[Metadata Source Plugin] Webscription (Baen Ebooks)

[kiwidude]

This plugin is now deprecated and will no longer be supported. Instead all of its functionality has been migrated into the Baen plugin, which is an updated direct replacement.

This is a bit of a niche metadata source, for those of you who are a fan of Baen Ebooks and other publishers available from www.baenebooks.com (formerly at webscription.net)

Baen Ebooks has a fairly small selection of authors/books (certainly in comparison to the other metadata sources). However for the books it does have there are some very nice covers.

Note that unlike other metadata sources this plugin offers no support for ISBN based lookups or retrieval of ISBN. Instead it does a lookup by book title, and then validates that this matches the author (if any) for your book to provide a match.

Main Features:

• Can retrieve title, author, comments, publisher, publication date, rating and covers
• Also retrieves a Webscription id, which can be used to directly jump to the page for a specific book from the book details pane (like Goodreads/ISBN etc).

Special Notes:

• Requires Calibre 0.8 or later.

Installation Notes:

• Download the attached zip file and install the plugin as described in the Introduction to plugins thread.
• Note that this is not a GUI plugin so it is not intended/cannot be added to context menus/toolbars etc.

Paypal Donations:

• If you find this or any of my other plugins useful please feel free to show your appreciation. I have spent many hundreds of unpaid hours in their development and support so any encouragement for me to continue is appreciated!
  

Version History:

Spoiler:

Version 1.1.0 - 14 Mar 2016
New URL
Lots of website changes
Added series name but no series index

Version 1.0.3 - 01 Aug 2013
Fix for covers not downloading due to website changes

Version 1.0.2 - 17 Mar 2012
Further changes to support updates to Baen website

Version 1.0.1 - 10 Jan 2012
Website moved to baenebooks.com

Version 1.0 - 12 May 2011
Initial release of plugin

[jgaiser]

Thanks.... Donation on the way...

[kiwidude]

Very kind of you - glad you found it useful.

[danwdoo]

A worthy donation cause if I ever saw one!

[kc7zzv]

Plugin version 1.0.0 doesn't work after website update. At the least, I'm pretty sure the value of BASE_URL on line 37 in __init__.py needs to be changed from
BASE_URL = 'http://www.webscription.net'
to
BASE_URL = 'http://www.baenebooks.com'


Note: I have not tested this fix, and there might also be other problems too

[kiwidude]

Website updates - the bane of a metadata download plugin developer's life, sigh.

Thanks for the heads up, I'll take a look tonight. Would be nice if it is just that URL change...

[theducks]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Website updates - the bane of a metadata download plugin developer's life, sigh.

Thanks for the heads up, I'll take a look tonight. Would be nice if it is just that URL change...

The original (URL) website redirects. Is there any way a PI could detect and capture the new path?

[kiwidude]

@theducks - it is an idea that I believe "could" be done but I don't think it would be worth the effort of coding it up. Changing domain name is a pretty drastic event that is unlikely to happen very often, versus the more likely occurrence of when they restyle the website which is what causes the serious developer pain.

[kc7zzv]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

@theducks - it is an idea that I believe "could" be done but I don't think it would be worth the effort of coding it up. Changing domain name is a pretty drastic event that is unlikely to happen very often, versus the more likely occurrence of when they restyle the website which is what causes the serious developer pain.

To expand on what you said, when moved to a new domain, websites are often changed to the point that the old code for parsing fails.

[kiwidude]

Changes in this release:

• Website moved to baenebooks.com

I *almost* went as far as renaming the whole plugin, since Webscription is a name that will likely mean nothing in future. However it can stay as it is for now.

[kc7zzv]

Nice. It's now working very well for me.

So, the ISBN and the SKU are the same, in all the cases I've seen, except the eARCs have an "A" at the beginning. So, the plugin could return an ISBN, too. How hard would that be to do?

[kiwidude]

@kc7zzv - when I originally wrote this plugin many aeons ago I did take a look at that. IIRC there wasn't much consistency at the time that I saw on when it was an ISBN versus when it was something else. I do recall spotting that "A" + ISBN coding for some books but think I also may have found some exceptions to that rule which made it all seem a bit dodgy.

Combine that with the fact that I would suggest many users of this plugin will also be downloading using other metadata plugins that do return an ISBN, and that whatever ISBN the plugin comes back with, it is going to get "mangled" by Kovid's ISBN pool Worldcat logic, it just didn't seem worth the effort.

However I can appreciate that if someone only had the Webscription plugin enabled then they would like to get an ISBN if it was available. I'll take another look and see if I can find the cases that put me off the idea last time...

[kc7zzv]

Ah. I hadn't seen that problem. One problem I saw is that some are the shorter ISBN, and some are the longer ISBN, but I was assuming that's not a problem to code. I also know that some of the products don't have ISBNs, like monthly webscriptions.

Mostly, I was thinking it might be useful to find out if two entries are for the same book. This is starting to sound like it might not work as well as I'd hoped though.

[kiwidude]

Two entries for the same book - do you mean duplicate checking in calibre? You are better off with the Find Duplicates plugin for that.

As I mentioned above the metadata download process has some voodoo concerning ISBNs and Worldcat which mean I would never rely on the ISBN you end up with after metadata download having a particular significance. Perhaps with only a single metadata download plugin enabled that is not the case, I can't recall the code off the top of my head. But certainly with multiple download sources enabled there is no guarantees about what ISBN you will end up with.

There are a few other options, such as the Extract ISBN plugin. Or rather more manually the Goodreads Sync plugin, which via its "Linked Book" feature has the option of overwriting the ISBN to the specific edition you chose from Goodreads.

But duplicate checking via title/author with the Find Duplicates plugin is usually your best bet.

[kc7zzv]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Two entries for the same book - do you mean duplicate checking in calibre? You are better off with the Find Duplicates plugin for that. .

Sorry I didn't get back to you sooner. I meant that, when I get a list of entries to use, when downloading metadata, I can see the ISBN for each. That would make it easier to see if the webscription one is the same book as the Amazon/Google entry it finds. So overall, it's not a high priority.