[GUI Plugin] Goodreads Sync

[EdStout]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Changes in this release:

• Fix drag/drop into the Goodreads dialog due to change to use of HTTPS url

Thanks to those of you who reported it and KrazyKiwi for correctly guessing the cause...

Thank you KrazyKiwi and kiwidude! Great work, guys!

[crissman]

Hi, I am not sure if this was asked or answered in the several pages here.

What I would like to do with this addon is to have a custom shelf in goodreads "Library" and upload my complete collection to goodreads and from that point either manually added the particular books I am reading/re-reading/or currently reading to various shelves. As I said manually do this via the goodreads website or somehow do this automatically based on maybe a column in calibre itself or some kind of alternative.

What I did was a test run (forgive me first time playing with this addon) and selected a bunch of books in calbre and used the add to shelf option and chose my "library" shelf. When I went to verify that it indeed uploaded those books to goodreads I found that it not only added the books to my library shelf but also added it to the "read" shelf.

Is there anything I can do to stop it from adding to the "exclusive shelves" and just add to my own custom shelf? Then from there either have an option to select a secondary shelf or add it via calibre/manually once I have read the particular book?

Thanks in advance for any help and apologies if this has already been asked and answered.

Crissman

Originally Posted by edwdecarlo

I have set up a custom column to capture the Goodreads shelf when I sync via Goodreads sync. I then use the Goodreads Sync 'Shelf Add Actions' and 'Sync Actions' to populate this custom column. Once the custom column is setup and populated, it can be used like any other column (displayed, searched on, in scripting, etc).

Here are screen shots of my custom column, and how I am populating it within the Goodreads Sync customize. Note: I only use the standard Goodreads shelves, so I am using a Text column with set values. You can change this to be any other text type if you use others, or just add the extra values you need to the set values of the column. I find using the set values makes it easier to capture when a book is moved to a different shelf.

I have also including a screen shot of my Date Read and My Rating custom columns.

I hope this is helpful.

This solved almost all of my issues..
The only question I do now have is in regards to just added books to your own custom shelf only rather then it applying it to your own custom shelf as well as the "read" exclusive shelf.
Since I have one calibre library for my entire family but goodreads is exclusively for myself it would be nice to have all my books in a shelf called "library" and then from there be able to designate my books in to ones I am interested in reading in the future to be able to put those in the "to read" shelf. There are alot of books that I have that I am not interesting in read now or ever but I have them because I have other family members that are.


Using the above information I added an option to the column stats where instead of just having unread,reading,read I also added library. and now everything is working PERFECTLY

A big thanks to edwdecarlo your screenshots made a world of difference.

[edwdecarlo]

Crissman

Thank you. I am glad my posting was able to help you.

The only question I do now have is in regards to just added books to your own custom shelf only rather then it applying it to your own custom shelf as well as the "read" exclusive shelf.
Since I have one calibre library for my entire family but goodreads is exclusively for myself it would be nice to have all my books in a shelf called "library" and then from there be able to designate my books in to ones I am interested in reading in the future to be able to put those in the "to read" shelf. There are alot of books that I have that I am not interesting in read now or ever but I have them because I have other family members that are.

As for the Goodreads 'read' shelf, my experience is that this is a shelf maintained by Goodreads and any book marked as Read will always be added to this shelf...free of charge. It seems that any book added via the API (used by this plugin) with a 'Read Date' is considered to be read. There is no way I know of to prevent this.

The other Goodreads maintained shelves are:

all - All book in your library. I believe this just shows anything in read, currently-reading and to-read shelves, and is not a true shelf.
currently-reading - Any book marked as Currently Reading
to-read - Any book marked as Want to Read. I believe this is also the catch all for book not in read or currently-reading.

Note: Any book added to your library must be in either read, currently-reading or to-read, whether you manually add it or Goodreads does it automatically.

You should be able to create your own custom Shelves (which are basically tags to Goodreads) and use this plug in to populate those shelves. From your description of what you are trying to do, I would suggest creating the following Shelves:

library - To store all the books you wish to maintain on Goodreads
library-to-read - for those book you want to read
library-read - for those book you have read

When you create the shelves (or sync them) in the plugin confiq, be sure to mark them Exclusive. This way the plug in will make sure the book exists only once within any shelf marked exclusive.

