Thought: Authors Database

[kiwidude]

@transmitthis - now that is an interesting bit of lateral thinking, well done. You should also be able to put a hyperlink to Wikipedia in the comments field to go directly to the page if you want it. As for ordering it at the top, surely that is just a case of giving it a title name like __AUTHOR__ or something provided you have a "normal" title sort for your view in place.

Haha - I see Charles just posted saying it was a bad idea - if it avoids doing development it sounds good to me

[theducks]

Originally Posted by transmitthis

Just noticed chaley's post.

That got me thinking - what about simplifying it a bit, and
just having a empty book entry for each author

If it could be made to always stay at the top? It would then be simple to have a Author image (Cover) and any number of comments and html displayed in the preview pane.

Make the title start with 00(keepme) and it rises above the rest for a title sort

[transmitthis]

Originally Posted by chaley

It is generally not a good idea to use one kind of entity to represent another completely different thing. The operations don't make sense (title sort on authors?), and the correspondence between the item and its real meaning is lost.

That shouldn't stop you from doing it should you wish, but it shouldn't become a recommended process. That would lead to much more confusion that any of us wants to deal with.

Just seen theducks - Thanks for the idea, seems that if there all called Author details, I imagine there easy to find anyway.

Ah, I see, hrm, well it does exactly what I was hoping to acheive, showing an image of author, some links and the like, but I bow to your greater knowledge in these things.

Is there a way to make something like this "sit well" with Calibre?



Its actually quite nice as I can highlight the list of books that I want to get from this Author, an easy way to make notes and things relating to the writer in general.

[kiwidude]

@Charles - with regards to your other post. Surely one of the major issues that was mentioned earlier by theDucks is that Authors are not treated as a separate known entity in the Calibre database. i.e. they are derived from books that happen to share a name.

So a link "column" won't make practical sense unless it is associated with the "Author" as you wouldn't want to have to store it at per book level for each of the books.

And as theDucks points out, you have the issue of authors disappearing when books are removed, renaming of authors merging them etc.

Others mentioning a separate database I think would cause more problems than it would be worth imho - all the issues of moving libraries, upgrading, backups etc meaning something else that has to be taken into consideration. If such a feature were to exist I think it has to be inside the Calibre database to be practical.

I don't think it is a trivial problem to solve - that is not to say that for the benefit of the long term in Calibre it could/should not be tackled at some point. I know I have expressed no interesting in writing a plugin to attempt to manage it in the past. However that is not to say I would not use such a feature if it already existed in Calibre.

[theducks]

I like it.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

@Charles - with regards to your other post. Surely one of the major issues that was mentioned earlier by theDucks is that Authors are not treated as a separate known entity in the Calibre database. i.e. they are derived from books that happen to share a name.

Ahh, but they are very separate. There is a table of authors that each book refers to. That is where author's sort strings come from, and that is why one can rename an author without touching every book.

So a link "column" won't make practical sense unless it is associated with the "Author" as you wouldn't want to have to store it at per book level for each of the books.

That is what I was proposing when I was discussing author links, and why 'manage authors' would be used to maintain the links. If you are referring to the link custom column proposal, yes, I agree with you, the link is associated with the book and note some category such as series, publisher, etc. This is a very real difficulty. What would be better would be to have links on items in custom columns, but there lies perdition

And as theDucks points out, you have the issue of authors disappearing when books are removed, renaming of authors merging them etc.

This is true, but is it a real issue? Do authors really go away? To have an author disappear, all the books by that author must be deleted, at which point do I really care about that author any more?

Others mentioning a separate database I think would cause more problems than it would be worth imho - all the issues of moving libraries, upgrading, backups etc meaning something else that has to be taken into consideration. If such a feature were to exist I think it has to be inside the Calibre database to be practical.

I don't think it is a trivial problem to solve - that is not to say that for the benefit of the long term in Calibre it could/should not be tackled at some point. I know I have expressed no interesting in writing a plugin to attempt to manage it in the past. However that is not to say I would not use such a feature if it already existed in Calibre.

[travger]

Originally Posted by chaley

This link could point at whatever you want. My thought is that it would point at an author's page on fantastic fiction, goodreads, or what-have-you, but it could just as easily point at a word document on the local machine.

Two links? One to wikipeda and one to local machine?
Often enough wiki has more info than I'm willing to read and also I might not want to go to the web, but it's nice to have the possibility in reach. File in local machine would be wonderful - some people could want excel or word to mark books they have, some would be content with text, and some may have even video of the author...

I imagine it being not 'open with', but rather like format in book details panel - if I click on it, it opens with appropriate reader.
And if those files could be stored somewhere next to/in Calibre files... (so that in making backup I won't forget them)

[transmitthis]

Coolio, I like it too.

It doesn't have to be an empty book, it can be a one page epub. with any extra notes in there. or txt or mobi etc...

Thinking a bit more about it I have another idea:
As all the Author Details are going to be roughly the same at least the general synopsis and book list, it would be silly for everyone to go and do their own.
What about creating a Book for each author together - ie crowd sourced by all the peeps who come here - Just need somewhere.. to put them so its easy to see which ones are done.

I know there are a lot of Authors, but I'm sure people will have no problems doing their Favorites and that will save a lot of time for others, as then just download it and just change it if they want to.

