[Metadata Source Plugin] Fantastic Fiction

[kiwidude]

Changes in this release:

• Updated for changes to FantasticFiction website for how to scrape the search results

[JohnnyBook]

Love the Plugin as FF is one of my favorite sites. (Thats the good news, now here comes the bad.... HAH, of course you knew there had to be a Bad right?)

I see the Plugin now supports getting the Genre from FF to add to Metadata. But it does Genre -> Tags.

IS there any possibility of getting the plugin to put the Genre into the Genre Column in Calibre? Or is Calibre not supporting that ability?

[kiwidude]

It is calibre not supporting that ability. There's similar posts about this subject on the Goodreads thread, and a whole thread dedicated to it in the development forum.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by JohnnyBook

IS there any possibility of getting the plugin to put the Genre into the Genre Column in Calibre? Or is Calibre not supporting that ability?

Unless I'm mistaken there is no "genre" column in calibre. In order to see a "genre" column it had to be added as a custom column by the user and calibre currently does not support Metadata Plugins writing to custom columns.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by dwanthny

Unless I'm mistaken there is no "genre" column in calibre. In order to see a "genre" column it had to be added as a custom column by the user and calibre currently does not support Metadata Plugins writing to custom columns.

Walt
I find this confusing as the 'Count Pages' PI writes to 1 or 2 custom columns.
This may be just a limitation of this PI or there is a programmatic conflict (If you use A features, then you can't do B features)

[kiwidude]

@theducks - it is a limitation of metadata download plugins. A gui plugin like Count Pages or Goodreads Sync has no such limitation.

Metadata download plugins do not have responsibility themselves for saving data to the database. Instead they just return some data in a structure that calibre code then merges across metadata plugins and then saves. So no matter what a metadata plugin does in terms of "attempting" to pass back custom column data, the core calibre code just ignores it because it knows nothing about it.

[JohnnyBook]

Originally Posted by dwanthny

Unless I'm mistaken there is no "genre" column in calibre. In order to see a "genre" column it had to be added as a custom column by the user and calibre currently does not support Metadata Plugins writing to custom columns.

No "Genre" Column? I have had a Genre column in my Library forever.
Ok, I checked. when making a New Library, Calibre does NOT create a "Genre" column. I guess I must have created my Originally Library off of someone else's Library template which included the "Genre" column. I did not realize it was a custom column.

[kiwidude]

Changes in this release:

• Updated for further changes to FantasticFiction website for lookups by ISBN

[dandichka]

Originally Posted by JohnnyBook

No "Genre" Column? I have had a Genre column in my Library forever.

It has always seemed to me the Genre column should be standard in Calibre. It's a lot easier to hide it if you don't want to use it than it is for a new user to set it up.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by dandichka

It has always seemed to me the Genre column should be standard in Calibre. It's a lot easier to hide it if you don't want to use it than it is for a new user to set it up.

Essentially the genre column is standard in calibre, it is just called the tags column. Tags are the generic industry metadata standard for applying labels to items in the internet and so has been the default value for what you call the genre column.

Amazon.com was one of the first sites calibre used where you could grab the "tags folks assigned to books" from the bottom of any book page. Since then sites like the Sony book store and Barnes and Noble book stores have called them Subjects. While Goodreads and Fantastic Fiction now label their books by Genre. Currently it seems that Tags, Subjects, or Genre in the land of eBook metadata are roughly synonymous.

[dandichka]

Originally Posted by dwanthny

Essentially the genre column is standard in calibre, it is just called the tags column. Tags are the generic industry metadata standard for applying labels to items in the internet and so has been the default value for what you call the genre column.

No, I actually wasn't referring to the tags column, but a hierarchical genre structure such as described in the help files. For instance, a book with genre: Fiction.Historical or Academic.Arts.Painting or just "Sports". The hierarchical categorization can have multiple uses, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that genre classification is the most prevalent.

[Ginnia]

Seems the Fantastic Fiction plugin has recently stopped working in Calibre. Just upgraded Calibre to 0.9.27, but the plugin still does not return any information on books I know are listed in FF. What do you need from me to back this up? Am sending a portion of the update metadata log for "The Long Quiche Goodbye" by Avery Aames.

--------------------------------

Running identify query with parameters:
{u'authors': [u'Avery Aames'], u'identifiers': {u'amazon': u'1445837102', u'google': u'sN5buAAACAAJ', u'isbn': u'9781445837109', u'ff': u'a/avery-aames/long-quiche-goodbye'}, u'timeout': 30, u'title': u'The Long Quiche Goodbye'}
Using plugins: Fantastic Fiction, Google, Amazon.com, ISBNDB
The log from individual plugins is below

****************************** Fantastic Fiction ******************************
Request extra headers: [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.249.78 Safari/532.5')]
Found 0 results
Downloading from Fantastic Fiction took 0.459000110626
FantasticFiction url: u'http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/a/avery-aames/long-quiche-goodbye.htm'
Could not find title/authors/Fantastic Fiction id for u'http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/a/avery-aames/long-quiche-goodbye.htm'
Fantastic Fiction: u'a/avery-aames/long-quiche-goodbye' Title: 'The Long Quiche Goodbye' Authors: None

************************************************** ******************************

[kiwidude]

@Ginnia - perhaps they just made a change to their website. I am seeing the same problem on that book. Will need to take a look into what they have changed...

[kiwidude]

Changes in this release:

• Fix for change to FF website where not picking up authors correctly

[DoctorOhh]

Thank you!