-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 5
Home
-
You should configure the list of search-sites (data sources for searches) to reflect your usual book-genre. Go to "Settings", under the "Search" category, "Websites". Enable/disable and move them up or down the priority list. This can also be adjusted at any time on search-screens from their options-menu.
-
From the same "Websites" screen, tap the settings icon on top of the page, and on the next page choose "Amazon" and update the Amazon URL used for searches to your local/preferred site. Make sure it's a fully valid URL including the https:// part.
-
If you have no need for any specific fields, go to "Settings", scroll down to the "Advanced" section, and select "Field Visibility" and disabled any fields you don't care about.
-
The lending-facility can also be enabled/disabled in the "Advanced" section.
-
If you're migrating from the app "Book Catalogue", please see importing-from-book-catalogue
Styles are a very powerful way of customising the main book list. Access them from the main menu panel "Booklist Styles". There are two types: "Built-in" and "User-defined". You cannot change a built-in Style. Instead, you duplicate it, give it a custom name and edit that copy. There is A LOT of customisation possible. I'll add examples here as and when I get specific questions, but the best thing is just to experiment with them. Note that Styles are set for each bookshelf. So you can sort/style each bookshelf individually.
By default, no styles are preferred and the Styles option menu (icons in the task-bar of the main screen) will show all of them. Once you add/modify a Style, it will be flagged as preferred. Open the menu panel and select "Booklist Styles" (read the 'tip'). Select or deselect styles (using the check-box on each row) and move them up/down with the "2-bars" icon button. Selected styles are preferred and will show in the options menu providing a shorter/easier menu. The greyed row will be the actual selected Style; which obviously you can change on the book list using the options menu again.
The defaults are used by all built-in Styles and can be modified through "Settings", scroll to the "Style" category, and select "Edit default settings". When you modify a Style, i.e. clone a Style to customise it to your individual taste/needs, you will get a copy of the default settings at that time. In other words, the settings are copied and not inherited. Modifying a default will affect all built-in Styles, but will not affect already created User-defined Styles.
Suppose you added a book with 2 or more authors. By default, you will only see the primary author in the book list. Open the menu panel and select "Booklist Styles" (read the 'tip'). If you haven't done this before, the top one is the default "Author, Series". Either long-click or use the menu button on the row (3-dots) and choose 'duplicate'. Modify the name to something that suits you. Click OK and read the 'tip'. Scroll down... to the setting: "Show books with multiple authors" Switch that ON and you get "under each owner". When returning to the book-list, you will now see all authors on individual rows, and that single book will appear once under each.
In the style settings, under "List", the option "Sorting" allows flexible asc/desc sorting on a per-field basis. This allows books to be custom sorted within the style-group they belong to.
By default, you can flag books as Read or Unread (and set start/end dates). If you want to keep more details on your reading-progress you can configure individual styles to either present the Read|Unread flag, or to allow you to enter a raw percentage, i.e. 0..100%*, or a percentage based on the current and total pages, e.g. page 56 of 345 . To choose locate the switch under "Track your progress" in the Style settings.
From the main book-list, you use the Book (popup) menu to quickly set Read|Unread while from the Book details you get, depending on the above configuration, access to the detailed reading-progress fields.
Filters are available from the main book list screen in the options' menu. They are set and stored on a Bookshelf, i.o.w. different bookshelves can/will have different filters. They allow you to tune which books will be shown in the current Bookshelf list. You can for example set a filter to only show Books in a specified format (e.g. Hardcovers), books in a specific edition (e.g. First Edition) and many more options. Filters are always combined as a logical AND for now.
Books and authors can have Identifiers assigned to them. They consist of a "key"
(e.g "goodreads", "asin", ...) and a "value" (a number or alphanumeric code).
They represent an id for the book/author as used by an external website.
The app has about 2 dozen of them build in, but new ones can be added automatically
as fetched during a book search, or manually by the user. When available, menus will
show up providing "View on..." links to take you to the book/author on that site.
From "Settings" you have access to an editor for the Identifier key,
name and the URLs. EDIT CAREFULLY! The 'site' URL is informational only.
The book and author URL's SHOULD NOT BE MODIFIED unless you are absolutely sure
of what you are doing. They act as direct links to a specific book/author on the site.
Here is an example:
https://openlibrary.org/books/%s
The "%s" is a placeholder for the actual Identifier value. As an example, suppose a book has an "openlibrary" identifier with value "OL26456609M", then the link becomes:
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL26456609M
When in doubt, do not change them, or log an issue and ask for advice.
From "Settings" you have access to an editor for all tags used. It also allows you to construct rules which will automatically substitute tags with one or more other tags, or delete them from new books altogether. Some useful examples are builtin.
