Great Add-On; an easy idea to make even better (maybe two)

[Paul Parker]

Wow, this is an excellent add-on. I read a lot, but am highly
selective and a poor graduate student so it's extremely helpful to see
price comparison and local library availability via WorldCat. I've
spent a lot of time finding good books on Amazon and then checking my
local library to see if I can reserve them. I only found Book Burro a
few hours ago and I already told someone else about it.

I realized that by messing with my listed WorldCat ZIP code I can
force my favorite particular library system to the top of the WorldCat
list. I don't do ILL much, though, so the additional libraries are
rarely helpful to me. Would it be possible to put a limit on the
number of libraries returned via WorldCat? I would probably usually
set it to 1, so either I'd see my local library or I'd see something
else and know they didn't have it. I don't know your code at all, of
course, but it would seem to me you could just add a second value box
on the WorldCat tab, and then stop copying items from the WorldCat
feed if you reached the maximum early. If your data structure is an
array rather than a variable length list or such, then I guess it
could be little more complicated.

An advanced version of this would be filtering for a few strings.
This gives you a cheap and general way to limit to specific libraries
via WorldCat, allowing you to specify most(?) local libraries almost
for free. In this case you'd have a variable number of results,
though, which might complicate your code.

Being able to see BookMooch availability easily inspired me to go
ahead and join that. While I was at it I joined PaperBackSwap as
well. Is there any chance you could check PBS availability?

Thanks so much,

Paul

P.S. No idea how steep the learning curve is, but I'm a decent
coder. Maybe I could implement some little feature sometime if you
like.

[jesse]

On Aug 28, 10:20 pm, Paul Parker <paultpar...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Wow, this is an excellent add-on.  I read a lot, but am highly
> selective and a poor graduate student so it's extremely helpful to see
> price comparison and local library availability via WorldCat.  I've
> spent a lot of time finding good books on Amazon and then checking my
> local library to see if I can reserve them.  I only found Book Burro a
> few hours ago and I already told someone else about it.

Thanks! I still have lots I want to do to improve it, but not enough
hours in the day :(

> I realized that by messing with my listed WorldCat ZIP code I can
> force my favorite particular library system to the top of the WorldCat
> list.  I don't do ILL much, though, so the additional libraries are
> rarely helpful to me.  Would it be possible to put a limit on the
> number of libraries returned via WorldCat?  I would probably usually
> set it to 1, so either I'd see my local library or I'd see something
> else and know they didn't have it.  I don't know your code at all, of
> course, but it would seem to me you could just add a second value box
> on the WorldCat tab, and then stop copying items from the WorldCat
> feed if you reached the maximum early.  If your data structure is an
> array rather than a variable length list or such, then I guess it
> could be little more complicated.

You are correct that the data structure wasn't very complicated (it
was an array). I updated the code to allow a user to set the maximum
number of results they want. Check for updates (0.52 should include
that feature)

> An advanced version of this would be filtering for a few strings.
> This gives you a cheap and general way to limit to specific libraries
> via WorldCat, allowing you to specify most(?) local libraries almost
> for free.  In this case you'd have a variable number of results,
> though, which might complicate your code.

I want to think about how best to do this. But good idea!

> Being able to see BookMooch availability easily inspired me to go
> ahead and join that.  While I was at it I joined PaperBackSwap as
> well.  Is there any chance you could check PBS availability?

I've not heard of PBS, but I'll check it out and see if they have an
API for integrating with it. On that note I want to provide deeper
integration with Book Mooch, Library Thing and other book sites.

> Thanks so much,
>
> Paul
>
> P.S.  No idea how steep the learning curve is, but I'm a decent
> coder.  Maybe I could implement some little feature sometime if you
> like.

Unfortunately I've not had time to open the code. It is on my list of
things to do, but it still has ugly code that complicates things more
than they should. I want to clean things up before inflicting the
world with my code.

[jesse]

I've added initial support for PaperBookSwap. Check for version 0.53

Jesse