[Covers Plugin] Goodreads Covers **Deprecated**

[kiwidude]

As of Calibre 0.8 this plugin is deprecated and will no longer work. Instead you should use the replacement Goodreads Metadata Source plugin which is compatible with Calibre 0.8 onwards.

This plugin allows Calibre to download book covers from goodreads.com. Calibre currently comes with plugins for a number of cover sources such as OpenLibrary.org and most recently Amazon. Adding this plugin can potentially increase the likelihood of getting a cover for your book.

It is the second of a Goodreads trinity of plugins I will publish in this forum. The other two are for Goodreads metadata downloads and shelve syncing.

Main Features of v1.1.1

• Downloads a cover where available on Goodreads for books with an ISBN.
• Handles broken image urls on Goodreads website

Special Notes:

• Like the other Calibre covers plugins this will only attempt to find covers for a book which has an ISBN. This is a limitation of the current Calibre API. I have added code to do title/author searches like the Goodreads metadata download plugin, but it is disabled until/if the API is changed.
• Kovid intends in future to make breaking changes to the API. When he publishes that new version, this plugin will stop working. Check back here for updates over the next month or so.

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.
• You can enable/disable and configure both it and the other metadata download plugins like Amazon, Google Books etc in Preferences -> Plugins -> Covers plugins

Version History:

Spoiler:

Version 1.1.1 - 13 Apr 2011
Change the URL searched against as Goodreads have changed their website.

Version 1.1 - 21 Feb 2011
Added additional call for each url to test whether image is broken link

Version 1.0 - 16 Feb 2011
Initial release of Goodreads Covers plugin

[silasgreenback]

Nice indeed.

I've only tested it for a couple books, but the availability of covers where there were none speaks for itself.

Thank you!

[tlindgren]

FYI, this plugin problems with some ISBN and when that happens it blocks other plugins further down the list such as the official openlibrary.org plugin from providing cover! Note that the official cover download plugins doesn't do this, if they fail the next plug gets to tru.

Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be a way to rearrange the order, it always runs them in alphabetical order.

The error message it gives are: ERROR: Bad cover: The cover is not a valid picture
Example ISBN: 9780345379092

The Amazon Covers plugin fails with what appears to be an internal error, but if it gets the chance the openlibrary.org Covers will provide the cover.

It's hard to tell but I think it probably removes more covers than it adds until this is fixed.

[kiwidude]

Originally Posted by tlindgren

The error message it gives are: ERROR: Bad cover: The cover is not a valid picture
Example ISBN: 9780345379092

I've seen this situation before but I was not sure how prevalent it is.

The issue is the Goodreads website having missing images with broken links. For the "correct" pages for books with no cover they have a slightly different div structure and link to a "blank cover" type of image - that situation I can detect and handle fine.

However for other books such as that ISBN you sent me they basically have a broken link. There is no difference I could see from the web page itself when scraping as to whether the image linked to exists or not. I had hoped that this was a "rare enough" situation to not try to bother with at least until Kovid had made changes to the API but perhaps that is not the case.

Right now the way the API works is that a plugin is just responsible for returning a URL to an image. Later code in Calibre then takes responsibility for downloading the image, it assumes the link is a valid one and hence the "bad picture" message you get when it tries to convert the output into an image such as you get when parsing this image url from that ISBN above in Goodreads:
http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173213624l/258872.jpg

My point being that the only thing I could do would be in the plugin to attempt to download the cover myself. I don't know if the response header would give me an error code to save me downloading the content, I'll look into that. Why I didn't do this previously was that it means an additional web call which will slow the downloads down further, and worst case for valid images it means they get downloaded twice (as I have no way of passing the image to the Calibre code, just the link to it).

I didn't realise that Goodreads returning a "dud" link would prevent other plugins from returning valid ones. That does make it more of a priority to look into.

[kiwidude]

I've just pushed up a new version of this plugin on the first post to address the issue mentioned by tlindgren above.

The plugin will now better handle the situation of Goodreads having broken image links on their website and correctly return no url to Calibre rather than an invalid one.

[tlindgren]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

The plugin will now better handle the situation of Goodreads having broken image links on their website and correctly return no url to Calibre rather than an invalid one.

Thanks, I suspect the reason why it popped up so often when I tried it was because Amazon cover lookup wasn't working so it tried to pull all covers with your plugin instead of just what it couldn't find on Amazon, this greatly increase the chance of hitting these.

I check that URL you gave and it's clearly Goodreads and/or AmazonS3 fault, they're sending back HTTP/1.1 OK, the only indication that it's bogus is the zero length, nasty. I have to thank you for solving that issue, several of your plugins are immensely useful.

[kiwidude]

Change in this release:

• Change the URL searched against as Goodreads have changed their website.

[Shack70]

Can't seem to get this plugin to work. Running Caibre 0.7.55 in Windows. Plugin installs but when I try download covers it doesn't show in the list of sources.

[kiwidude]

Are you using the tweak to preview calibre 0.8 by any chance? As this plugin is not yet compatible with that. I will be posting a new version soon on this thread.

[Shack70]

Yes I am, I didn't think it would matter but I guess it does.

Thanks!

[kiwidude]

It does indeed, neither this or the goodreads metadata plugins will work in their current state in 0.8 with the considerable changes Kovid has made to that part of Calibre.

I didn't realise until I started looking into this tonight but the new version of the plugin will actually combine both metadata and covers into one plugin. I'm hoping to put an initial version up tomorrow.

[Shack70]

Nice! Let me know if you need any volunteers for testing

[kiwidude]

A nice offer thanks. Don't suppose you run from source by any chance? As Kovid has been nice enough to make a few tweaks to things as this is coming along but you will likely need to be running from source to give it a go until the next Calibre release.

Any volunteers, PM me an email to send you a zip in the next day or so. Functionally the metadata downloading is all working now, I've just started work on the custom genre->tags mapping configuration. So it should be ready tomorrow for any willing helpers...

[Shack70]

No I don't run from source, just the normal Windows installer.