Update books with metadata from online sources

[jvoisin]

You said on hacknews that "When I add books, I need to grab metadata for the book like title, ISBN, etc." It would thus be nice if citadel could do precisely this, since it's also my main usecase for Calibre: adding books to it, and having it figure out fancy rich metadata :)

[phildenhoff]

You're talking about pulling in data from the web when you add books, right? I'm working on something right now to make it easier to edit the metadata by hand when you import a book, but downloading from the web is still a ways out.

What expectations do you have for a feature like that?

• It happens during import
• It only happens when requested
• It's fast
• It's slow but hidden

[jvoisin]

When I import a book, I'd like citadel to use its metadata (title, author, …) to ask the internet™ about it, and fill the blanks (ISBN, ASIN, part of a series?, genres, cover, …). Should this fail or suggest invalid metadata, I'd like to be able to edit the metadata, and restart the process (maybe there was a typo in the title of the book).

I think one of the biggest issues UX-wise it to present several possible results: "based on the metadata you provided, here are 3 possible books, which one is the best match?"

[a3rosol]

Because you don't have enough on your plate already, I'd like to pile on ;)

Consider supporting MARC21, which is a machine readable standard used by libraries world wide to encode their catalogues. library of congress, british library and the german national library all support it. Their meta data is standardized and normalized and they should be able to provide a clean, authoratitive and up to date source of information on pretty much all books published in the respective countries.

Ideally, when I add a book, citadel should have the ability to look for the isbn in the file and use it for a lookup using the online sources

[phildenhoff]

Thanks @a3rosol, great idea! that's an idea (but not the exact standard) that I had partially looked into, but mentioning all the libraries that support MARC21 has made it sound like a very good idea. I didn't know about MARC21. I think I'd prefer to go to a library to get book info, rather than Amazon, Google et. al.

I'll definitely look into that more!