Goodreads will continue populate read, currently-reading and to-read in the background, so just ignore those.

One thing to keep in mind, if your purpose for creating the custom shelves is to separate each family members books, using the custom shelves will not work if you have multiple people interested in the same book, since the Exclusive setting applies to all shelves within a single Goodreads account. A better solution in this case; the plug in supports being able to sync to multiple Goodreads accounts from your single calibre library, so each family member can have separate Goodreads accounts and you can use the built in shelves to maintain each family member's books separately.

Hope this is helpful.

[charles_cinci]

I just updated to 1.7.3, but the drag and drop still doesn't seem to work for me with calibre 1.4.

I'll see if updating Calibre makes a difference...

Charles

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Changes in this release:

• Fix drag/drop into the Goodreads dialog due to change to use of HTTPS url

Thanks to those of you who reported it and KrazyKiwi for correctly guessing the cause...

[ragdoll]

I am not sure I have understood how this plugin works.
I'd like to have my read books on the read shelf in Goodreads and also have them tagged with the "read" tag.
I wasn't able to automatically sync in either way. Is it possible?

[crissman]

Hi, I think I am having an "old" issue that seemed to have been addressed by "goodreads" way back when.

Not sure if it is something that is happening yet again or something different When I "add to shelf" I am getting an error "The request contacting Goodreads has Failed. Please try again" I figured I would throw it out there and see if someone might know something about this.


calibre, version 1.21.0
ERROR: Goodreads Failure: The request contacting Goodreads has failed. Please try again.

URL: http://www.goodreads.com/shelf/add_to_shelf.xml
Response Code: 404
<html><head><meta name="robots" content="noindex" /></head>
<body>
not found
</body>
</html>

This is isolated to a few books not all books.
1. Some add to shelves just fine, and and others do not.

2. Select for example 10 books and try to add them to a shelf and if "one" of these books gives this error ALL the books do not get uploaded to the goodreads website. It will tag it in the calibre column with the appropriate shelf name with the except of the "error book"

3. Singly add the the book that causes the error and it still causes the error does not get tagged with the shelf name in calibre and does not get added to the goodreads website shelf.

4. Singly add one book it will add to shelf just fine, both in calibre and on the goodreads shelf

5. Singly add one book it will add to shelf in Calibre "or at least tag it in the calibre column with the shelf name" but does not add it to the goodreads shelf on the website.

Thanks Crissman

edit: Just tried to create a new shelf via the goodreads plugin in calibre and receive the same kind of error

calibre, version 1.21.0
ERROR: Goodreads Failure: The request contacting Goodreads has failed. Please try again.

URL: http://www.goodreads.com/user_shelves.xml
Response Code: 201
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<user_shelf>
<book_count type="integer">0</book_count>
<created_at type="datetime">2014-01-31T04:54:07+00:00</created_at>
<description nil="true"/>
<display_fields>011110100110000110000100000000</display_fields>
<editable_flag type="boolean">true</editable_flag>
<exclusive_flag type="boolean">true</exclusive_flag>
<featured type="boolean">false</featured>
<id type="integer">91513909</id>
<name>western</name>
<order nil="true"/>
<per_page type="integer" nil="true"/>
<recommend_for type="boolean">true</recommend_for>
<sort nil="true"/>
<sortable_flag type="boolean">false</sortable_flag>
<sticky type="boolean" nil="true"/>
<updated_at type="datetime">2014-01-31T04:54:07+00:00</updated_at>
<user_id type="integer">10451626</user_id>
</user_shelf>

[kiwidude]

@Crissnan - Goodreads do seem to be having the odd issue with their API and annoyingly they don't seem to be responding particularly actively to enquiries about it. Personally I haven't had any issues with adding books to my shelves - if I did I would be diving in to try to fix it. But then again I am only adding one book at a time in my day to day usage.

That "Add shelves" issue I can replicate. Again they are not responding to my query about it. It could be that the response code it is giving back of "201" is actually a "valid" response code for all I know, rather than an error one, because it does actually add the shelf on goodreads. Will wait a bit longer to see if they respond to the thread and then look to tweak the plugin if needed.
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show...s-add-to-shelf

[crissman]

@Kiwidude

Thank you for looking into this. Recently I haven't had any other issues relating to adding books or adding shelves "201" or "404" errors. However the one specific book that originally caused the "404" error still will not "add to shelves"

calibre, version 1.24.0
ERROR: Goodreads Failure: The request contacting Goodreads has failed. Please try again.

