[GUI Plugin] Import List

[Wharton]

OK. I now have everything loaded. This is a general library question. I now have all my books from Amazon onto Calibre. I downloaded them all from my Kindle and they are all Amazon books. I am missing many book covers so I ran the entire library through the book cover metadata update(every option checked except Chinese) and very few book covers appeared. What am I doing wrong?

[theducks]

(Get) Covers need to match the Identifiers AND you need sources enabled for those (languages). Looking at Amazon US will not find Amazon Chinese.

Configure The Amazon Metadata PI to use the property country

Another PI I love for picking covers (drag and drop into metadata editor/ details pane, when you find one) is the Search The Internet Plugin

[Wharton]

Thanks

[Wharton]

OK. I am making progress. Drag and drop works great! Do I need to do each book individually or can I do this in one pass?

New Question: Is there a way to search for all my books that don't have a cover? I haven't located this yet so I assume user error.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Wharton

OK. I am making progress. Drag and drop works great! Do I need to do each book individually or can I do this in one pass?

New Question: Is there a way to search for all my books that don't have a cover? I haven't located this yet so I assume user error.

Try searching for cover:false in the search box.

[Wharton]

Ah, that is what I couldn't find. Thanks so much.

[Wharton]

How can I blank out a field en masse? I thought "" would do it but when I do that in Edit Metadata the "" is entered into the field. The word "unknown" keeps appearing even though I have blank fields when I created the entry. When I search on a title it shows up as "unknown Pride and Prejudice" and I just want the title.

So close, yet so far...............

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Wharton

How can I blank out a field en masse? I thought "" would do it but when I do that in Edit Metadata the "" is entered into the field. The word "unknown" keeps appearing even though I have blank fields when I created the entry. When I search on a title it shows up as "unknown Pride and Prejudice" and I just want the title.

So close, yet so far...............

Certain fields are not permitted to be blank (or start with a blank): Title, Author (there may be more) will be set to Unknown

The only other thing that comes to mind is you are searching on a calculated field where that condition was triggered

Just make the field empty (delete contents or enter -1000000 if numeric and no empty button is alongside)

[capink]

See the above post for a better answer.

[Wharton]

OK. I am done batting my had against the wall. Thanks

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by theducks

<snip>

Just make the field empty (delete contents or enter -1000000 if numeric and no empty button is alongside)

To make an integer or floating point number Undefined/Empty enter a space (' '), for a date enter a hyphen ('-'), to set a date to Now enter an equals ('=').

BR

[Rellwood]

Three things:

Is there any chance of allowing the author and/or titles to be pointed elsewhere? As long as the columns match the format for author/title?

I use the plugin to import my Goodreads .csv (export library .csv) and the Goodreads book titles are much different from the edited Calibre titles. This makes the import take forever (I have some 3500 books in Goodreads). I created a "Goodreads Title" column and have been copying it to the title column when trying to import.

This takes a while to do, and requires me to copy from the original Calibre title to a holding title column, and the Goodreads title to the Calibre title, and then back after the import. Each time I do this it requires Calibre to totally change my library. If I could just point the title in the list to the title column I have set up, I could avoid doing this. Same for the Authors.

Also, is there a way of setting the plugin to NOT exclude special characters? "&", and "." is being dropped and it causes some of my titles/authors to not match.

Finally, it would be great if the plugin could have a feature that would remember matches. I am finding that the same books are having to be manually matched up each and every time (thus the reason why I have that Goodreads Title/Authors columns).

Thanks, and I love the plugin otherwise!

[capink]

I have added python3 support to this plugin. It was tested on 3.44 and 4.99.5 and it seems to work. My programming knowledge is very basic, so it would help if someone more experienced can review this and release it.

There is a file inside the zip packages called python3support.txt that describes the changes done to the plugin.

[capink]

I made some modifications to the plugin, in case anyone is interested:

- FIX: If a csv file has an empty value in a cell that corresponds to a numerical value in calibre, a type error was raised. Now you can have empty values in place of numbers.
- ADDED: Added an option to match books by using identifiers (isbn .... etc) instead of title/author match.
- Added a scrollbar to the columns to import area.

Everything seems to be working except a minor annoyance with the scrollarea not shrinking with content (attached pictures help explain the problem). I hope someone can look at the code and maybe help with fixing the problem.

@Rellwood: I think the new option to match books by identifiers can solve your problems. Give it try.

[capink]

This is — hopefully — my last update to the plugin:

- FIX: problem in the previous version when changing between two saved settings not correctly setting the match method.
- FIX: "Columns to import" scroll area is now dynamically resized based on contents.

It is now up to plugin maintainer(s) to decide what to include from the python3 and other modifications.