endive

Endive

What it is

endive is a CLI epub collection manager, allowing you to:

• Centralize metadata: endive retrieves metadata from the epub file itself, and also from Goodreads, to make sure all the relevant and correct information about your books is centralized in its database. This includes user metadata such as reading status, rating, or review.
• Carefully import books: importing makes sure that relevant metadata is always collected for any new book in the collection. The user can define special folders as retail or non-retail sources for epubs, or point directly to epub files.
• Easily manage the collection: with a simple but powerful CLI, to search/modify the database with minimal pain.
• Organize from metadata: epub files are organized and named automatically from the metadata, according to a user-defined pattern.
• Take good care of the books: the library can be checked for changes, allowing you to make sure retail epubs have not been modified since import. Retail epubs always trump non-retail versions.
• Easily export to e-readers: once your e-reader is locally mounted, endive allows exporting a subset of the collection with the same queries used for searching. It also keeps track of which books have already been sent to your device.

Current state

Not stable yet. The database format may change, and you should only feed endive files you've already backed up somewhere.

Table of Contents

• Prerequisites
• Installation
• Usage
• Configuration
• Testing
• Third party libraries

Prerequisites

Publishers do not seem to lose much sleep over retail epubs having incomplete metadata. This means: missing information, wildly different ways to include vital information such as ISBN number (if it is included at all, or correctly included).

To get as faithful as possible information about epub files, endive relies on getting information from Goodreads. Since this means using the Goodreads API, you must have an account and request an API Key (terms and conditions).

See the configuration instructions to find out what to do with that key.

Installation

If you have a working Go installation, just run:

$ go get -u github.com/barsanuphe/endive
$ go install ...endive

endive uses libgit2 to automatically version your library database, make sure it is installed on your system.

Note that endive uses less do display information, so it will only work where less is available.

For editing long fields (such as book description), endive fires up $EDITOR and falls back to nano if nothing is defined, because nano is everywhere.

endive is a Works On My Machine project, but it should work on all Linux distributions, and maybe elsewhere, provided less and $EDITOR are recognized.

Usage

Import from retail sources:

$ endive import retail

Import specific non-retail epub:

$ endive import nonretail book.epub

List epubs in english written by (Charles) Stross:

$ endive search language:en +author:stross

Note that search is powered by bleve, and therefore uses its syntax.

Available fields are: author, title, year, language, tags, series, publisher, category, type, genre, description, exported, progress, review, and probably a few more.

Same search, ordered by year:

$ endive search language:en +author:stross --sort year

Results can be sorted by: id, author, title, year.

Show info about a book with a specific ID:

$ endive info *ID*

Edit title for book with specific ID:

$ endive set field title "New Title" *ID*

Set type for several books:

$ endive set field type novel *ID1* *ID2* *ID3*

Mark a book as shortlisted for reading:

$ endive set shortlisted *ID*

Refresh library after configuration changes:

$ endive collection refresh

List all books:

$ endive list

List all books that do not have a retail version:

$ endive list --nonretail

Sorting all books by author:

$ endive list --sort author

Sorting all books by year, limit to first 10 results:

$ endive list --sort year --first 10

Exporting shortlisted books to a mounted e-reader:

$ endive export progress:shortlisted

For other commands, see:

$ endive --help

Configuration

endive uses a YAML configuration file, in the configuration XDG directory (which should be /home/user/.config/endive/):

# library location and database filename
library_root: /home/user/endive
database_filename: endive.json

# $a author, $y year, $t title, $i isbn, $l language, $r retail status,
# $c fiction/nonfiction, $g main genre, $p reading progress, $s series
epub_filename_format: $a/$a ($y) $t

# list of directories that will be scraped for ebooks,
# and automatically flagged as retail or non-retail
nonretail_source:
    - /home/user/nonretail
    - /home/user/nonretail_source2
retail_source:
    - /home/user/retail

# see prerequisites
goodreads_api_key: XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

# associate main alias to alternative aliases
# only the main alias will be used by endive
author_aliases:
    Alexandre Dumas:
        - Alexandre Dumas Père
    China Miéville:
        - China Mieville
        - China Miévile
    Richard K. Morgan:
        - Richard Morgan
    Robert Silverberg:
        - Robert K. Silverberg
    Jared Diamond:
        - Diamond, Jared
tag_aliases:
    science-fiction:
        - sci-fi
        - sf
        - sciencefiction
publisher_aliases:
    Tor:
        - Tom Doherty Associates

Testing

Testing requires the GR_API_KEY environment variable to be set with your very own Goodreads API key.

$ export GR_API_KEY=XXXXXXXXX
$ go test ./...

Third party libraries