[Metadata Source Plugin] Fantastic Fiction

[kiwidude]

This plugin offers yet another download source for book metadata from one of the most consistent sources of book information and covers around by retrieving from www.fantasticfiction.co.uk.

As with my Goodreads and Barnes & Noble plugins it is designed to either supplement or replace the metadata plugins that come with Calibre. Unlike the Goodreads plugin you cannot get any get any tags (genres) or ratings for a book.

However Fantastic Fiction has very consistently sized covers, excellent series information and is extremely fast to retrieve from.

Main Features

• Can retrieve title, author, series, isbn, comments, publisher, publication date and covers
• Also retrieves a Fantastic Fiction id, which can be used to directly jump to the page for a specific book from the book details pane (like Goodreads/ISBN etc).
• Optionally assign the Genre value Fantastic Fiction has for some books to your Tags column

Special Notes:

• Help Documentation
• Change History
• Requires Calibre 2.85.1 or later.

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!
  

[travger]

Yey, my favourite site to check!!

[danwdoo]

Oh man, this is awesome! I have always loved FF as the best site for any series information! One other thing that would be really cool, would be if I buy one or more books in a series, this could be used to download placeholder 'wanted' books for the rest of the books in the series. Not sure if it would even be possible, but it would be cool. Either way, this is a 'Fantastic' plugin!

[Valkrider]

Thanks for this plugin , I have tried it on a couple of books and it works fine.

[kiwidude]

Changes in this release:

• Bug-fix non-ascii title/author names not being parsed correctly
• Bug-fix re-runnability after a FF id is retrieved
• Add support for ISBN based lookups

The first release of this plugin I did not support ISBN lookups. I have decided to add support to make the plugin a little more consistent with the other metadata source plugins. So you can now create an empty book, specify only the ISBN and have the title/authors populated if FantasticFiction has a match.

If you find any issues, please post details of the title/author/isbn you had when doing the lookup.

[kiwidude]

Changes in this release:

• No longer prefix comments for a book with 'SUMMARY:'
• Ensure no issues with no author being specified or no title being specified
• Ensure no series books parsed correctly

One change I have been contemplating which any feedback would be welcome on is the actual "name" used for the fantastic fiction id that you see in the tag browser and edit metadata dialog. Currently this is set to "ff". Perhaps some may like something a little longer in comparison to other ids like "goodreads", "amazon", "webscription" etc. I think "fantasticfiction" is perhaps too long, which only leaves something like "fantfiction" or "ffiction". Eyebrows might be raised if I used "ffuk"...

Or if you are perfectly fine with "ff" then we can keep it at that. If we are going to change it, now is the time before too many users create lots of ids for it.

[danwdoo]

I think I like ffiction, though ff is fine as well. I agree fantasticfiction is probably too long.

[kiwidude]

Changes in this release:

• Tweak the logic when searching by ISBN so falls back to use original title/author for search when ISBN not found.

[Valkrider]

I'm not bothered what you call it, I am more than happy with FF. I do agree that the full name may be a bit long.

[Gary_M_Mugford]

Kiwidude,

For whatever reason, I hadn't enabled the FF plugin before now. With this single plugin, Calibre might be perfect. Thank you. GM

[kiwidude]

Hi Gary, glad you found it useful.

I wouldn't class it as "perfect" myself, all the metadata source plugins I have written each have their own strengths. For instance FantasticFiction has lots of covers and good series information, but no ratings. Goodreads is my favourite "all rounder". B&N usually has the best covers. I tend to have (only) those three sources enabled. I would use Webscription too for the small subset of books Baen have, but disabled the rest of the time.

[kiwidude]

Changes in this release:

• For ISBN based lookups, strip any : from title returned to prevent treating as a subtitle
• Strip '?' from title based lookups and the words "A Novel"
• Strip leading "The" from title for ISBN based lookups
• If title/authors returned by FF for ISBN lookup results in no matches, retry with calibre title/authors
• When checking book returned from search is correct, compare with FF isbn and calibre title/authors before rejecting
• Ensure UTF-8 decoding of search results in case of rare issues
• Support change to FF website to surround ISBN with <strong> tags
• Fix for rare "url malformed" error when written by multiple authors but only one on FantasticFiction

This release should significantly increase the success hit rate for this plugin. It has taken a while but I have finally had a couple of days off "writing" plugins to use this plugin in anger with my own library against hundreds of titles. I have tried as many as possible of the scenarios where FantasticFiction did not have a match returned to investigate exactly why and add a whole bunch of subtle corner cases. Not every single possible situation is covered but it is as improved as I can make it at this point.

Enjoy!

[kiwidude]

Changes in this release:

• Offer options for what to do with the Genre: addition the Goodreads website now has (discard, tags)

Recently Fantastic Fiction (for some books) has been including a hyperlinked genre in the comments for a book on the web page. As this was annoying me (particularly since when added to Calibre the link will not work) I added two options for how to deal with it in a dropdown you can access when configuring this plugin. The default behaviour is to strip the genre information out completely. You also have the option of it turning the genre into a value for the tags column.

[kiwidude]

Changes in this release:

• Support an additional edge case of Genre with a blank comments

[kiwidude]

Before anyone asks - yes it does appear this plugin is broken due to FantasticFiction making a change to their website recently. So much for today being a "plugin development free" day...