[GUI Plugin] Goodreads Sync

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by takkun324

I try to avoid long drawn out posts and avoid explaining why other peoples hard work sounds confusing.

Sorry, but that is bit self-defeating. If you have a problem and want help, you need to explain what the problem is clearly enough for the readers to understand what the problem is and then help.

And if you read the help and it is confusing, then say so. And why. That's the only way someone can know there is a problem. Most developers know they are rubbish at writing user documentation. It is partly because we just don't think that way, but a lot is because we forget what needs to be explained.

4. I assume I'm clicking Edit 'Shelf Add' actions? Doing so for my 'read' shelf, I then assume I want "Add value to column" Selecting the column this represents and tell it to add the word "Read" So I telling the plugin that if the book is in the Read shelf I should add a tag called "Read".

* Why did I assign columns in "Synchronisable Custom Columns"?
* What does "At least one action" mean? Might one need more actions?
* When would one need to setup a rule to "Remove value"?
* Does this need to be done with every single shelf?
* What about all other data? (dates, reviews, etc...)?

5. Ah, this isn't really a step of installation but explaining what step 4 does in different phrasing. Ok?

6. Yes the help file. It kinda helps me but then I run into phrases like this: "Only shelves that have some kind of sync action specified can be synchronised from" and I think, "what is a sync action again?" "Where do I find my shelves Sync Actions? The text assumes familiarity the the plugin and lingo used. Looking into new lingo causes me to forget why I found it in the first place.

I'm a little stuck in how to answer this. Nearly everything is answered in the help. And most of the rest follows reasonably logically from that. Just about anything else I could say would be rewording what is in the help. At the moment, it doesn't look like you have done the configuration needed for the function you want to use. I would suggest picking one function, following the help and examples to configure that. If there are problems, you can ask questions that are more specific to the function.

And steps 4 and 5 are separate. There is some overlap, but the steps state what they are for and these are different. And the help does give examples.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by takkun324

Am I posting large images?

Yes - As you will have read in the Guidelines, 600x600 is maximum size for in line images, yours are 1100x618 - and they are on a very slow site that sometimes times out.

Originally Posted by takkun324

I try to avoid long drawn out posts and avoid explaining why other peoples hard work sounds confusing.

Really - the length of your reply to my post would seem to belie that claim.

BR

[takkun324]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

yours are 1100x618

I'm sorry but I don't know what images you think I posted. Perhaps these are from long ago (?) as I haven't posted for months. I looked around my profile and couldn't find any images. I also searched and found 2 threads I posted in which showing no images of mine.

If you can tell me where these are, I will remove or downsize them asap.

Originally Posted by davidfor

Sorry, but that is bit self-defeating. If you have a problem and want help, you need to explain what the problem is clearly enough for the readers to understand what the problem is and then help.
...
I'm a little stuck in how to answer this. Nearly everything is answered in the help.

Thank you for your reply. If you don't know how to answer, "say so. And why. That's the only way someone can know there is a problem." I had thought a small list of questions would make it easier but I understand the difficulty.

From what I've read, it seems this plugin can not take text (tags) as-is but needs to be interpreted every time (if "tag=xyz" then add "xyz" to "tags" and will not bother with tag "zyx"). I'll just have to mess with this after Christmas, making careful backups. Perhaps just to keep only book titles in sync. Seems far to tedious to manage a detailed collection.

Thanks anyway.

[BananaTricky]

Originally Posted by takkun324

Calibre: 3.21
Goodreads Sync: v1.12.1 installed through calibre's plugin browser.

I find this plugin confusing: There doesn't seem to be any official documentation as to how this is setup.

Perhaps I can give you some real-life examples of how I sync my library. I write my reviews in Goodreads and tag extensively but have very few tags in Calibre. When I want to sync a shelf from GR to Calibre:

• select the GR shelf to sync (eg read-2018)
• tell it add a tag to the book in Calibre "2018-read" (because yep I wrote them differently)
• remove the tag "Kindle Paperwhite"
• add a tick to the custom column I created which says "read?"
• then I tick the boxes underneath which (from memory) are to add the date read from GR and the star rating
• save the settings

click on GR sync - choose the shelf I want to sync (as you may imagine I have shelves for each year), the plugin thinks for a while, especially now at the end of the year when there are >300 books to sync, a pop up box appears which has the list of books to sync and identifies any that it can't match (for example if the name in GR or Calibre includes the series title), I double-click on that book and then try searching in the pop-up box, if that doesn't work I delete the title of the book, search again, identify it in the list of books by that author and select. If for some reason I can't find the book (usually because I haven't copied it from my Kindle into Calibre) I can still sync the rest of my shelf.

I'm hoping that a reasonably techphobic's explanation of her process might shed some light on the instructions.

There are also some detailed (but technical) instructions in Calibre https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/

Best wishes, this truly is a wonderful library manager, I have over 9,000 books in my Calibre library and I find it easy to use.

