Thought: Authors Database

[chaley]

I spent the weekend thinking about what I personally would want from something like this. My conclusion is that *I* want something that cross-references books and authors, using author as the pivotable field. By this I mean I want to click on a book and see in my side panel:
- all the authors of that book (usually 1, but often more).
- for a selected author side panel, all the books by that author.
- some information about the selected author.
- to be able to click on a book in the list and have it be selected in the library view, changing the display in the box to the authors of the just-selected book, one of which will be the previously selected author.

This isn't an authors database, because it is still mostly book-centric. The model is "books have authors" (calibre's current model), not "authors have books". For this reason it shows information about the currently-selected book. However, because the info pane is author-centric, it lets one quickly browse books by any one of the authors of the selected book.

I have built a prototype to see how it behaves. There is much the prototype does not do, such as editing the information. It is not currently possible to get to this display from the tag browser; it should be possible to change the display by selecting an author. I haven't actually changed the database; the image of Mr Verne is hard-coded.

I will think more tonight about whether this is useful enough to finish. I am not convinced. One can do much of this using search and the library view, albeit with more typing. For example, seeing the authors of a book is trivial, but searching for books by a first or second second author is not. Seeing all the books by a given author is a trivial search, but switching between lists of books by first/second author is not. The author picture is eye-candy, something I don't particularly care about but wouldn't throw away. Notes about the author are more useful for me, particularly to note books I want to procure in the future. The 'mental model' behind the information matches mine, but I have no idea if my model is common enough to avoid a lot of controversy.

The pane is non-modal, not "always on top". One can either manually layout the screen so both are visible or use the equivalent of ALT-Tab to switch between the library and the pane, letting it hide behind my library view. I use the latter, letting it hide behind the main calibre window as I work.

Comments?

(Note: the image is of my test library, which is a total mess. I use it to do bizarre things to see what I can break.)

[theducks]

I have always wanted a way of handling this at the Authors Level.

Andrew North -> Andre Norton
S. L. Viehl -> Lynn Viehl

And a ton the have middle names: Initials, full name, missing, nicknames (E. E. 'Doc' Smith)

inconsistent Metadata for the same person

[chaley]

Originally Posted by theducks

I have always wanted a way of handling this at the Authors Level.

Andrew North -> Andre Norton
S. L. Viehl -> Lynn Viehl

And a ton the have middle names: Initials, full name, missing, nicknames (E. E. 'Doc' Smith)

inconsistent Metadata for the same person

Doesn't renaming authors in the tag browser take care of these?

[kiwidude]

@charles - my 2p (about all it is worth). As you say your effort was based around what you would like, and of course different people will have differing opinions.

Personally I am not a fan of "extra windows" - I would quite happily let it occupy the book details pane area while I am in "view author" mode. On small screen laptops etc popup windows are a *pita* imho.

I would guess one of your reasons may have been to have sufficient width to see the books by an author. For myself, I wouldn't use that. I can hit Alt+A if I want to see books by an author, which gives me the nice "pretty" view with covers, custom columns, tags etc as well. So any valuable data about those books like whether I own them, wishlists, have read etc is all available to me.

Obviously you have a set of users who don't care about authors at all (after all they don't have it now).

Then there is another set of users who cannot be bothered with maintaining author data, but might want it easier to get to information about an author - ala the hyperlinked author name like Kovid suggests. As found on this thread the problem is that people will want more than one hyperlink, and there is also the issue of other users who have authors who have no web pages but do have information they want to store about them.

The next step up (which is probably where I sit and closest to what you have) is where people might like to have an author photo and a comments area. What people do in comments is up to them - whether they make their own minor notes about the author or paste vast swathes of text from Wikipedia. You would still probably want the ability to add links to things like Wikipedia and the author's home page etc, but presumably you could just do that in the comments so have as many links as you want.

The final step would be the full blown author metadata db - storing stuff like DOB/DOD etc in individual fields and perhaps searchable as well. That is OTT imho as it will be a minority of Calibre users who want to repeat the maintenance effort that others on the web do.

So *my* theoretical implementation would be an author pane that can replace the book details one when you hit a hotkey/right-click or whatever (I guess you could hyperlink the author name in book details to flip to it as well). I'm not fussed about seeing multiple authors at once, but that is just me - if a book has multiple authors, you could just click on the hyperlinked author name you wanted if it wasnt the first one which would be the default behaviour.

In that authors pane, it would have a photo up the top, display the author name below it, and then just fill the rest of the comments area with a text field you can edit and a save/cancel button at the bottom. Double clicking on the photo would expand into a popup window like book details but with editable comments using the same editor as edit metadata.

