Calibre plugin to import selected books from a Project Gutenberg OpenZIM archive

[Frédéric Hancy]

Hello,

I have just released a custom plug-in for Calibre to import Zim Gutenberg libraries. Let me know what you think and if there's room for improvement.

For anyone who is not familiar with these files, check the link below for a directory of Gutenberg Zim files, there a huge number of books available:
https://browse.library.kiwix.org/#la...gory=gutenberg

If you want to contribute to the code, here's the project github:
https://github.com/fhancy/zimfile4calibre

All the best,
Fred.

[Frédéric Hancy]

Updated version V0.1.9 with some corrected bugs. Please use this version instead.

[sgmoore]

I think you should mention that this is AI assisted. Personally I don't have an issue, but I know some people do.

I happen to have a 50Gb Gutenberg zim file that I downloaded from a few years ago and being in calibre would make it easier and quicker to search for books, so I gave this a go.

It worked (which is of course the main thing), but there were two little surprises.
I knew I would not have enough room to store the files on my SSD drive, so I created a new library on my Hard Disk, but I still ran out of space. It turns out that this process created 17GB of files in my temporary folder (which is normally on C).

When I set CALIBRE_TEMP_DIR to point to D, it completed. It took it a hour or two to get to 100% and the dialog to disappear, but then it was obviously still working as calibre was unresponsive and remained so for the whole of the next day, the whole process took around 40 hours.

[Frédéric Hancy]

ok, I'm not making any money out of this, just trying to share something I was looking for and managed to finally get it done with Cursor.

As for the space required, it would be a good idea to include some tests prior to the extraction process to estimate the space and time required. I've tested on smaller files and did not run into this freezing issue. I will investigate this further, thanks for your feedback