URL: http://www.goodreads.com/shelf/add_to_shelf.xml
Response Code: 404
<html><head><meta name="robots" content="noindex" /></head>
<body>
not found
</body>
</html>

This is an excellent plugin and it makes my life so much easier. I have been slowly adding my calibre library to goodreads a little at a time and I have to say without this plugin it would be so slow and tedious. Thank you very much for your efforts in creating this plugin.

Crissman

[Wampuscat]

I want to grab the 'position' of the books on one of my Goodreads bookshelves and put that in a custom column in Calibre using the plugin. Can anyone tell me how I can do that? I can't seem to find the 'position' information to set up a rule for it.

[gabby98]

I apologize if this has been asked but I have not been able to find it...I would like to add my books to certain genre based shelves (limited values allowed) if they have tags that match that shelf name. I just started using this plugin 2 days ago. I am not familiar with the sync option, but from what I saw when I looked at it, it does not apply to what i want. How would I go about this task?

Please and in advance

ETA: I thought I'd figured it out just now, but it did not work.

ETA2: OK, more playing and I kinda figured it out. Seemed I was choosing the wrong option. it doesn't work when I use add books, but does when I use linked books upload tags as shelves...is that what is should do?

Anyway, if I want to link books that have a mystery tag or a mysteries tag will it still work if I just use myster as the tag for the shelf? Is it case sensitive?

thanks again!

[gabby98]

I thought someone would've had something for me by now...but realizing that my last post ended up being a bit of a mess by the end, I'll try to cleanup my questions.

I've figured out how to add bond to shrines by tags but can it been done automatically during the add books, our just via the linked books option after its already been added?

If I want to link books that have a mystery tag or a mysteries tag will it still work if I just use myster* as the tag for the shelf? Is it case sensitive?

thanks again!

[kiwidude]

No wildcards are supported. As per the Help, in the Customize plugin dialog for this plugin is where you specify what calibre Tag(s) will map to a specific Goodreads shelf. As for case sensitivity, you will see that when you type in calibre Tag names the autocompletion will match whatever your case you use in calibre. And as you are creating these entries for each specified shelf that you have in Goodreads, the naming corresponding does not matter - so long as you have at some point clicked on "Refresh Shelves" to ensure that list represents what you have actually created on the Goodreads website then that should all just work...

[gabby98]

Originally Posted by gabby98

...
I've figured out how to add bond to shrines ....

Oops, auto correct on my phone strikes again.

Originally Posted by kiwidude

No wildcards are supported. As per the Help, in the Customize plugin dialog for this plugin is where you specify what calibre Tag(s) will map to a specific Goodreads shelf. As for case sensitivity, you will see that when you type in calibre Tag names the autocompletion will match whatever your case you use in calibre. And as you are creating these entries for each specified shelf that you have in Goodreads, the naming corresponding does not matter - so long as you have at some point clicked on "Refresh Shelves" to ensure that list represents what you have actually created on the Goodreads website then that should all just work...

Thanks for your response!, but one more thing:

Originally Posted by gabby98

I've figured out how to add books to shelves by tags but can it been done automatically during the add books, our just via the linked books option after its already been added to a shelf?

thanks again!

[kiwidude]

If I understand your question correctly, no the plugin does not offer a way as part of the calibre add books functionality to automatically upload. You have to explicitly use the menu option. This makes more sense because when you first add the book to your library in all likelihood the metadata for the tags field will either be nonexistent or rubbish.

[gabby98]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

If I understand your question correctly, no the plugin does not offer a way as part of the calibre add books functionality to automatically upload. You have to explicitly use the menu option. This makes more sense because when you first add the book to your library in all likelihood the metadata for the tags field will either be nonexistent or rubbish.

Sorry...my bad I hadn't realized until just know how my wording was very confusing/misleading.

I meant, can the books also be added to the auto shelves when I use the Add to Shelf option of the plugin or is it only an option when I use the Linked Book > Upload tags as Shelves option/
ty again