Photo Library a passable replacement for Bookshelf?

[Lighthammer 80]

I wanted to get some decent discussion going on possible replacements for Bookshelf that fits a little closer to ease of development.

Many sites who do Comics currently just toss comics into a small image viewer. I'd actually make the claim that this is likely the #1 way most ebooks / comics are presented online.

I got the idea that perhaps --- just maybe --- the Emby photo folders might almost work for this task, but I'm finding the designs are just slightly off for this use case but likely within easy implementable designs.

I feel the primary features required to turn the Emby Photo Folders into usable software are:

#01.) Being able to classify folders as books/comics

 

Currently, if you make the bottom folder a comic with the CBZ/PDF simply extracted as images, when you open that folder, Emby shows you all the pages instead of starting a reader.

 

#02.) Saving Read / Pages Read

 

The other problem with using this format is there's no tools in here that save what page / section you're on. This seems like it would be easy to implement with the tech that's already in Emby.

#03.) There is no meta data usage:

When you get down to the comic level, there should be several bits of metadata you can associate with the comic. Just rattling off the ones I'm finding the most valuable:
 

Primary Metadata

• TItle
• Sort Title
• Date Added
• Series
• Series ID #
• Publisher
• Author
• Artist
• Overview
• Date Published

Eternal IDs:

• ISBN:
• Comicbook Vine ID:

These are all pieces of tech programmed in already. I used the Metadata entries from TV Series and followed that order with a few minor changes to reflect books / comics.

 

#04.) Scrapper:
 

While the Scrapper tech is obviously already in the server, I'll acknowledge that setting up scrappers is a little more time consuming then all of the above points. That being said, in checking around at APIs. That being said, it appears Amazon's API is pretty good for grabbing books:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NprOBJNcwok

As far as Comic Scrapping goes, ComicVine already has a really strong scrapper in place

 

https://github.com/cbanack/comic-vine-scraper/wiki/Download-and-Installation

The APIs are readily around and readily usable. 

 

#05.) Magnification Tools:
 

The biggest piece of tech not in Emby Yet that really is needed is tools to simply magnify images. At current, Emby can't even use in browser tools such CTRL+Scroll that is part of every modern browser. This is easily the #1 hurtle the server tech has right now at taking the image tools and turning into a book reader. 

 

#06.) PDF / CBZ Extraction:

 

The next piece of tech is the other obstacle into making this tool user friendly for persons who don't readily have tools to extract books / comics. I don't believe at current, Emby has ANY tech for file extraction of this nature. It can, of course, extract scenes from videos. I believe this is the biggest tool Emby would need to develop for this project. 

Comic Book Utility Belt is open source and does all this:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/comicutility/

 

#07.) Markup Tools:

 

The last tool that Emby lacks is any sort of markup tools. I put this one last because this easily falls into the "Would be nice, but not necessary" era. While the ability to build tools that allowed you to highlight or otherwise mark up documents would be a great addon, this falls into a use case that will be very valuable for some, but not all and feels like a project onto its own. 

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I'd see this easily implemented using the following Project Plan:

Step 1 - Minimum Viable Product:

 

The Minimum viable product requires #1, #2, #3, and #5 to be viable. All the tech for #1 - #3 is already in Emby and would only require minimal work to implement. #5, the magnifier, is something I'd argue is the only tool not already in Emby that would need to be developed to turn the Photo viewer into a Book reader core component of Emby.

Step 2 - Scrapping:

 

I honestly have no idea what's involved in getting Emby setup to do the scrapping components. I've utilized API calls in other projects, but I'm not a programmer. Adding in API calls into other CMS packages is easily done. I think this could be easily implemented into Emby in short order.

 

Step 3 - Extraction Tools:

 

This is the one I image would be the hardest step as part of core features. There are open source tools that could be utilized for this or at the very least code compared.

 

Other Steps:

 

All other steps could easily be relegated to the community. Anything beyond the minimum usable case use should probably be relegated to addons.

 

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In closing, with a little bit of modification, the Photo Tools already in Emby could get this area of the software up and running very rapidly. 

Edited March 27, 2017 by Lighthammer