[Bash123]

Hi All,
I would greatly appreciate it if someone can share the default setup of the plugin to copy my notes from Kindle to GR. What are the default fields? I tried Annotations, other custom fields and failed miserably. I don't have much to upload, however, it just never worked. It worked from the Kindle directly, but I do not remember how I did it.
Many thanks in advance,
The Bedouin

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Bash123

Hi All,
I would greatly appreciate it if someone can share the default setup of the plugin to copy my notes from Kindle to GR. What are the default fields? I tried Annotations, other custom fields and failed miserably. I don't have much to upload, however, it just never worked. It worked from the Kindle directly, but I do not remember how I did it.

The help tells you what you need to do. But, in the configuration, you need to set the "Review text column" and set the option for it in the shelf add or sync options.

[Bash123]

Thanks davidfor for the reply. In a new installation, I tried it without any modification. However, I am not interested in uploading a review. Just my notes in the Notes field on GR which is private. Any ideas on that?
Much appreciated!

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Bash123

Thanks davidfor for the reply. In a new installation, I tried it without any modification. However, I am not interested in uploading a review. Just my notes in the Notes field on GR which is private. Any ideas on that?

Sorry, the plugin has only two ways to send text to GR. One is review text. The other is a comment as part of the progress update. Both are public. The review text will come from the column configured. You also need to set the option in the"Edit 'Shelf Add' Actions". For example, you might want to send the review text when you add the book to the "read" shelf.

And rereading your first post, if you are getting the text from the device, the only ways to do this is with the Annotations plugin or the "Fetch annotations" function in calibre. You would then need to use the column the annotations are put into as the "Review text column" in this plugin. But, I don't feel that either of these functions would produce good results when sent as the review text.

As to setting the private notes, it would need a change to the plugin. But, the plugin uses the Goodread API. From a quick look, I don't see a way to do this.

Originally Posted by Bash123

Hi All,
I would greatly appreciate it if someone can share the default setup of the plugin to copy my notes from Kindle to GR. What are the default fields? I tried Annotations, other custom fields and failed miserably. I don't have much to upload, however, it just never worked. It worked from the Kindle directly, but I do not remember how I did it.
Many thanks in advance,
The Bedouin

Just making sure: if your goal is only to get your Kindle notes onto the Goodreads site, you know that you can set that to work directly by enabling the setting in Kindle, true? Your Account > Social Networks > Goodreads. I'm seeing all my Kindle book notes on the GR site, don't need Calibre for that specific item. Sounds like you had that working? So why do you need the notes to go into Calibre, not clear on that part?

[dunhill]

The add-on works well with this shelf configuration that is currently being read.
What I do not know how to do is that when I synchronize the shelf that is being read and the book in Goodreads I mark it as read, I mark it as read.
I leave you captures of the configuration for which you can guide me.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by dunhill

The add-on works well with this shelf configuration that is currently being read.
What I do not know how to do is that when I synchronize the shelf that is being read and the book in Goodreads I mark it as read, I mark it as read.
I leave you captures of the configuration for which you can guide me.

Not completely sure what you mean, but...

In Goodreads, you mark a book as being read by adding it to the "Read" shelf. In calibre, how you do that is up to you. There has been a lot of discussion on how to do it. It could be a tag, a special column and value, a Yes/No column.

I use a percent-read column and if it is 100%, then the book is finished. That percent-read gets synced to Goodreads using the update progress function. And that has an option to put it on the read shelf when setting the percent-read to 100%.

If you use something else, you need to configure what happens when you sync or add to the shelves. Your screenshots show what you do for the "Currently Reading" shelf. You need to configure something for the "Read" shelf.

[dunhill]

Davidfor, what I do is the other way around, when I start and finish a book, I mark it in Goodreads and then it went into caliber and synchronization. I will try adding a function for the read shelf. Thank you.

[ZRJZTh1u]

Hi, I've searched and tried a lot of things on the plugin, but I can't figure out how to just sync ONE book from Goodreads. I just want to pull my rating/review from Goodreads for ONE book without having to sync the whole read shelf, which has hundreds of books and takes a LONG time.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by ZRJZTh1u

Hi, I've searched and tried a lot of things on the plugin, but I can't figure out how to just sync ONE book from Goodreads. I just want to pull my rating/review from Goodreads for ONE book without having to sync the whole read shelf, which has hundreds of books and takes a LONG time.

You can update Goodreads from calibre for each book. But, getting from Goodreads is for the shelf.

[dunhill]

Originally Posted by ZRJZTh1u

Hi, I've searched and tried a lot of things on the plugin, but I can't figure out how to just sync ONE book from Goodreads. I just want to pull my rating/review from Goodreads for ONE book without having to sync the whole read shelf, which has hundreds of books and takes a LONG time.

The same thing happens when you update the read shelf. The plugin synchronizes the three states, but I can not find the way to make when the book passes from reading to read in the configuration of the reading shelf.