That's just a theory and offered as a discussion point.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by chaley

Doesn't renaming authors in the tag browser take care of these?

Yes and No
If you refresh Metadata. You always have to remember to turn off the over write
Adding New Books

In the example:
S. L. is her SF name
Lynn is her Romance name
Both are variations on her Legal name (Lynn is her middle name)

[kovidgoyal]

@kiwidude and chaley:

Lots of work

1) I like the idea of having the book details panel switch between book and author view when clicking the author name rather than a popup.

2) IMO the vast majority of people are going to want to lookup info about an author, not maintain it themselves.

2a) Therefore the author info panel should by default automatically show the authors' pic and brief bio, scraped from wikipedia and cached into the db. With a link to the full page. This scraping will happen on demand the first time author info is requested for that author.

2b) There should be a button to allow the user to edit the picture and bio as needed.

2c) This is going to need a new table in the db with the columns:

thumbnail, url, comments

2d) There's no easy way to backup and restore this data.

Most importantly: I am not volunteering to do this, if it were up to me, I'd just make the author names clickable with a global template that defaults to wikipedia.

[chaley]

Thanks for the thoughtful response.

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Personally I am not a fan of "extra windows" - I would quite happily let it occupy the book details pane area while I am in "view author" mode. On small screen laptops etc popup windows are a *pita* imho.

I am the opposite. I like multi-window interfaces where I control to as fine a level as I want the placement of the information. I have no problem if some parts of a window are occluded or hidden.

For various reasons that revolve around my progressive lenses, I like using close-to-square smaller screens. I use a 17" 4/3 1280x1024 screen by choice. It sits around 2 feet from my eyes. Real estate that I can see without moving my head is key. For that reason I use alt-tab a lot. If I want to have the equivalent of position-locked panes, I arrange them on my screen as I wish.

I would guess one of your reasons may have been to have sufficient width to see the books by an author. For myself, I wouldn't use that. I can hit Alt+A if I want to see books by an author, which gives me the nice "pretty" view with covers, custom columns, tags etc as well. So any valuable data about those books like whether I own them, wishlists, have read etc is all available to me.

The books make depth, not width. Also, Alt-A doesn't distinguish between the authors (does an 'or'). My experience is that the second author is often the one of interest. My goal is to be able to see books by one of the authors, not the union of books by any author.

Then there is another set of users who cannot be bothered with maintaining author data, but might want it easier to get to information about an author - ala the hyperlinked author name like Kovid suggests. As found on this thread the problem is that people will want more than one hyperlink, and there is also the issue of other users who have authors who have no web pages but do have information they want to store about them.

I have no problem at all with adding wikipedia (or what-have-you) hyperlinks to authors on the book details pane.

The next step up (which is probably where I sit and closest to what you have) is where people might like to have an author photo and a comments area. What people do in comments is up to them - whether they make their own minor notes about the author or paste vast swathes of text from Wikipedia. You would still probably want the ability to add links to things like Wikipedia and the author's home page etc, but presumably you could just do that in the comments so have as many links as you want.

The important things for me are to have a list of authors for a book, then to be able to see other books by one of those authors. I actually don't care about the picture and the comments.

So *my* theoretical implementation would be an author pane that can replace the book details one when you hit a hotkey/right-click or whatever (I guess you could hyperlink the author name in book details to flip to it as well). I'm not fussed about seeing multiple authors at once, but that is just me - if a book has multiple authors, you could just click on the hyperlinked author name you wanted if it wasnt the first one which would be the default behaviour.

I never use the book details pane. I can see what I want in the library view, and I can't justify the real estate. As for clicking an author, the problem is that one proposal (Kovid's) is that it open wikipedia, and another (yours?) is that it do a search for books. Perhaps I misunderstand.

In that authors pane, it would have a photo up the top, display the author name below it, and then just fill the rest of the comments area with a text field you can edit and a save/cancel button at the bottom. Double clicking on the photo would expand into a popup window like book details but with editable comments using the same editor as edit metadata.

The editing stuff is what I was going to do. I was thinking of having an 'edit' button that would permit changing the author's name, sort, comment, etc.

As I said, I don't use, and don't want to use, the details pane. Just goes to show that people are different.

My concern, corroborated by your comments, is that what I want is far enough away away from the 'mainstream' that it is weird. I don't mind being weird, but forcing my weirdness onto the general calibre user can lead to difficulties. This is one reason I am considering leaving things as they are, because I can make do with what is there and it isn't much fun doing many hours of work for no personal benefit.

[lbik]

Most importantly: I am not volunteering to do this, if it were up to me, I'd just make the author names clickable with a global template that defaults to wikipedia.

