tfonteyn / NeverTooManyBooks

A book collection app for Android
GNU General Public License v3.0
71 stars 4 forks source link

scan folder #71

Open simonfossom opened 2 weeks ago

simonfossom commented 2 weeks ago

I can only presume I'm not the only digital first reader. Meaning all my books are in one folder and then sub-folder by category. I really like the layout and readability of NeverTooManyBooks (and the name ofc :) )

It would be great if the app could check the folder and add books by the best match.

And thanks for all the great work so far. Love it.

tfonteyn commented 2 weeks ago

thanks for the kind words :)

It's tricky to scan folders/files without any structured data. The question has come up before in #31. Please read through that one first.

I need (some) structured data to work with. Worst case scenario with folder-scanning is that you end up with the filenames as titles, and all of them under an unknown author. Granted I did think of the possible definition of the user giving the app a regular expression (rather limited to tech-savy users) to parse and dissect the filenames but I fear it will be error prone.

As mention in #37, I want to import epub files myself (and read their metadata) but it's lower on my todo list.

And don't forget, the data has to come from "somewhere" which for the internet searches really means a valid ISBN (or webcatalog) number.

In your case it might be feasible to generate a CSV file by cleverly using a dir/ls command. I'm fairly flexible in importing from CSV. Althought I really need to document it properly. If you fancy giving this a try, I can help out while documenting the format?