MobileRead Forums - View Single Post

kovidgoyal · 06-20-2011, 05:06 PM

@kiwidude and chaley:

Lots of work

1) I like the idea of having the book details panel switch between book and author view when clicking the author name rather than a popup.

2) IMO the vast majority of people are going to want to lookup info about an author, not maintain it themselves.

2a) Therefore the author info panel should by default automatically show the authors' pic and brief bio, scraped from wikipedia and cached into the db. With a link to the full page. This scraping will happen on demand the first time author info is requested for that author.

2b) There should be a button to allow the user to edit the picture and bio as needed.

2c) This is going to need a new table in the db with the columns:

thumbnail, url, comments

2d) There's no easy way to backup and restore this data.

Most importantly: I am not volunteering to do this, if it were up to me, I'd just make the author names clickable with a global template that defaults to wikipedia.

06-20-2011, 05:06 PM	#51
kovidgoyal creator of calibre Posts: 45,386 Karma: 27756918 Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Mumbai, India Device: Various	@kiwidude and chaley: Lots of work 1) I like the idea of having the book details panel switch between book and author view when clicking the author name rather than a popup. 2) IMO the vast majority of people are going to want to lookup info about an author, not maintain it themselves. 2a) Therefore the author info panel should by default automatically show the authors' pic and brief bio, scraped from wikipedia and cached into the db. With a link to the full page. This scraping will happen on demand the first time author info is requested for that author. 2b) There should be a button to allow the user to edit the picture and bio as needed. 2c) This is going to need a new table in the db with the columns: thumbnail, url, comments 2d) There's no easy way to backup and restore this data. Most importantly: I am not volunteering to do this, if it were up to me, I'd just make the author names clickable with a global template that defaults to wikipedia.