[kiwidude]

I've seen a number of cases of inconsistency between the search results from the Goodreads metadata plugin and what that Goodreads Sync feature can do. It has been too long since I looked at the code in both to remember exactly what differs. But I have noticed a number of edge cases where the metadata plugin will pick the wrong book in the series (because Goodreads is returning the order of the search results incorrectly) - whereas if you use the Goodreads Sync plugin to link the book then you can manually choose the right one from the results. There were definitely a lot of cases where I thought "if it chose the first identical match rather than the first result from Goodreads" then it would get a better result.

In regards to the book descriptions - I have found that different editions on Goodreads have differing amounts of metadata. So sometimes switching edition using the Link feature will get you to one that has the metadata you want.

There is definitely room for improvement in the whole metadata process. The only sources I use are Fantastic Fiction and Goodreads. I would like an enhancement for the Edit Metadata dialog to let me choose which metadata it uses from when there are combined sources - e.g. take the description from FF but the tags from Goodreads in this particular case. It has to be a book by book decision. FF all too often has the Audio edition metadata which is annoying and the lack of control other than disabling all other metadata plugins is not ideal. I think in some cases it just decides metadata like comments based on the length (longest wins) but has been way too long since I last looked.

Of course the other thing that would be nice would be to have the metadata plugin always prioritise a "Kindle" or "ebook" edition, but that would make the plugin orders of magnitude slower. Also Goodreads data for a lot of books is very messy - there are multiple Kindle editions with varying quality of data associated with them etc.