MobileRead Forums - View Single Post

kiwidude · 05-22-2011, 08:58 AM

I didn't realise I had to qualify my "thoughts appreciated" with "useful thoughts appreciated".

Take your rants elsewhere, the main forum seems to be a good place lately given the tone of some of the recent posters in there. This is the development forum, for discussing technical implementation questions. That you have no need for additional metadata beyond that supplied by Calibre today is perfectly fine, and any changes in this regard won't affect you in the slightest.

However there are people out there who do want to store additional metadata with their books - data that is available from the same web pages we pull title, authors, comments etc from. Just because it isn't part of the standard Calibre set of database fields does not make it any less relevant to some users. Would I personally use all of the potential this feature would expose? No - though I would like to store an actual number of pages, and perhaps some of the rating stuff. Having the whole calibre database normalised to "3 stars" because of the basic way the ratings are stored and averaged now I do not find particularly useful. Also there are people who are storing articles via DOI etc in their library asking for a metadata source - care to bet there isn't some field relevant to those that may come up in future that doesn't fit in Calibre's default set? Opening the API a little further would allow more disparate metadata sources - heck even people who want to store a row for their audio books could have custom columns storing the running time or whatever with the right plugin.

I had started drafting this post in an email to Charles as "Mr Custom Column" but thought I should use the dev forums instead for wider opinions and suggestions.

05-22-2011, 08:58 AM	#3
kiwidude Calibre Plugins Developer Posts: 4,636 Karma: 2162064 Join Date: Oct 2010 Location: Australia Device: Kindle Oasis	I didn't realise I had to qualify my "thoughts appreciated" with "useful thoughts appreciated". Take your rants elsewhere, the main forum seems to be a good place lately given the tone of some of the recent posters in there. This is the development forum, for discussing technical implementation questions. That you have no need for additional metadata beyond that supplied by Calibre today is perfectly fine, and any changes in this regard won't affect you in the slightest. However there are people out there who do want to store additional metadata with their books - data that is available from the same web pages we pull title, authors, comments etc from. Just because it isn't part of the standard Calibre set of database fields does not make it any less relevant to some users. Would I personally use all of the potential this feature would expose? No - though I would like to store an actual number of pages, and perhaps some of the rating stuff. Having the whole calibre database normalised to "3 stars" because of the basic way the ratings are stored and averaged now I do not find particularly useful. Also there are people who are storing articles via DOI etc in their library asking for a metadata source - care to bet there isn't some field relevant to those that may come up in future that doesn't fit in Calibre's default set? Opening the API a little further would allow more disparate metadata sources - heck even people who want to store a row for their audio books could have custom columns storing the running time or whatever with the right plugin. I had started drafting this post in an email to Charles as "Mr Custom Column" but thought I should use the dev forums instead for wider opinions and suggestions.