mobile add from isbn

[goge]

Hello,

There must be many that have a large collection of paper books they would like to manage with calibre, I know I do.

I'm was hoping I could use my phone as an isbn scanner and scan the books in right from the bookshelves, but it seems I would need to bring the books to a computer and type them in by hand or buy a usb scanner.

I looked into the REST api but it only has endpoints to get content out.
I then looked into the smart device driver. I cannot seem to find a message to add from isbn, only create / upload from a file.

The plan is to make a very simple web app that uses https://github.com/EddieLa/JOB to get the isbn and send it through to Calibre.

To do that the best option would be a RESTful endpoint to send the isbn number to, if that's not possible a tcp connection could be used as well. I am willing to build out both the app and endpoint I just don't know where to look for the "Add from isbn" code and what the community would rather have in terms of a restful endpoint or adding to the smart device driver.

Thanks!

[kovidgoyal]

calibre is not a webapp so I dont understand what you mean by a restful endpoint. If you want to add a list of ISBNs as book records to calibre you can do so by right clicking the add books button in the calibre GUI or using the calibredb command line interface.

[goge]

Thanks for the quick reply.

I'll try to clarify.

I'm looking at creating a mobile web app to add books to calibre by scanning isbn barcodes on my phone.

Right not I'm using calibre through the web content server started with calibre-server. If I understand correctly the content server is a cherry-py server. The content server has the rest endpoints

I did not know of the calibredb command line interface so this is great news if I can add books using an ISBN through it. If that's the case I could exec the command through the cherry-py server or make a new server to do the same. I can then add the rest endpoint to the cherry-py server and have my mobile app consume it.

Once again Thanks!

[goge]

So I tried out the calibredb method using

calibredb add --isbn "9780747595823" --empty

This adds an entry for a book with the ISBN but doesn't scrape any of the other information. For instance it doesn't populate the author, title, category, tags...

Am I mistaken in believing that "right clicking the add books button in the calibre GUI" populates the rest of the metadata?

Is there a way I can get calibre to populate the metadata for a new book added by an ISBN?

[goge]

I've found the xISDN class and the sources/identify class that consumes the metadata. However this does not actually add the data to the library. I could make the call to xISDN and then an explicitly call an Add with that meta data but I would like to see how this is currently done in the GUI before doing this.

Could someone help point me to where the meta data returned is saved to the library when the gui action is called?

Thanks!

[eschwartz]

Try it out with a sample ISBN in the GUI -- it adds the books with no metadata and offers to schedule a Metadata Download.

Check src/calibre/gui2/actions/add.py to see how it is handled, specifically, follow the functions genesis() --> add_from_isbn() --> add_isbns() --> do_one_isbn_add()

[goge]

Many thanks!

I'm mobile now but I'll look into when I get to a machine.

[davidfor]

You might want to look at the Import List plugin. It can import a list of books from a CSV file or from a lot of web sites. Plus you can define your own formats or sites to match.

[kovidgoyal]

If you want to download metadata from the command line when adding, you can do so, just chain the appropriate commands, in your case fetch-ebook-metadata --opf and calibredb add and calibredb set_metadata --from-opf

[goge]

That's great! I have the flow of console commands working. Currently it's a simple console app I pass an isbn to and it goes through the flow.

I no longer think adding this to a devices driver or the content server ajax endpoints is the right option. Creating a separate web app to run beside Calibre is probably too much to ask as well. I'm thinking it may be best to create a plugin with the companion scanning app. Has any other plugin been developed to start a simple web server or do tcp communication that I can use as a guide?

Thanks again!

[kovidgoyal]

Not that I know of, but as there are ~ 100 plugins I cant be definitive.

[goge]

I'm having problems spinning up cherrypy inside the plugin. I was able to create a plugin using kovid's template (thanks kovid!). Since I'm running inside the plugin I think I can follow the same process used in add.py.

Is it alright if I use the thread as a sort of dev blog?

So I'm stuck on two parts, I've never worked in cherrypy and only have theoretical knowledge of python.
1: When I try to use the cherrypy's cherrypy.dispatch.MethodDispatcher to create the REST endpoints I get

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "site-packages/calibre/gui2/ui.py", line 226, in initialize
  File "site-packages/calibre/gui2/actions/__init__.py", line 143, in do_genesis
  File "calibre_plugins.mobile_isbn_scanner.ui", line 59, in genesis
  File "site-packages/cherrypy/__init__.py", line 160, in quickstart
  File "site-packages/cherrypy/process/wspbus.py", line 250, in start
ChannelFailures: TypeError('character mapping must return integer, None or unicode',)

2: I can successfully spin up a simple hello world cherrypy server but it blocks the thread stopping Calibre from loading. So I'm going to need to run cherrypy on another thread which is going to take some research.

Thanks!

[goge]

I'm still on this. Some increased work / home life meant I didn't have time to move forward on it but the books can't come out of the boxes until this plugin / feature is functional so I'll continue to work in it and keep with thread updated

[goge]

Sooo... did some work last night. I'm going to have to scrap the plugin idea. It seems I can only access the db in a graphical window... I'm only running the content server on my system. It seems the content server is a wholly separate app.

So I'm going to add the functionality to the LibraryServer. Should I extend the AjaxServer and ContentServer or should I create a new ISBNServer? Does the LibraryServer have a maintainer I should talk to about conventions and best practices?

Thanks!

[kovidgoyal]

The content server most definitely has access to the db, how else would it show you your collection?