[Metadata Source Plugin] Barnes & Noble

[kiwidude]

This plugin offers another download source for book metadata including some excellent quality covers by retrieving from www.barnesandnoble.com.

As with the Goodreads plugin 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) from this plugin as Barnes & Noble do not have any such information on a book detail page. If that changes in future I can look to support that.

However it does have higher quality covers available in larger sizes than many of the other metadata plugins offer, as well as series information like Goodreads.

Main Features

• Can retrieve title, author, series, isbn, comments, rating, publisher, publication date and covers
• Also retrieves a barnes & noble id, which is really just a combination of isbn and book information that can be used to directly jump to the page for a specific book from the book details pane (like Goodreads/ISBN etc).
• Option to customise the number of ISBN editions to consider when doing title/author searches. Set this to 1 for maximum download speed, with a risk that the first edition chosen does not have a large cover available.
• Option to retrieve all contributors to a book as an author. By default this is turned off, however B&N is able to provide illustrators, editors etc should you want these retrieved.

Special Notes:

• Help Documentation
• Change History
• Requires Calibre 2.0.0 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!
  

[bookmonster]

B&N has always been my FAVORITE source for covers! Kiwidude, YOU ROCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[lgladen]

Kiwidude - The B&N plugin seems to be inserting commas as well as "&" signs in between multiple authors when downloading metadata. Checked the download log and B&N shows (for example): Katherine Maclean, & Polly Freas (editor), & Kelly Freas (editor)

[kiwidude]

Originally Posted by lgladen

Kiwidude - The B&N plugin seems to be inserting commas as well as "&" signs in between multiple authors when downloading metadata. Checked the download log and B&N shows (for example): Katherine Maclean, & Polly Freas (editor), & Kelly Freas (editor)

Yes I noticed something similar last night just before I crashed so it is on my hit list for this morning. The books I had checked with multiple authors when i did the first release didn't happen to have the extra text in brackets that causes the issue.

I also found there was another type of "audio" edition I need to add to my list to filter out. And I need to do some more work on prioritising various results based on whether they have a large cover you can drill into or not, as the approach I have in there currently doesn't always work. Annoyingly barnes & noble don't attach a drill in large cover to every edition, so it is a lucky dip at the moment.

Will be a new version in a few hours hopefully. Btw if anyone finds any other issues please post an isbn or title/author that I can use to replicate.

[kiwidude]

Changes in this release:

• Add "Audio" to list of excluded format types
• Fix issues with multiple authors when they have contribution type in brackets after them
• Add a config option (like Goodreads) to return all contributing authors (off by default)
• Modify prioritisation of results to increase chance of getting a large cover when multiple have covers

Important:

Until Kovid tweaks something in Calibre in the metadata API, you may want to set your maximum number of requests down to one in the configuration screen for this dialog (I have made that the new default, but if you have installed this previously you will have to manually adjust this).

If you do not, then there is the possibility that the ISBN/B&N Id that you are returned is not actually the "best match". There is more discussion on this issue here for the technically inclined, I have added an issue to the bug tracker for it.

What is the impact of setting it to just one result match being considered?

Well it means you are relying on B&N giving you their best match at the top of their search results. So for instance it can be the case that only some of the ISBNs they offer on their website have large images available for a book. Retrieving several results can increase your chances of getting the largest cover.

You may not notice a difference for many books - hopefully B&N's "best match" is the one with the most complete metadata and cover anyway.

Note that this will normally only affect searches by title/author, not when you already have an ISBN (provided it exists on B&N).

[kiwidude]

Changes in this release:

• Make sure that Image not available gifs are not returned as fallback covers

[kiwidude]

Changes in this release:

• Remove some debugging stuff from the log
• Strip hyperlinks text from the comments since these don't get retained and just confuse the output

[liquid2000]

Please add function for parsing TOC from the Barnes & Noble site

[kiwidude]

Originally Posted by liquid2000

Please add function for parsing TOC from the Barnes & Noble site

I have no idea what you mean or what you hope to achieve?

[meme]

Since when has that stopped you before

[liquid2000]

I need the table of contents for my books. For science books it's better to search when you have table of contents than short and simple description. On the B&N site for this kind of books there is a table of contents on the tab Features. I want to add TOC to to the comments field but I don't know what I most change in the source code

[kiwidude]

A much better description of what you would like, thanks! Welcome to MR btw. Can you post a link to an example couple of books on the B&N website? As this information is only available for certain books, maybe only for certain editions of those books too? So even if I did add an option for getting this information it could well be a lottery as to whether the edition picked by the metadata search has this info available...

[liquid2000]

Table of contents isn't available for all the books but for almost all science books
e.g.
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Rot...rical+machines
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Mic...I=visual+basic

In the source of the page there is section <div id="toc" class="#toc-feature">

[kiwidude]

@liquid2000 - give this version a try. You will need to go into the configuration for the B&N plugin after installing and tick the checkbox I have added for appending the TOC. I decided not to try to strip the page numbers from the TOC, maybe someone would find them useful anyways so easier to just leave them in there. Let me know if this does what you want and I will officially release it.

[liquid2000]

Exactly! Thank you very much