[GUI Plugin] Overdrive Link

[LilyEvie]

Just to let you know - The search feature on the Freading site is broken - at least for authors - example search for Barbara Hambly - 0 results but if I search for "the Bride of the Rat God" it will come up. Then when I click on the authors name there will be 16 books listed. Unfortunately as a result these books are not detected by your plugin. I wish they had a way of contacting them to let them know it is broken.

Thanks for all your hard work on this plugin. I use 9 different ones and yours is the only one that is constantly being improved via users suggestions.

[LilyEvie]

Just found out that search by keyword also seems to be broken by Freading site. All other libraries I use seem to be OK.

[nynaevelan]

jhowell: A question regarding the Kindle Unlimited search, does it search for books with narration as an audiobook or it doesn't differentiate the plain ebooks with the narration ones??

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by nynaevelan

jhowell: A question regarding the Kindle Unlimited search, does it search for books with narration as an audiobook or it doesn't differentiate the plain ebooks with the narration ones??

Currently it doesn't differentiate. I will look into adding the ability to distinguish them.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by LilyEvie

Just to let you know - The search feature on the Freading site is broken - at least for authors - example search for Barbara Hambly - 0 results but if I search for "the Bride of the Rat God" it will come up. Then when I click on the authors name there will be 16 books listed. Unfortunately as a result these books are not detected by your plugin.

I have released version 1.15.2 of the plugin to work around the recent changes at Freading.

[Montana Harper]

The latest version of the plugin (at least, though possibly earlier versions, also, since I haven't used it in a couple of weeks) has a bug where it doesn't seem to "remember" once you update a book that it's found if you're searching for multiple books. With each successive book you find, the list is concatenated rather than replaced, and if you tell it "yes" to update on a later list, you get the warning about metadata having changed since you started the job.

ETA: I should correct that to read "With each successive book you *search for*, the list is concatenated rather than replaced," since you get the popups even when a book isn't found.

[LilyEvie]

I have noticed that in some cases, I am offed the choice of downloading the book twice from the same library. Sayers - Whose Body for example where other books by the same author are offered normally.

[Montana Harper]

In my experience, LilyEvie, that means that the library has more than one copy available. I especially notice it with things like translations of classics; I did a search for The Odyssey the other day and came up with 2-3 versions at each library.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by Montana Harper

The latest version of the plugin (at least, though possibly earlier versions, also, since I haven't used it in a couple of weeks) has a bug where it doesn't seem to "remember" once you update a book that it's found if you're searching for multiple books. With each successive book you find, the list is concatenated rather than replaced, and if you tell it "yes" to update on a later list, you get the warning about metadata having changed since you started the job.

ETA: I should correct that to read "With each successive book you *search for*, the list is concatenated rather than replaced," since you get the popups even when a book isn't found.

I'm sorry, but I'm not sure that I understand your description of the problem. I think you are saying that you are often seeing the warning that "The metadata for some books in your library has changed since you started the search" when you are dealing with search completion dialogs.

I assume that you are starting a search and while that is in progress you start another search that includes some of the same books. If that is the correct then don't do that! The plugin isn't designed to deal with that case. In fact, I will make a change in the next release to prevent the plugin from starting a new search for the same books while one is already in progress.

If I have misunderstood the issue then please try to clarify it for me.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by LilyEvie

I have noticed that in some cases, I am offed the choice of downloading the book twice from the same library. Sayers - Whose Body for example where other books by the same author are offered normally.

Originally Posted by Montana Harper

In my experience, LilyEvie, that means that the library has more than one copy available. I especially notice it with things like translations of classics; I did a search for The Odyssey the other day and came up with 2-3 versions at each library.

I agree with Montana Harper that the most common case for getting multiple links for the same book to the same library is that different editions of the book are available. For example, OverDrive has multiple editions of Whose Body? available to libraries. It can be useful to know that you have a choice when some are checked out and others are still available.

Multiple links can sometimes also be caused by books with similar names being incorrectly matched by the plugin. If you notice books that are inappropriately linked you can bring them to my attention here and I'll try to improve the matching algorithm.

[Montana Harper]

Originally Posted by jhowell

I'm sorry, but I'm not sure that I understand your description of the problem. I think you are saying that you are often seeing the warning that "The metadata for some books in your library has changed since you started the search" when you are dealing with search completion dialogs.

I assume that you are starting a search and while that is in progress you start another search that includes some of the same books. If that is the correct then don't do that! The plugin isn't designed to deal with that case. In fact, I will make a change in the next release to prevent the plugin from starting a new search for the same books while one is already in progress.

