[Efreak]

Originally Posted by davidfor

Sorry, but this is working as designed. The Goodreads sync plugin is not used to fetch the metadata for the book. This is done through the standard metadata download function of calibre. You also need to install the Goodread Metadata Source. This reads the books page and extracts the metadata, including the series info if it is available. That will also set the Goodreads identifier for the book.

You can use the Goodreads Sync plugin to set the identifier. Then you need to use the metadata download to get the full metadata. In this case, the metadata download will use the identifier to get the page rather than doing a search using the title and author. Other than that, it works the same.

My process is:

1. Add the new book to calibre. I am usually adding a format, but occasionally add an empty book.
2. Make sure the author and title are correct, or at least close enough that they will match the metadata sources.
3. Use the metadatata download. I normally do this for a single book and choose the results that match best.
4. If the metadata source I chose was not Goodreads, then I won't have a good reads identifier. I use Goodreads Sync to find the book and get an identifier.
5. If the book has multiple editions, use Goodreads Sync to choose the best edition.
6. Add the book to the appropriate Goodreads shelf. Though I tend to do this when I start reading the book.

I will occasionally do the metadata download step after setting the Goodreads identifier. The Goodreads Sync plugin can show more book choices if the title and author aren't correct. But, I am just as likely to search the site and manually set the identifier before doing the metadata download.

I am not fetching metadata. I am syncing from the goodreads shelf and having it create empty entries for non-existing books. I do not care about metadata like publisher, date, etc--just the name and author that are usually pulled in by the sync plugin when creating a new entry. There are no actual book files in this library; I only use it to track other books that I'm currently reading. When I sync from the shelf, it doesn't wasn't importing an entry at all, instead it was giving me an error and refusing to import that entry. You can see most of what I'm talking about here. However, having updated Calibre since the original post, it seems to be adding the entry and setting the title to Unknown (as you can see in the video), which is good enough for me. That could/should probably be fixed, but it doesn't break the plugin anymore, so my issue I guess is fixed somehow by Calibre itself?