Quote:
Originally Posted by glennWilliams
just as a quick note: my interest in writing an extension is to handle short stories. single author collections, anthologies etc
its about the handling of a books contents, which is absolutely outside the core app.
im just interested if anyone else would use something like this
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I'm new to this forum (though I've used Calibre for a number of years), and I approached this forum specifically to investigate the anthology issue. I would be very interested in any anthology extension, and would be using it extensively.
Terminology note: To avoid confusion. in this posting I use the word title for a book/ebook title, and story for a single story within an anthology. Anthology is a type of book containing multiple stories.
I currently have a Kindle touch with a good collection of ebooks, and because I am planning to move, I thought as I boxed the books up for the move would be a good time to add my print books to my Calibre database,
I then came across a problem with anthologies, which I was unable to solve (unless this thread has been resolved but not documented on the forum).
To illustrate the problem, an example: Print book ISBN 038794950X title The Mathematical Magpie, editor Clifton Fadiman. This contains a famous short story which I re-read upon occasion, The Nine Billion Names of God, by Arthur C Clarke (and fifteen other stories by multiple authors). The story is also contained in an anthology titled The Nine Billion Names of God, but I don't own that book!
What I would like to see in Calibre is, when I select the author Arthur C Clarke, the story The Nine Billion Names of God and the book it is contained in listed. (I would also like to see the story listed when Calibre generates a Calibre catalogue, but this is less important)
There are at least 3 reasons why it would be of value
1) I want to find a story to re-read, and I can't remember the anthology editor/title.
2) I want to compare the titles/stories I own against an author's bibliography, as there may be short stories I want to acquire.
3) There is a new anthology published, and I want to decide whether to buy it. If I already own 9 out of the 12 story, it may not be worth buying the anthology for the 3 stories I haven't read.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
But what's the problem with just listing all the authors in the authors field, in order of significance? And adding a note in the comments field (or a dedicated custom column you create) about any special role any of the authors might have had?
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I can see two problems with Kovid's suggestion.
Firstly, it is vulnerable to damage. If I manually updated the metadata as he suggested, and subsequently used the download metadata function (if I wanted to add ratings, for example) Calibre would overwrite the list of author names I typed in with the editor name it populated from Google or Amazon, destroying the database links I would rely on.
Secondly, since the individual story titles are not fields in the calibre database, Kovid's suggestion meets the reasons I have for using anthology data poorly -> (1) can be achieved, but only be drilling down into the metadata for every book, as a column listing a dozen titles (probably average for an anthology) would make the library display unmanageable, as the new field (or re-used comments field) would take up a dozen lines of screen. (2) suffers from the same problems as (1), but is needed far less frequently, so not such a serious impact. (3) would be near unmanageable, as it would require the user to suffer the problems of (1) repeated for each author who contributed to the anthology.
I would be very interested to hear from glennWilliams and kovidgoyal on this subject, as I am planning a project to add 15,000 print books to my 600 ebooks on my Calibre database, and (like any developer) I am determining the best strategy
before starting the work.