|
I spent the weekend thinking about what I personally would want from something like this. My conclusion is that *I* want something that cross-references books and authors, using author as the pivotable field. By this I mean I want to click on a book and see in my side panel:
- all the authors of that book (usually 1, but often more).
- for a selected author side panel, all the books by that author.
- some information about the selected author.
- to be able to click on a book in the list and have it be selected in the library view, changing the display in the box to the authors of the just-selected book, one of which will be the previously selected author.
This isn't an authors database, because it is still mostly book-centric. The model is "books have authors" (calibre's current model), not "authors have books". For this reason it shows information about the currently-selected book. However, because the info pane is author-centric, it lets one quickly browse books by any one of the authors of the selected book.
I have built a prototype to see how it behaves. There is much the prototype does not do, such as editing the information. It is not currently possible to get to this display from the tag browser; it should be possible to change the display by selecting an author. I haven't actually changed the database; the image of Mr Verne is hard-coded.
I will think more tonight about whether this is useful enough to finish. I am not convinced. One can do much of this using search and the library view, albeit with more typing. For example, seeing the authors of a book is trivial, but searching for books by a first or second second author is not. Seeing all the books by a given author is a trivial search, but switching between lists of books by first/second author is not. The author picture is eye-candy, something I don't particularly care about but wouldn't throw away. Notes about the author are more useful for me, particularly to note books I want to procure in the future. The 'mental model' behind the information matches mine, but I have no idea if my model is common enough to avoid a lot of controversy.
The pane is non-modal, not "always on top". One can either manually layout the screen so both are visible or use the equivalent of ALT-Tab to switch between the library and the pane, letting it hide behind my library view. I use the latter, letting it hide behind the main calibre window as I work.
Comments?
(Note: the image is of my test library, which is a total mess. I use it to do bizarre things to see what I can break.)
|