Anyway if noone can see any major issues in making a "Authorbook" then I will go ahead and make a few and see how it goes

Just seen travger's post, We just need to put any details about the Author we want in the Comments of this "Authorbook, as you would normally with any other. which you can see in the Book Details Window. If theres any extra info you got from the web you want to include, just stick it in the actual book - (just a txt file, converted to epub or whatever you want)

[chaley]

Originally Posted by transmitthis

Ah, I see, hrm, well it does exactly what I was hoping to acheive, showing an image of author, some links and the like, but I bow to your greater knowledge in these things.

If it works for you, then use it!

My concern is it becomes a 'calibre-recommended' approach, then documentation must support it, FAQs must explain it, and it must make sense to people who want to spend no more than 30 seconds thinking about it (this is not a criticism). Consider the author sort tweaks and the FN LN/LN, FN issues. In this case the tweak is semantically appropriate and affects calibre in the ways that are predictable, but it is unapproachable by a great many people. My feeling is that this is true because it describes 'effects' and not 'goals'. Using books for authors is a bigger version of this -- using the notion of 'book' to achieve the effect of managing something quite separate. I could go on, but I am beginning to bore myself, so it is obviously time to climb off my box.

[kovidgoyal]

A simple solution that requires almost zero work is to have author names become clickable links in the book details panel. We could let the user specify the link as chaley suggests, but for authors that do not have a specified link it could link to the wikipedia search page for that name or even the direct page for the name, assuming wikipedia has a consistent url scheme for people names.

[kiwidude]

@Charles - I was aware of the table, I guess my definition of "separate entity" is a bit different given their existence is tied to the lifetime of the books associated with them. And the problem with truly treating them as a separate entity I think manifests itself in particular when you start to figure out how to integrate them into the GUI.

The screenshot is interesting. In some ways it is ideal, in that as a user you can quickly move between the author and the book. Having a popup dialog for the author "loses" in comparison with the modality issues.

However I do 100% agree with Charles that it should not become the "recommended" approach, it is just a workaround that those who are desperate can use. Think of all the issues it causes - that your access to the author information is limited to how you have done your search, the sensitivity to sort order, the "noise" it adds to the library view, the false positives it returns for plugins like Find Duplicates etc.

Perhaps an alternative approach would be if the book details pane could be tabbed or something, to allow switching between book detail and author detail... with the author details stored in the Authros table as Charles was suggesting... just thinking out loud...

[transmitthis]

Originally Posted by chaley

If it works for you, then use it!

My concern is it becomes a 'calibre-recommended' approach, then documentation must support it, FAQs must explain it, and it must make sense to people who want to spend no more than 30 seconds thinking about it (this is not a criticism). Consider the author sort tweaks and the FN LN/LN, FN issues. In this case the tweak is semantically appropriate and affects calibre in the ways that are predictable, but it is unapproachable by a great many people. My feeling is that this is true because it describes 'effects' and not 'goals'. Using books for authors is a bigger version of this -- using the notion of 'book' to achieve the effect of managing something quite separate. I could go on, but I am beginning to bore myself, so it is obviously time to climb off my box.

No please do let me know if I will come a cropper later on if you see issues arising.

It's just a simple idea. Make a Book, and have the title be the Authors name, it can be anything relevant really.
I don't really see why this book, would not sit well, while other books do, sorry I'm not into programming, more of a designer

The only thing I was wondering was if the Calibre community would want to do these books themselths, or have others help in creating a whole lot of them. To that end all that needs doing is a list of which Authors are being done, and where you can download them.

I do like you idea kovid, the simple you can make it the better, I can see already how complicated this program is Do you see any issues in the idea I described?

[chaley]

Originally Posted by travger

Two links? One to wikipeda and one to local machine?
Often enough wiki has more info than I'm willing to read and also I might not want to go to the web, but it's nice to have the possibility in reach. File in local machine would be wonderful - some people could want excel or word to mark books they have, some would be content with text, and some may have even video of the author...

I imagine it being not 'open with', but rather like format in book details panel - if I click on it, it opens with appropriate reader.
And if those files could be stored somewhere next to/in Calibre files... (so that in making backup I won't forget them)

Wonderful example of why I am not sure I want to go here.

Moving from one to two links is 20 times the work (1-N table associations and the like). Ensuring that clickable links work everywhere (book details, library display, content server) is more work. I mean no criticism here. You are absolutely correct to point out the logical consequences starting down a path. Of course, a user will want to manage the application used to open a particular link type, and of course any data should be in known places (although along with kiwidude I am not convinced that the library is that place). These issues should be thought of in advance, and comments like yours help.

@kiwidude: integrating an authors database into the GUI beyond single line management and/or ensuring that the lifetime of an author is independent of all book references is far beyond where I am willing to go.

@kovid: the difficulty here is that the authors table must be extended to have another column for the link (assuming a 1-1 link/author relationship). This creates problems of management, of consistent availability (can it be clicked in book details but not content server and the library view?), and of meaning (is extension sufficient for open/with?). I do agree that having a default link template for authors in book-details would be reasonably straight-forward.

[transmitthis]

Just seen your post kiwidude, I see, the concern is if a people start using this method then it could have unforeseen implications. Yes I do understand now.
It is an entry in the database as a Book, and not a separate Author Database, so it has the problems relevant to that, that you outlined above.

Its just a thought, peeps can try it out, until something comes along, and just delete the books, no harm I imagine.

[transmitthis]

Just playing



Actually making a book is quite hard - well easy, but you have to format it nicely if you want it to look good, not really a problem but something to be aware of.