possible?

after conversion in many books the pictures are mirrored/twisted.
the plug-in open the book and make's the same again to get the right orientation of the pic's. most pic's are only mirrored, rarely one is color inverted. so it is enough to mirror it back.

it would make it easier to get clean files. i don't know if it is possible to detect if the pic is inverted also. but for first mirroring would greatly help and did save a lot of time.

thanx
olaf

[godzilla8nj]

I use calibre-server to host my family's "ebookshelf" website. I would be very interested in a plugin that would enable a password-protected Calibre management area that would allow me to login and upload ebooks, edit metadata, start conversions, etc.

Now I either have to be sitting at the server machine, remoting into the desktop, or using ssh and the command line options. None of these is optimal.

[LikeBooks]

(Page 9/10)[QUOTE=drMerry;1516470]I'm thinking about creating a 'meta author' plugin.

Does someone have interest in a plugin like this.
__________
Of course, yes! I´ve already been thinking about such plugin, too.
It would be nice like this: (my draft; in new window; maybe better in new subTab) http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images...uthormeta.jpg/
(similar to Edit Metadata)
______
"04-29-2011, 03:55 PM #137
kiwidude: ... I can get all the author info I want from a right-click of Search the Internet plugin..."
______
Yes, it is a really nice plugin, but not as comfortable as a new topic.
(Why do we download bookcover (e.g.) ? Because we like it. It´s... ...beautiful^^.
-So pics/information of/about the authors are.)
It would be really nice to have this opinion integrated in Calibre.

[khonshu]

First idea: A tag generator, similar to the cloud tag generators seen on many sites nowadays. Most of you seem to be using calibre with fiction ebooks where the number of tags is lower (usually) that, for example, in my own case. I am using it to clasify a vast collection of ebooks about computers, operating systems, web design, programming... you know... and tagging a book like for example "Mastering Apache, PHP and MySQL" where the main topic may be web development, programing, database management... well... hope you understand me... a pluging that reads the book counting word frequency and returns a list of the most frequent words (lets say 50 words) would be very useful to me... and hope that for someone else... if in addition it discard common words of the language, has support for different languages... well... don't wanna ask too much...

Second idea: An ISBN grabber... most of my ebooks' metadata is missing... half of them were authored by someone called User and the other half are titled Document1... sure you know what I'm talking about... I can retrieve all the metadata I need with Calibre but it is incredibly faster when I got the ISBN. Would it be too difficult to make a pluging to read the ebook searching for the ISBN?

Thank you very much for your attention and excuse my English... not my mother language.