Calibre "Get book" Ideas

This is a list of ideas I’ve had or suggestions I’ve received from people about what to do with “Get books” in calibre to make it better. These are all ideas and may or may not make it into future release.

OPDS set of classes that makes it very easy and quick to add new stores that support OPDS. Basically, the plugin author would only need to specify the base feed url and this class would take care of finding the search feed. It would then allow for returning search results via the feed’s search. So all a plugin author would need to do is something like:

    class NewStore(OPDSStore):
        FEED = 'http://store.tld/opds/feed.xml'

Going further with this idea would be to allow users to specify OPDS feeds in a list. Possibly with some meta information about the store. Then each store would be treated just like a store plugin. This would require some work to accomplish. The current framework for “Get books” assumes each store is a separate plugin.

Many free stores (especially ones with OPDS feeds) allow direct downloads of the ebook. It would be very nice if when double clicking a search result, instead of going to the store’s web page for the book, it would be downloaded right then and put into the users calibre library. This would reduce the step of downloading then adding with free sources. This would reduce the need to use the internal browser. This would need some thought on how to signify if a search result downloads a book or goes to a more information page. This would also need to be configurable and there would need to be a way to always access to the more info page. Further many stores provide more than one format so there would need to be some way for users to select or specify which format they want to download.

Again these are just some ideas of where I could take “Get books”.