Upload of multiple files - Query related to book description

subscraxme

Hello all,

When uploading multiple files, as a part of enhancing the effectiveness of the forum, it is recommended to include a short description, title, cover image, etc. along with the book uploaded.

Currently, I am manually searching for each book in amazon/goodreads/ or any e-commerce site, picking up the book description, cover image, etc. pasting it manually in the POST and then uploading. This is a bit cumbersome if the number of books to be uploaded is large.

Question is, when there are multiple books to be uploaded, is there any easy (better way) of putting the description, images, etc ?

What do you guys do when uploading multiple files - how do you manage this ?

Any automated or semi-automated way will be a huge plus as it would save a lot of time and also improve the efficiency of the whole process !


Would love to hear from others on how you are doing this.


Thanks!

Pedro_P

Building a book collection can certainly demand more effort in trying to provide all the correct and necessary information about each book (index, covers, descriptions, attachments, additional reviews, etc.), and to that extent, the more information you include about books, the higher the level of gratitude (rate) that you will get.
However, the criterion of including a brief description of the books that are shared, seeks to provide readers with information relevant to the content of the book, what the book is about or the topic that develops the book.
This information (description) is important and necessary, because it helps the reading user not to perform a blind and uninformed download.
I do not believe that there is an automated way to include descriptions of books within the threads, most of the users who create threads with large collections of books, usually take their time and build their collections step by step and calmly.
When you share many books, it is not necessary that you carry out the entire books upload in a single moment or instant, you can take your time and build your books collection in a calmly way, you can include an additional message in the title of your thread, indicating that the construction of the thread or collection is in development or process, in that way, the other users will wait for you to finish, to later make addictions if there were any.

Crazydude

I think this merits some more thought. I already have a collection built over years in Calibre. A bulk upload way would help sharing it greatly.

Pedro_P

Crazydude 8-9-2018 06:27 AM
I think this merits some more thought. I already have a collection built over years in Calibre. A bu ...

Well, there is a difference between storing books for oneself and sharing them... Each one of us has its own criteria for storing books, and certainly, nobody but oneself knows what contains each book and the sense of our own order.
However, sharing a book is a very special gesture of generosity, which can be distorted if one shares a book with missing pages, with scribbled pages, or broken pages... In that sense, the Craxme Reading Room section does not seeks to be a simple repository or warehouse of books lacking order and organization, where the threads contain only attachments without further details, the Reading Room section, also aims to be a space, as similar as possible to a real library or bibliotheca, that is, a place where books have a clear order, which facilitates the search and reading of books, which helps the reader to determine for himself what the reader wants to read.
In the real libraries there is a concept called «Index Card», which contains relevant information of the book, that way one can read the 'index card' and know if the book is useful for one or not, besides facilitating the search of the books. Include in the threads a brief description of the books that are shared, has the same purpose.
Soon a new space will take place here in Craxme Forum, which will complement, in a new way, the Reading Room section... Reading is perhaps one of the most enriching human activities on many levels... But certainly, a book is More than a book, it is more than a mere set of letters and words... Books fulfill their purpose when they are read, when someone reads them... And another of the objectives of the Reading Room section is to promote reading, motivate it.
An attachment without a description, can generate curiosity and / or reaction (positive or negative) of the reader, but not necessarily motivate him to read... And certainly, the greatest satisfaction for those who share a book, is to see and know that the book their have shared is read by many readers.

subscraxme

Pedro_P 8-9-2018 12:44 PM
Editado por Pedro_P en 8-9-2018 02:17 AM

Building a book collection can certainly demand more eff ...

Well, call me pig-headed or stubborn, but I was trying to see whether easier option for getting descriptions without manually searching each book in amazon or goodreads/etc.

I had some free time last sunday, and I thought let me try out this...

End result: I learned something new and yes, it definitely can be tweaked to reduce the drudgery of manual search of each and every book.

For the benefit of others, who may be so inclined to pursue this, I am listing out things I did.

Was exploring calibre's internals and came to understand that the metadata of Calibre (stored in the name as"metadata.db") is a SQLlite Database. Using a SQLlite Dbrowser, I was able to explore the content/structure of this database.  I suggest people who are technically inclined to explore this more.

For others, there is an easier method, which I used to create book description,name, etc. For ease of use, I am jotting it down as a series of steps.

Step1: Import thebooks in calibre

          in most cases, calibre pulls in the title, cover, etc.

Step 2:

   OpenCalibre:

      2A) Wherever book metadata is not there, edit the book name, author etc. as accurately as possible

      2B) After this, select the books which don't have the proper data, Select "Edit Metadata"option, and choose download metadata and covers option

                   (Ctrl-D)

       Note: You need to have working internet connection.

       2C) If you have entered the book details correctly, mostly calibre will succeed in downloading book metadata, covers. You will get those in the metadata

           Repeat Steps 2A to 2c till you have this for all the books. You may need to manually enter for few books which this data is not getting updated by calibre

Step 3:

     Use  "Save to disk" option to Export books, covers into a single directory

Step 4: - Export the metadata from Calibre

Calibre has got a command line export option, which exports most of (at least whatever is relevantto us) the metadata.

This is the CalibreDb command

Syntax: (in windows environment)

  from a command prompt in windows:

           calibredb list -w32000  --separator `-fauthor_sort,authors,comments,isbn,title  > D:\LIST.CSV

1st argument"list"  - lists the contents of the db

2nd argument -w32000- gives an adequate enough of size of screen display. Else this defaults to 24 characters and puts too many hard CR/LF which is a mess to clean up and import in excel.

3argument - is the field separator - for this iused the ` backtick (under ~ key). This is rarely found in description and hence can be used more effectively than a comma,semi-colon,etc.

4th argument list of fields which have to be exported

5th argument -->the ouput of the command is re-directed to a txt file called LIST.CSV.

Step 6:

Open the CSV file,in MS-Excel (or similar software)

Filter for the books you are intending to upload

From the comments column, strip all the HTML tags(use a simple replace command in MS-EXCEL)

Discard all the other fields other than title and comments (you can ignore all other columns)

Save the XL -Proceed to Step 6b if you want to make it more neater!, else you are done.

Step 6b

This is needed ONLY if you don't want to uploadbooks/books description as a table, but want to do it as a normal page.

Open MS-Word

         Select Mailings

              ->Start mail Merge

               -> Normal Word Document

              Select Recipients

                  -> Use from an exisiting list

                             (select the Excel sheet which contains the bookname,description)

                             (Select the first row contains the column headers)

                    ->Click OK

               Insert Merge field

                            Select the first field (BookName)

                                     Make the font bigger, Underline

                            Select the second field (BookDescription)

                Finish Merge

                     ->Edit Individual documents

                     ->Select merge to new document

The document will now contain a clean document of Bookname with bold/underline followed by the book description. Tweak wherever isnecessary

Upload ! :-)

FootNotes:

Time spent:

    R&D, searching in google, reading about mail merge, etc. about 4 hours - (whole of Sunday evening! :-)

For filling the data for about 47 books, and make it ready to export it took me about 10 minutes. Not very great, but still considerable savings in time. Earlier to upload 5 -to 10 books it used to take me around 20 minutes of manually entering the book in amazon/goodreads/etc.,copy the description, copy the book info, copy the cover image and then get ready for upload.

This can be definitely made better by using some scripts, which I will attempt to do once I get some free time.

P.S  to see an example of this, please see this - my first experiment at semi-automation :-)

https://www.craxme.com/forum.php ... e=1&extra=#pid40649