Once again this is a weeks in review instead of once. I’ve been focusing more on new features than blogging. Calibre 0.7.57 is out and is also the beta for 0.8. Adding the tweak “test_eight_code = True” will enable the 0.8 features.

Get Books aka Stores

For quite some time I’ve been working on integrating support for searching and connecting to third party stores to make it easier for users to find and acquire books they’re interested in. This is a very large feature and one I’m very excited about. There are two pieces: The individual store plugins that connect the user to a given store and a meta-store search that searches all of the store plugins at once.

For 0.8 I have support for 14 stores. They are a mix of big name, independent, paid, free, and public domain. There is something for everyone. The majority of the stores are implemented though an embedded web browser. This is because the majority of stores are only accessible via their web site. MobileRead is the one exception but I’ll talk about that later.

By default accessing the stores is done though the embedded web browser but each store can be configured to open in the system web browser instead. One major befit of this approach is I’m able to detect ebook downloads. When an ebook is downloaded it is automatically added to the currently open library.

MobileRead is the exception and opens in it’s own search window. Right now it opens to the specific book’s entry in the embedded web browser so you can see details and download the book.

The meta-store search (along with MobileRead’s search dialog) allow for full boolean and field logic. Just like the main calibre window. The search gets results from every store and shows them in one easy to sort list. Title, Author, Price, DRM status, Store, and Formats are all listed.

screen-shot

PDB - Plucker Input

Not much to say about this but it’s been a long time coming. Plucker is now supported as an input format. Not all features are supported (tables for instance). However, plucker files for pretty much every source will have the main content come though.