Issue with download metadata

[at80]

I am getting following error while trying to download metadata for my pdf. Note that I tried both "F#" and "FSharp" in the below search log. Shouldn't it give me suggestions? Atleast google should not fail. Is it suppose to do exact match? If that is the case then the entire purpose of having it would be void as people would like to do partial literal matches.


calibre, version 0.8.1
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.

Starting download
Query: title:Apress Expert Fsharp 2.0; authors:Unknown
Running identify query with parameters:
{u'authors': None, u'identifiers': {}, u'timeout': 30, u'title': u'Apress Expert Fsharp 2.0'}
Using plugins: Barnes & Noble, Google, Amazon.com, Overdrive
The log from individual plugins is below

****************************** Amazon.com ******************************
Request extra headers: [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1')]
Found 0 results
Downloading from Amazon.com took 4.27099990845
Trying alternate results page markup
No matches found with query: u'http://www.amazon.com/s/?sort=relevanceexprank&field-title=Apress+Expert+Fsharp+2+0&search-alias=stripbooks&unfiltered=1'

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

****************************** Barnes & Noble ******************************
Request extra headers: [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.2; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1')]
Found 0 results
Downloading from Barnes & Noble took 1.83699989319
Querying: http://productsearch.barnesandnoble....ert+Fsharp+2+0
Failed to make identify query: u'http://productsearch.barnesandnoble.com/search/results.aspx?store=book&TTL=Apress+Expert+Fsharp+2 +0'
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "calibre_plugins.barnes_noble.__init__", line 135, in identify
File "site-packages\mechanize-0.2.4-py2.7.egg\mechanize\_mechanize.py", line 199, in open_novisit
File "site-packages\mechanize-0.2.4-py2.7.egg\mechanize\_mechanize.py", line 255, in _mech_open
httperror_seek_wrapper: HTTP Error 404: Not Found

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

****************************** Overdrive ******************************
Request extra headers: [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.2.11) Gecko/20101012 Firefox/3.6.11')]
Found 0 results
Downloading from Overdrive took 8.2539999485

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

****************************** Google ******************************
Request extra headers: [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1')]
Found 0 results
Downloading from Google took 0.542000055313

************************************************** ******************************
The identify phase took 8.49 seconds
The longest time (8.254000) was taken by: Overdrive
Merging results from different sources and finding earliest publication dates
We have 0 merged results, merging took: 0.00 seconds

[kovidgoyal]

Maybe you failed to read the error message

<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.

[at80]

Thanks for your prompt reply. However, I have reasons to disagree. Is it mandatory to provide the author name? I want to lookup based only on the name of the file. Doing a normal search on google yields first few accurate hits. I don't know python or which api from google you are trying to pull the result. If you try using Google Books search api then the results are instantly available. See an example for yourself at http://www.google.com/search?q=apres...&tbm=bks&tbo=1

In worst case possibly I can specify the url of the amazon book page and get the metadata from there associated with the book without doing any search from the app. Calibre is an excellent software and many thanks for keeping it free. If you openup plugin interfaces for Fsharp/CSharp/Powershell then I can craft my own plugins.

[itimpi]

It is not mandatory to supply the authors name (although then it must be blank and not set to some other value such as 'unknown'). Also it looks as if the title was a bit too explicit. The key point is that every word you supply for searching must be present in the result - so supplying too much info can be detrimental if it does not match what the metadata source has stored for that book.