Plugin ideas... add yours here

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

I'd come at it from a different angle.

Create two books with same title and author but different series, putting the format file(s) into what I regarded as the 'primary book'. And then cross reference and share the content via a calibre://show-book and calibre://view-book links in a #related/Related long text column.

As a reminder to click the view_book link to read the content, colour the book line if it has no formats.

That's one way to get at it, though it doesn't really work for how I personally use Calibre, but I suppose I could do it as a workaround. Though I would probably just have two copies of the book files. (They're not THAT big, and I don't really want another column if I can help it.)

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by compurandom

Only options for that are to either make custom series column to hold the second series, or use tags instead of series.

Originally Posted by chaley

And then use Grouped search terms (Preferences / Searching / Grouped searches) to combine the standard and custom series columns together for searching.

I don't use tags at all, so we'll pass on that part. And I'd kind of like to avoid another column, just for real estate reasons, but I suppose I could go that route if I had to.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by CRussel

Is there a plugin that allows me to have a book in multiple series? For example, Dana Stabenow has two active series -- Kate Shugak and Liam Campbell. The 19th book in the Kate Shugak series is also the 5th book in the Liam Campbell series. Ideally, I'd like to be able to list it as "Kate Shugak [19.0],Liam Campbell [5.0]" in the series column.

I'm wondering if on a Kobo, you can have two database entries that point to one eBook in two different series.

[compurandom]

Originally Posted by chaley

And then use Grouped search terms (Preferences / Searching / Grouped searches) to combine the standard and custom series columns together for searching.

Oooh! Good idea. I've done that with tags, but didn't think to it with double series columns.

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I'm wondering if on a Kobo, you can have two database entries that point to one eBook in two different series.

As you well know, Jon, I don't have a Kobo. Nor any interest in having one.

[milady133]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I'm wondering if on a Kobo, you can have two database entries that point to one eBook in two different series.

Nope, unfortunately the series of the book is a column in the table of the main book information, even if you were able to create a second row in the table with the same information but the series (I haven't checked the primary key on the table to see if it's doable) the software it's not expecting it, so in the best case it would retrieve only one of the rows, so you'll see only one of the series, and when updating other columns (percentage read, read status, and others) it would update one of them (it might even update different columns in different rows, so you might see different information depending on which row retrieve first) in the worst case it would complain and force you to create a new database.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by milady133

Nope, unfortunately the series of the book is a column in the table of the main book information, even if you were able to create a second row in the table with the same information but the series (I haven't checked the primary key on the table to see if it's doable) the software it's not expecting it, so in the best case it would retrieve only one of the rows, so you'll see only one of the series, and when updating other columns (percentage read, read status, and others) it would update one of them (it might even update different columns in different rows, so you might see different information depending on which row retrieve first) in the worst case it would complain and force you to create a new database.

No need to create a new database because you'd have backed up the database before trying this and you would not add any more books until you've tried it. That way you can restore the database if need be.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

No need to create a new database because you'd have backed up the database before trying this and you would not add any more books until you've tried it. That way you can restore the database if need be.

Jon, are you planning on rewriting Kobo's code to allow use of those additional table entries?

[Fiat_Lux]

Could metadata from WorldCat.org, Archive.org, HathiTrust.org, scholar.google.com, and books.google.com be scraped, and added to the book metadata?

[ownedbycats]

I also wouldn't mind being able to scrape info from OpenLibrary, though i suppose it'd be redundant with Archive.org.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Fiat_Lux

Could metadata from WorldCat.org, Archive.org, HathiTrust.org, scholar.google.com, and books.google.com be scraped, and added to the book metadata?

From memory, calibre used to use Worldcat but the free version of the API was either removed, or restricted in ways that made it impractical for calibre to use.

I'm sure someone looked at scholar.google.com in the past, but, I don't remember why it has not been done so far. But, books.google.com is one of the built-in metadata sources.

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

I also wouldn't mind being able to scrape info from OpenLibrary, though i suppose it'd be redundant with Archive.org.

With all the template and chains stuff you have been doing, have you considered doing it yourself? If you model it on one of the existing plugins, you have a large part of it covered. The hard part is working out the site, not the plugin code. And there is plenty of help available.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by davidfor

With all the template and chains stuff you have been doing, have you considered doing it yourself? If you model it on one of the existing plugins, you have a large part of it covered. The hard part is working out the site, not the plugin code. And there is plenty of help available.

Maybe.

Open Library has catalog records available as RDFs/JSON/sometimes OPDs. So maybe to find the book, grab the records, and then parse them for input to columns.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Maybe.

Open Library has catalog records available as RDFs/JSON/sometimes OPDs. So maybe to find the book, grab the records, and then parse them for input to columns.

If they have an API, it generally makes it easier. Parsing JSON is a lot easier than a page. You might end up with a mix. The search is done by scraping the page, but the details come from the API. Though for Goodreads it is the other way round.

[ownedbycats]

Here is what I found: https://openlibrary.org/developers/api

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Here is what I found: https://openlibrary.org/developers/api

That should make it relatively easy. The search results look good as do the rest.