Book cataloguing and starting contributions

[trifleneurotic 44]

Hello!

 

I am a brand new Emby user and I am really loving it!

 

Consequently, I am also a bibliophile, and have hundreds of physical books. I would love to be able to catalog, tag, check out and otherwise manage my collection in Emby.

 

I have seen some mentions of the MB Bookshelf plugin but it seems to be centered around eBooks, and it appears to have lost interest perhaps, with the last post about it over a year ago although I am still researching. 

 

My thought was to put feelers out there for a book cataloguing plugin I could write (I'm a developer by trade, mostly Java and C#), although I am not sure this is the correct forum for discussing such ideas. I am not sure if it would perhaps mean working with the aforementioned plugin or starting afresh.

 

Ideally, there would be functionality within at least the iOS and Android apps to scan or manually enter ISBNs to put into Emby which would use sources such as LibraryThing, Library of Congress or Amazon. Maybe Goodreads could play a pivotal part as well. Since it already offers such functionality for the most part, perhaps a plugin could just integrate with those sites, essentially using them as a backend (API keys? OAuth?). 

 

I haven't thought this through thoroughly; this was just a high-level idea. But I would be interested in developing such a plugin, and essentially was just trying to gauge if anyone else would be as well.

 

Lastly I am looking forward to contributing to Emby, although aside from general pages on how to contribute to Github projects, I haven't found much documentation on how to get started specifically with Emby contributions. The Markdown file for the "main" project is empty, and since anyone can create an issue, I haven't found any guidance as to which issues are OK to tackle, although I am assuming that if you want to, you just confirm that it is indeed a bug and fix it. I also am aware of the Feature Request forum, but since I'd be developing it I wasn't sure if that was the right place.

 

I also found this page but it is over two years old:

 

https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/8049-available-projects/

 

Many thanks!

 

[Luke 36997]

Hi, welcome !  The main challenge with this is that although it's easy to write a server plugin to import books into the library, it then requires effort in all of the apps individually in order to do anything with that content. Nonetheless if you wanted to get it started that could help foster more of a books community here and if we see adequate demand then we'd certainly look into it.

 

I think it would probably be wise though to add to the existing plugin rather than create a new one, as I think it will just cause confusion to have to similar sounding ones.

 

What do you think?

[trifleneurotic 44]

Hi Luke!

 

Yes I totally see where you are coming from regarding the effort involved for each app to use book data. One app at a time (: Which of course is possible but not trivial.

 

I agree that there possibly would be confusion regarding a new books plugin. I believe my line of thinking was that if I started fresh then that may generate more interest if people have pre-conceived notions of the old bookshelf plugin vis-a-vis functionality. Then again, I can't say for sure that the confusion is worth the new "branding" since it appears books have never been Emby's historical metier anyway, which is of course perfectly understandable given its pedigree as a media streaming solution.

[zigzagtshirt 55]

I think this is a wonderful idea.  I would definitely use this a lot!  Has any progress been made on moving forward?

[TolkienBard 54]

I teach English literature. I have almost as many books as I do television series, and that's a LOT. I've been relying (poorly) on Library Thing, an online book collecting database to take care of cataloguing my books. I would love to have something tied in with Emby though. I also need to look more into MB Bookshelf. I had it installed once upon a time, but I only recently started breaking down and getting ebooks. I'm hoping the bookshelf experience is as nice as the rest of Emby.