Corrective lenses for curmudgeonly readars in your life.

This is a drop-in replacement for R—'s metadata service. It works with your existing R— installation, it's backwards-compatible with your library, and it takes only seconds to enable or disable. You can use it to permanently manage your library, or to temporarily help you add works the R— service doesn't have yet.

Unlike R—'s proprietary service, this is much faster, handles large authors, and doesn't take months to load new works. It is also intended to be self-hostable and will be kept (mostly) open source (see "Getters" below).

graph LR;
    R[R—]-.->M[official metadata];
    R-->rreading-glasses;

    classDef dotted stroke-dasharray:2,text-decoration:line-through;
    class M dotted;

Please read this section closely before deciding to use the service, especially if you intend to use it permanently. The service works well for my personal use case, but there are some subtle differences that might impact you.

I have deviated slightly from the official service's behavior to make a couple of, in my opinion, quality of life improvements. These aren't due to technical limitations and can be changed, so I'm eager to hear if people think these are an improvement or if it would be better to match the official behavior more exactly.

• Book titles no longer include subtitles (so {Book Title} behaves like {Book TitleNoSub} by default). This de-clutters the UI, cleans up the directory layout, and improves import matching but you may need to re-import some works with long subtitles. I think the trade-off is worth it but others might disagree -- let me know!

• Adding a new author now only adds (up to) 20 of their works instead of their entire library. Originally this didn't automatically add any works for new authors, because I personally much prefer a "book-based" workflow over the default "author-based" behavior. I figure adding 20 works is a sort of compromise between the two. Tell me if you really need the default (add all books) behavior, or if you would prefer to keep it entirely book-based!

• Translated works aren't handled well at the moment. If you have a lot of these in your collection they might be updated to reflect the English edition, which you might not want. This is in progress but it will need some time and testing.

Navigate to /settings/development and update Metadata Provider Source with the address of your desired metadata service. Click Save.

A public instance is available at https://api.bookinfo.pro.

You can now search and add authors or works not available on the official service.

If at any point you want to revert to the official service, simply delete the Metadata Provider Source and save your configuration again. Any works you added should be preserved.

An image is available at docker.io/blampe/rreading-glasses. It requires a Postgres backend, and its flags currently look like this:

Usage: rreading-glasses serve --upstream=STRING [flags]

Run an HTTP server.

Flags:
  -h, --help                                    Show context-sensitive help.

      --postgres-host="localhost"               Postgres host.
      --postgres-user="postgres"                Postgres user.
      --postgres-password=""                    Postgres password.
      --postgres-port=5432                      Postgres port.
      --postgres-database="rreading-glasses"    Postgres database to use.
      --verbose                                 increase log verbosity
      --port=8788                               Port to serve traffic on.
      --rpm=60                                  Maximum upstream requests per minute.
      --cookie=STRING                           Cookie to use for upstream HTTP requests.
      --proxy=""                                HTTP proxy URL to use for upstream requests.
      --upstream=STRING                         Upstream host (e.g. www.example.com).

The open-source portion of this project implements an API-compatible, coalescing read-through cache for consumption by the R— metadata client. It is not a fork of any prior work.

Importantly, it does not currently include any logic to actually extract metadata -- you will need to roll your own for now.

The service is pluggable and can serve metadata from any number of sources: API clients, data dumps, OpenLibrary proxies, scrapers, or other means. The interface to implement is:

type Getter interface {
    GetWork(ctx context.Context, workID int64) (*WorkResource, error)
    GetAuthor(ctx context.Context, authorID int64) (*AuthorResource, error)
    GetBook(ctx context.Context, bookID int64) (*WorkResource, error)
}

In other words, anything that understands how to map an ID to a Resource can serve as a source of truth. This project then provides caching and API routes for that source.

In the future I might bundle some scraping logic to make self-hosting (with your own credentials) easier, but scraping is not yet implemented because I'm doing something very novel (no pun intended).

This is primarily a personal project that fixes my own workflows. There are almost certainly edge cases I haven't accounted for, so contributions are very welcome!

• (Prod) Add Cloudflare client for CDN invalidation.
• (Prod) Better translation support.
• (QOL) Ignore works/editions without publisher to cut down on self-published ebook slop.
• (QOL) Update R— client to send Accept-Encoding: gzip headers.

This software is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and noninfringement.

In no event shall the authors or copyright holders be liable for any claim, damages or other liability, whether in an action of contract, tort or otherwise, arising from, out of or in connection with the software or the use or other dealings in the software.

This software is intended for educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended to, and does not, constitute legal, financial, or professional advice of any kind. The user of this software assumes all responsibility for its use or misuse.

The user is free to use, modify, and distribute the software for any purpose, subject to the above disclaimers and conditions.