Wikipedia .com .de .fr .it .jp etc. Like the Amazon Plugin

[chaley]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

@kiwidude and chaley:
1) I like the idea of having the book details panel switch between book and author view when clicking the author name rather than a popup.

I don't.

2) IMO the vast majority of people are going to want to lookup info about an author, not maintain it themselves.

Probably true.

2a) Therefore the author info panel should by default automatically show the authors' pic and brief bio, scraped from wikipedia and cached into the db. With a link to the full page. This scraping will happen on demand the first time author info is requested for that author.

I personally don't care about this info. What I want to see is the cross-reference information from my library.

2b) There should be a button to allow the user to edit the picture and bio as needed.

Yes.

2c) This is going to need a new table in the db with the columns:

thumbnail, url, comments

I was considering altering the existing author's table. Why make a new one? Yes, one needs to be careful of "select *", but this can be dealt with.

2d) There's no easy way to backup and restore this data.

Backing up the library doesn't take care of it?

Most importantly: I am not volunteering to do this, if it were up to me, I'd just make the author names clickable with a global template that defaults to wikipedia.

There is no reason not to do that, independently of any other effort, so go for it. That said, it isn't something I would use.

[theducks]

I rarely use the Book details pane (Mainly to see a Zoomed Cover).
I like detachable/dockabl panes (like the cover Browser) that I can place on any display or bury under any window.
I like the ability of an Author picture (resizable? in relation to the rest of the window).
The idea of populating on first use of a author (First use being: the window is made to have focus.)
If there is a significant chance that Author info is not available, there should be a Unavailable (date) flag, so it does not keep timing out (and a forced 'retry' button).

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by chaley

What I want to see is the cross-reference information from my library.

Wouldn't a better place for that be in the similar books context menu action?

I was considering altering the existing author's table. Why make a new one? Yes, one needs to be careful of "select *", but this can be dealt with.

Backwards compatibility.

Backing up the library doesn't take care of it?

I meant with respect to the restore library functionality in Library Maintenance.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Wouldn't a better place for that be in the similar books context menu action?

Not for me, but perhaps for the majority of users. Reason for me: I want to see the both contexts, the library I am looking at and the books for an author. The context menu allows me to switch to a new context, but does not allow me to see both.

Backwards compatibility.

Not sure this is a real issue in this case. The authors table had the unused third column for ages, used only in the mid 0.7 releases. Adding more columns shouldn't be a problem. Certainly won't be in DB2.

I meant with respect to the restore library functionality in Library Maintenance.

You are right. This could be easily handled by writing the info to a file when the OPF is written, or even by writing it to the OPF. However, it is yet another thing that must be done.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by chaley

Reason for me: I want to see the both contexts, the library I am looking at and the books for an author. The context menu allows me to switch to a new context, but does not allow me to see both.

You could have the context menu action popup a dialog. My point was really that since the book details panel is meant to show the details for a single object, it seems wrong to use it to display books by an author, especially if doing that would require it to become a popup.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

You could have the context menu action popup a dialog. My point was really that since the book details panel is meant to show the details for a single object, it seems wrong to use it to display books by an author, especially if doing that would require it to become a popup.

I don't want to change the details panel at all.

My authors display is more like the books details window (not pane), not a popup but an application-level non-modal non-in-front window. A modal popup doesn't solve my problem. But as I said earlier, perhaps my problem is *my* problem, and no one elses.

[chaley]

After thinking about the comments and what I was doing, I decided to change focus. I wasn't building a 'real' authors database and I was creating more problems than I solved. That prototype went into the trash can.

However, (and ) I did like the idea where I could select a book and quickly get a cross-reference of the values of some category item (authors, tags, publisher, series, etc) against the books that have that item. (Kiwidude, this is the function you said you wouldn't use ). I used bits of my prototype and implemented it.

When the window is open, clicking on a column for a book will display the cross-reference for that item. This works for all items that appear in the tag browser (category items). For example, clicking on the tags cell for a book will show the tags for that book, select the first tag, and show the books with that tag. Clicking on a different tag in the displayed list shows the books with that tag. Double-clicking on a book selects that book in the library view, scrolling if necessary.

Without disturbing the content (e.g., the books found by the last search), the position (what books are currently visible) or layout (horizontal scroll) of the library view, I can use this box to get fast answers to questions like "what other books:
- have one of the tags in this book?
- are written by an author of this book?
- do I own in this series?
- have some value in a custom column?
The contents of the display box follows the selected book in the library.

If not used, it takes no space and no time. It requires no modification of the DB, and creates no backup problems.

It does what I wanted to begin with, so I am much happier with it.