Downloadin Amazon metadata yesterday, but not today

[LJJohnson]

As of yesterday, the Amazon metadata was working fine with version 1.3.0. I got several new books and it found them with no problems.

But today, with versions 1.3.0 and the newly installed 1.4.0, it finds metadata only if it is available for some site besides Amazon. The data below is from a book with I downloaded the data from fine yesterday...



calibre, version 1.4.0
ERROR: No matches found: <p>Failed to find any books that match your search. Try making the search <b>less specific</b>. For example, use only the author's last name and a single distinctive word from the title.<p>To see the full log, click Show Details.

Running identify query with parameters:
{u'authors': [u'Marsh, Richard', u'Bradley, Mary Lou'], u'identifiers': {u'amazon': u'B00BWSUM20', u'mobi-asin': u'B00BWSUM20'}, u'timeout': 30, u'title': u'How to Buy the Perfect Guitar'}
Using plugins: Barnes & Noble, Goodreads, FictionDB, Beam Ebooks, Google, Amazon.com, ISBNDB, Overdrive
The log from individual plugins is below

****************************** Amazon.com ******************************
Request extra headers: [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.249.78 Safari/532.5')]
Found 0 results
Downloading from Amazon.com took 2.3149998188
Failed to make details query: '/How-Buy-Perfect-Guitar-ebook/dp/B00BWSUM20/ref=sr_1_1/179-0941283-3909834?ie=UTF8&qid=1379698980&sr=8-1&keywords=B00BWSUM20'
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "site-packages\calibre\ebooks\metadata\sources\amazon.py ", line 226, in get_details
File "site-packages\mechanize-0.2.5-py2.7.egg\mechanize\_mechanize.py", line 199, in open_novisit
File "site-packages\mechanize-0.2.5-py2.7.egg\mechanize\_mechanize.py", line 216, in _mech_open
BrowserStateError: can't fetch relative reference: not viewing any document

************************************************** ******************************

************************************************** ******************************
The identify phase took 2.45 seconds
The longest time (2.315000) was taken by: Amazon.com
Merging results from different sources and finding earliest publication dates from the worldcat.org service
We have 0 merged results, merging took: 0.00 seconds

Thanks.

[stacyincaves]

Having the same issue, NOTHING coming in from Amazon. I checked my settings and all is right. Only Goodreads and B&N info coming up in searches for metadata and covers. Not even Google showing up consistently.

I just installed the update this morning & the problem began.

[kovidgoyal]

amazon's website has changed, you will need to wait for the next calibre release which will handle the change.

[LJJohnson]

Thanks, kinda figured that had happened. Looking forward to the update.

[kovidgoyal]

Since it's going to be a while to the next update I've uploaded a new build of 1.4 with the fix applied, re-download and re-install and you should be fine.

[samy2]

Still Problems with some books:

e.g.

Running identify query with parameters:
{u'authors': [u'Julie Smith'], u'identifiers': {u'isbn': u'9781617507953', u'mobi-asin': u'B00BLYB22O'}, u'timeout': 30, u'title': u"Other People's Skeletons"}
Using plugins: Amazon.com
The log from individual plugins is below

****************************** Amazon.com ******************************
Request extra headers: [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.249.78 Safari/532.5')]
Found 1 results
Downloading from Amazon.com took 5.6021270752


---
Title : Other People's Skeletons
Author(s) : Julie Smith
Publisher : Ivy Books
Identifiers : amazon_de:0804198209, isbn:9780804198202
No matches found with identifiers, retrying using only title and authors. Query: u'http://www.amazon.de/s/?sort=relevancerank&search-alias=aps&field-isbn=9781617507953&unfiltered=1'
Error parsing publish date for url: u'http://www.amazon.de/Other-Peoples-Skeletons-Julie-Smith/dp/0804198209/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1379789379&sr=1-1'
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "site-packages/calibre/ebooks/metadata/sources/amazon.py", line 363, in parse_details
File "site-packages/calibre/ebooks/metadata/sources/amazon.py", line 614, in parse_pubdate
File "site-packages/calibre/utils/date.py", line 123, in parse_only_date
File "site-packages/calibre/utils/date.py", line 109, in parse_date
File "site-packages/dateutil/parser.py", line 697, in parse
File "site-packages/dateutil/parser.py", line 303, in parse
ValueError: unknown string format