The camera will by default use a linear zoom of 30% and has autofocus enabled. For most devices this should result in faster scanning.
If there is a need to tune these, you can access "Settings", scroll down to the "Edit" section, and choose "Barcode Scanner". Options available:
- "Zoom Control" can be enabled, which will result in showing a slider to manually adjust the zoom while scanning.
- "Auto-focus" can be switched off if desired.
Whether you need either of these options, will depend on your device camera.
- Simply use Import from the main menu and it will get recognised automatically.
- Preference and style files cannot be imported and will be ignored.
- Go to the Goodreads Import/Export page and export your collection to a CSV file.
- Simply use Import from the main menu in NTMB and select that CSV file.
- Note that images will need to be added manually, or by using the "Update books" / "Update fields" menu options.
Each time you delete a book its internal unique identifier is stored in a "deleted-books" list. This allows using 2 or more devices to properly synchronise such deletions. But this also means that when you delete a book inadvertently, and restore a previous backup, it will stay deleted even after the import. To prevent this and force the import of such a deleted book, two manual steps are needed:
- Go to "Settings", scroll to the bottom, and select "Maintenance". From the menu,
- select "Clear the deleted books history"
- Go to "Import", select the file/backup you want to import, and make sure to disable
- "Synchronise deleted books" before starting the import. A future version will simplify this.
The data itself is backed up by the usual Android & Google services. But the cover images are excluded for the simple reason that they would likely and quickly exceed the default quotas of those backup services. Hence, the need for a manual backup. Secondly, it's the easiest way to sync your collection between multiple device; just make a backup, and import it on the other device and vice versa.
Not all sources are listed here, only those which needs some clarification.
The site is not actually listing books: i.e. paper, audio, ebook, ... It is listing works: a "title", which can represent multiple books. (This is similar to LibraryThing) This may cause the following fields to list more or incorrect data for your specific edition.
- Searching by title may return the wrong ISBN.
- There may be multiple publishers listed.
- The publication dates may be incorrect.
- the list of tags is the combined list of all editions. See the section on tags above for possible mitigations.
- the cover image may be incorrect. Correct this manually.
All search-sites support ISBN lookup; some also support 'Barcode'. The latter is specifically for books where the barcode MAY be different from the ISBN (yes, this happens).
You need to long-press the icon/image, then a menu will pop up with all options on how to add/edit/delete images.
- Either on the list or the book details screen (NOT in edit-mode),
- tap the
readstatus button and the book will be markedreadand the end-date will be today. - In edit-mode for a book:
- tap the
readstatus button and the behaviour is as above. - tap
read-start-dateto select any date; this does not affect the end-date or the status - tap
read-end-dateand select a date rangestart → finish+ the status is set toread.
- tap the
It's a very simple flag you can use to indicate you have all books you want from a particular Author. Similarly, for the Series: you have all books in that Series. Both will show as a double check-mark in lists allowing you to quickly view this status.
- This application will make DNS lookups and use http/https to connect to internet sites.
- If you have any firewall, DNS (e.g. personalDNSfilter) or other blockers make sure to add this app to the permitted list.
- Slow network access? Adjust time-outs for individual web-sites: "Settings/Websites", and tap the settings button at the top of the screen.
Make sure you close NeverTooManyBooks. Go to the Android system settings, and select "Apps" and navigate to the list of installed apps. Find this app, and open the details (depends on android version and device on how this is called and where exactly it is). It should have a line "Storage", click that, and you should see a button "clear data" : this will clear ALL data related to the app. Careful! Then open (or install) again, and it should be a clean/new installation.
Other than (obviously) internet access to fetch book-data, you will be prompted to grant the app permission to use the camera which is needed to scan barcodes. This is all most users will need.
When using the lending-functionality, there is an optional permission requested to access your contacts. When lending out a book, you can type in the name of the person you lend the book to, or, when granted permission, you can select from the list of your contacts. Keep in mind this is only used for this purpose, and is entirely optional. Please see the source code for all details.
No. The integrated ACRA framework catches unexpected errors, retrieves some context data and log files but in no circumstances sends this data anywhere. Should a fatal error occur, a dialog will be shown prompting you to save the crash-report to your local device storage only. It is then entirely up to the user to
- log a GitHub issue
- inspect or edit the crash-report
- optionally upload the saved crash-report to the GitHub issue.
- Go to "Settings".
- Scroll to the bottom and pick "Maintenance".
- Then pick "Debug report".
- Generally the 'Log files' and 'Settings' should be enabled, but the database options disabled unless requested.
- Tap "Save" to save it to your storage.
- Rest assured: Any username/password you have in there will be *** out; the report is plain text if you want to inspect it first.
- Next log an issue and attach that report.