It has been over a year since ping said he/she was "
taking a step back from active development in the near future" and over a year since the last commit to
https://github.com/ping/libby-calibre-plugin.
Since then the official release no longer works and requires users to manually load a forked version. This is is non-obvious, I think this is causing issues, especially with new users.
Since no-one else has volunteered, I have put myself forward to
try to
maintain this project. (My username both here and at github is sgmoore and my first name is Stephen) The mods have changed the first message on this thread to allow me to update it. So unless most of you (as users of the plugin) strongly object, my forked version will shortly become the official version and updates available via calibre plugins. If ping should decide to return, then I will have no problem standing down.
But I think it is important to be honest about expectations.
So first the bad news.
I don't think that the downloads feature will ever be restored.
If this feature is essential to you, then I am sorry, but I don't think I can help.
At the moment there is no way to download either magazines or audiobooks and for ebooks the best we can do is open the libbyapp webpage.
I admit I am not the ideal person to maintain this project.
When ping was looking for maintainers, I did not volunteer mainly because I did not consider that I had the necessary skills to do so. In particular
- I have very little experience in Python (which is the programming language that Calibre and this plugin use)
- I have no experience with web-programming.
- I have no experience with Language localisation.
On the plus side,
A mediocre maintainer is better than none.
I really like this plugin especially the search facility and want to try to keep it working as long as I can and even improve the searching.
Although I have very little python experience, I am a retired programmer (mainly C#) so not completely clueless.
The future
If you have issues, you can post here or at
https://github.com/sgmoore/libby-calibre-plugin/issues (I will shortly post a message to pings issues page requesting that we don't create new issues there, mainly because no-one is able to close them).
Before releasing the official version, I would like to publish one more test (see
https://github.com/sgmoore/libby-cal...s/tag/v0.1.9.3 ) and am looking for a few people to test one particular, namely the setup procedure. (Setting up using a code for the sonos speakers works for me and I would like to see if it works for others)
Ideally I would like a few brave people to rename their overdrive_libby.json settings file and configure this plugin from scratch to see if it works.
There is also a fallback procedure if this does not work. If you extract a token from the website and copy it to your clipboard, then this can be used in place of a setup code.
At the moment the help pages have not been updated and the plugin still goes to pages on ping's repo.
Pull requests for changes either to code or documentation or localization are welcome, with one exception - namely I may not accept any PR's that I think would likely result in a DMCA takedown.