If I have misunderstood the issue then please try to clarify it for me.

Yeah, I think I wasn't clear. Let me see if I can lay it out for you, step by step, because I don't start successive searches; I highlight a block and let OL do its thing. (BTW, I love the fact that it now queues up books as individual jobs, even when you start them all at once! It makes it easier to pause or stop if I realize there's a problem.)

1. I highlight a group of books and tell OL to "Search for Selected books." For the sake of this example, let me call them Book A, Book B, Book C, Book D, Book E, and Book F.
2. OL queues up six searches as background jobs and starts searching.
3. It searches for but doesn't find Book A, so pops up the dialogue and tells me it found nothing. I click on OK.
4. It searches for and finds Book B, so it pops up the "found" dialogue and asks if I want to update metadata for that book. I click OK.
5. It searches for and doesn't find book C, so it pops up...the found dialogue for Book B. If I tell it OK again, it warns me that the metadata has changed since the search was started. I click OK anyway (or cancel; it doesn't matter because the behavior is the same.
6. It searches for and finds Book D, so it pops up the "found" dialogue, listing Book B and Book D as found. If I click OK, I get the warning about metadata. If I cancel, I don't get Book D updated.
7. It searches for and doesn't find Book E, so it pops up the "found" dialogue, listing Book B and Book D as found. Warning about metadata, etc. etc.
8. It searches for and finds Book F, so it pops up the "found" dialogue, listing Book B, Book D, and Book F.

Rinse and repeat.

The behavior is the same whether I'm paying attention and clicking on the popups immediately, or I'm away from the computer and they accumulate.

Basically, it seems to be concatenating the search results in each successive results box, instead of wiping the search slate clean. I'd expect this behavior with the discovered books, since there's no active popup for that function and so the user has to actively go check out the discovered books and determine what to do with them, but I don't expect it in the active pop-ups when searching for specific individual books (as opposed to all books by a specific author that I don't have in my Calibre library, etc.).

I'm using Calibre 1.46-64 bit, Windows 7 Pro, and Overdrive Link 1.15.2.

My OL configuration includes six Overdrive libraries, two 3M libraries, one 1-Click Digital library, Amazon Unlimited, and Scribd (for which I have set up my login information).

If there's anything else you need, let me know.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by Montana Harper

Yeah, I think I wasn't clear. Let me see if I can lay it out for you, step by step, ...

Thank you for the exceptionally clear explanation! I use the plugin with a particular set of configuration settings and the problems were not apparent to me in my testing. I reverted to the default settings and was able to duplicate the problems you describe.

First, it is not intentional for all of the searches to be split into separate jobs. By default they should all be done in a single job. The "Maximum authors per search job" configuration option at its default value of 0 is supposed to not split into jobs by author and that is broken. I will fix this in the next release.

If you like the jobs split up individually then set the value to 1 in the configuration and it will search one author per job.

When I use the plugin I normally select the option "Allow # search jobs to run simultaneously" since that produces faster results. However, it also better isolates each search job from the others, making bugs less apparent. When I turned this off I was able to duplicate the spill over of results between jobs. This will also be fixed in the next release.

I should have a release with the fixes and some new features ready tomorrow.

Thanks again for your help!

[jhowell]

Version 1.16.0 - 26 July 2014

Add Kindle Unlimited with Narration as a searchable collection at Amazon. To use add a library with the provider of Amazon and library-id of kuwn.

Prevent searching for books when a search for the same book is already in progress.

Fix bug: When the "Maximum authors per search job" configuration option was at its default value of 0 (no splitting), each author's books was split into an individual search job. For anyone who likes that behavior, it can be achieved by setting the option to 1 instead of 0.

Fix bug where search results from one job could be repeated in another job.

[LilyEvie]

Thanks for the quick fix to the problem Montana Harper pointed out. I had also noticed it but was glad Montana Harper reported it as it was not an easy problem to explain.

As to getting multiple links for the same book at the same library, you are both right. Never figured that my library would have 2 copies of the same book with different covers and descriptions. It is a shame when a library does this as they could have used their resources for a different book.

[LilyEvie]

I think I have found another little quirk.

Night Terrors: The Ghost Stories of E.F. Benson by E. F. Benson & David Stuart Davies


When I click on that particular book to find other books by those two authors, OL seems to search for just books by just the first author listed - E.F. Benson and not the second - David Stuart Davies. The only way I can find books by David Stuart Davies is to add an empty book.