maintain a record of library book loans ?

[cybmole]

I mistakenly thought that overdrive/my local library could give me a history of e-books borrowed, but it seems not. There is a policy within overdrive of not storing checkout history for privacy reasons
Well usually I'd be all for that, but not when consequence is borrowing a book, getting 1/2 way through then realising I've already read it !

[back in the days of paper books and proper human-operated checkouts, the library persons would sometimes say to me " you borrowed that one a few weeks ago" - no such help from overdrive! ]

so does anyone here use calibre to maintain a history of books borrowed & returned, & if so, do they have a slick method that they could share please.

[copyrite]

My method is probably extremely simplistic I bet in terms of others' approach.

Since I don't actually have the Overdrive book in my Calibre library, I add an empty book, enter the title, author info, and add an OD tag. I'll usually trawl for metadata so it'll look perty.

Started doing this after I realized I'd already checked out and read something!

[cybmole]

that would work but if there was a way of having calibre spot the library download & auto-grab the metadata...
All the library books download via sony reader software to my docs/my books/reader, but it's not as simple as having calibre auto-add from that folder, because autoadd deletes the source & would anyway be not happy with the DRM

[cybmole]

adding a related question to the thread - I have ~200 books in calibre library that were bought from amazon, imported via K for PC & converted to epubs, then original formats deleted. So it's no longer obvious where they came from. Any sliick way to get all those tagged. as amazon books ? I can re-download everything into K for PC again quite easily I think, & then run add books from folder...but I'd need it set to merge with matching titles & not to create new records... then I could add a bulk tag & then delete the mobi versions. is that workable. ?

[eschwartz]

The calibre plugin "OverDrive Link" is my main way of talking to OverDrive. It searches your configured library locations for available (and recommendable) books by author/keyword and saves a list, with links to the book. You can add any book record from there into calibre as you check it out. Books already in calibre (or that the plugin adds to calibre) get the link added.

It works very well for me since I use OverDrive Link ==> Manage available books to check them out in the first place. (It is easier than using OverDrive search.)

[copyrite]

I tend to forget I have that OD Plug-in

[cybmole]

can the OD plug in be configured so that all it does is monitor checkouts & add details of checked out books? I don't really want to use the other features; I'd rather directly browse the library site. is there a user guide or similar to configuring it ?

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by cybmole

can the OD plug in be configured so that all it does is monitor checkouts & add details of checked out books? I don't really want to use the other features; I'd rather directly browse the library site. is there a user guide or similar to configuring it ?

There's a help button.

I'm sure you could expand its code to monitor MyAccount.htm but it's not currently a feature. Maybe you could ask JHowell to add that?

Meanwhile, you could just do it manually, using the plugin to grab the actual book details for stuff you want and whenever you read a book, add it to calibre ("Add selected books to the calibre library") then tag it "OD-read" or something. It would require active maintenance, but at least lots of books will be already in a nice list for export.

[cybmole]

ok - I added the OD plug-in (& shouted for help iin its thread about getting the library URL)- but I seem to have it working. I've told it to match my entire library with what is available at my library & it is chugging away. I see that when it finds a match it adds an ID tag to what is already there but I see no way use that ID in calibre sorts, outside of the plug-in interface. How do I get calibre to list only the books which match library / How do I go from having the tags to generating a simple Y/N custom column: available at library Y/N .

each matched book gets a unique new library tag so I need to find/list tags containing "@gloucestershire.lib.overdrive.com"

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by cybmole

ok - I added the OD plug-in (& shouted for help iin its thread about getting the library URL)- but I seem to have it working. I've told it to match my entire library with what is available at my library & it is chugging away. I see that when it finds a match it adds an ID tag to what is already there but I see no way use that ID in calibre sorts, outside of the plug-in interface. How do I get calibre to list only the books which match library / How do I go from having the tags to generating a simple Y/N custom column: available at library Y/N .

each matched book gets a unique new library tag so I need to find/list tags containing "@gloucestershire.lib.overdrive.com"

See screenshot. It will autofill these for you.

But it follows the format

identifiers:"=odid:@ebooks.nypl.org"

for example. In your case it would be:

identifiers:"=odid:@gloucestershire.lib.overdrive.com"

[cybmole]

that is great thanks.

it seems that many books which I did not originally get from the library are now available at the library, I think my library's collection has grown a lot in the last year or so

my next puzzle: I complete this one off match my entire library + create my new column...

in , say, a month's time , I'd like to check whether the library has any new books which now also match my collection, so I can use this new column: select only the unmatched books, then have the plug in run against "selected books" to re-check for those ?

is it safe to just re-run the entire check or will I get duplicate IDs being created for already-matched books ?

[eschwartz]

No duplicate IDs will be created. It will simply add any new links.

I periodically re-run a whole-library check. Well, not really, I divide it into chunks, but that's just for speed.

[cybmole]

thanks again - having fun discovering what clever searches I can now do, like how many of the books I bought from amazon are also now available as library epubs....
( answer : hardly any - but many of my amazon books were freebies ( "bought" for £0.00 ) from the week's top 20 free kindle books so were probably self-published only in mobi format )