************************************************** ******************************
The identify phase took 5.71 seconds
The longest time (5.602127) was taken by: Amazon.com
Merging results from different sources and finding earliest publication dates from the worldcat.org service
We have 1 merged results, merging took: 3.74 seconds

or

calibre, version 1.4.0
FEHLER: Keine Treffer gefunden: <p>Es wurden keine Bücher für die aktuelle Suche gefunden. Versuchen Sie, die Suche <b>weniger spezifisch</b> zu formulieren. Verwenden Sie beispielsweise nur den Nachnamen des Autors und ein einzelnes, prägnantes Wort aus dem Titel.<p>Um den gesamten Log zu lesen, klicken Sie auf Details anzeigen.

Running identify query with parameters:
{u'authors': [u'Ben Raines'], u'identifiers': {u'mobi-asin': u'B00E1DNLP8'}, u'timeout': 30, u'title': u'Essential Natural Uses Of....LEMON'}
Using plugins: Amazon.com
The log from individual plugins is below

****************************** Amazon.com ******************************
Request extra headers: [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.249.78 Safari/532.5')]
Found 0 results
Downloading from Amazon.com took 2.64712381363
No matches found with identifiers, retrying using only title and authors. Query: u'http://www.amazon.de/s/?sort=relevancerank&field-author=Ben+Raines&field-title=Essential+Natural+Uses+Of+LEMON&search-alias=stripbooks&unfiltered=1'
No matches found with query: u'http://www.amazon.de/s/?sort=relevancerank&field-author=Ben+Raines&field-title=Essential+Natural+Uses+Of+LEMON&search-alias=stripbooks&unfiltered=1'

************************************************** ******************************
The identify phase took 2.66 seconds
The longest time (2.647124) was taken by: Amazon.com
Merging results from different sources and finding earliest publication dates from the worldcat.org service
We have 0 merged results, merging took: 0.00 seconds

[kovidgoyal]

@samy2: Your first problem book works for me, and in any case the error is simply about parsing the pubdate, the actual book is found. The second problem book does not exist in amazon.de see the link below

http://www.amazon.de/s/?sort=relevan...s&unfiltered=1

[mayoi]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Since it's going to be a while to the next update I've uploaded a new build of 1.4 with the fix applied, re-download and re-install and you should be fine.

It's working now. Thanks, Kovid!

[LJJohnson]

I downloaded the metadata for 88 books today from Amazon with no issues with the updated 1.40 release. It seems to be working well.

On a slightly different subject, sometimes (say every 200 or so books), I get a book that the mobi-asin by itself will either not locate the book on Amazon, or will not find any books. If I copy the mobi-asin to the amazon ID tag, it now finds the book. Not a big thing, but a small nagging annoyance.

[kovidgoyal]

mobi-asin is not used for metadata downloads. This is because every amazon website has its own collection of asins, so amazon.com and amazon.de and amazon.es are different. mobi-asin comes from actual mobi files and has no way of distinguishing between them, but you can use amazon: and amazon_de: so the download system will only use amazon: on the assumption that the user has entered the correct variant.

[LJJohnson]

I am not sure I was clear in my original question, and I have an example now.

I normally download the books with the Kindle PC software, then import the book(s) into Calibre. Usually, only the "mobi-asin" comes down as the ID in the metadata.

mobi-asin:B00FCA8YEC

For most (99%+) of the books, this is sufficient when I do a [Download Metadata] to find the book. For a few, including this book, it does not find a book until I change the IDs to

mobi-asin:B00FCA8YEC, amazon:B00FCA8YEC

That is the problem I was referring to.

[kovidgoyal]

The metadata for 99% of your books will be found based on the title and author, mobi-asin is not used. For the 1% where it is not fouind, by changing mobi-asin to amazon, you are telling the download system to use that identifier instead of title/author.