Quote:
Originally Posted by drMerry
Well it would be nice in some cases:
- author not common so not on Internet
- If you want to read books of a particular era
- If author is dead (and no update expected)
- If it is combined with a plugin to update info from some sites
- If you have a slow network or work on a laptop without Internet (e.g. while traveling)
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Still not enough reasons to convince me - but don't let that stop you, you asked if others had any thoughts, and I gave you an answer why it hasn't justified the effort to me personally. I'm not going to find it life and death to wait until I have an internet connection again to do a simple right click Search the Internet lookup (via Google if not on Wikipedia) and get information that others are maintaining with no effort by myself. And if Google can't find it, I am unlikely to have other sources to populate it locally...
The only aspect slightly related to this that has any interest to me is an idea that was raised by someone else near the start of this thread. That is the ability to see upcoming or recently released books by an author. Now that is an idea I can get hot and sweaty about - the problem being where you can scrape the data from. FictFact is one of the easiest to source from, but only has data for books that are in a "series" which is too limiting. FantasticFiction is a far better source, and I even spent a little time figuring out the "voodoo" of it's separate data server lookups that sit behind the page in javascript.
However the amount of effort (and persistence requirements) to scrape data is such that it is the sort of thing you would want to have running on a server somewhere, produce a summary file and then have that available for the plugin to update from on a daily basis or whatever. So only one process is scraping the FF site (plus potentially other sites, munging the data together). However I don't have a server to run that background scraping on or make available the daily result file for plugin usage so it is just wishful thinking to me.