Broaden Search Criteria

[KeatonMayhem]

I started to test on my side, but to have the ability to add a select filter for [author, title (literal), title (contains), isbn]. The issues when searching for something like "Treasure Island" returns everything BUT the book I am looking for. Looking over the API structure, it appears that the filters could coincide with the queries below:

AUTHOR
https://openlibrary.org/search.json?author=tolkien&sort=new
LITERAL
https://openlibrary.org/search.json?title=the+lord+of+the+rings
CONTAINS
https://openlibrary.org/search.json?q=the+lord+of+the+rings

Additionally, as nice as it is to return the searches in real-time, would having a submit button after typing help with not potentially hitting an API ratelimit with open library?

[Mozzo1000]

Hi @KeatonMayhem
Thank you for opening up this issue.

If I understand you correctly you would like the ability to filter on author, title and such and not only a free text search as it is implemented right now?
I will have to take a closer look at the API OpenLibrary provides. But I do understand the issue with not finding the right book, it shouldn't be like that. It should be easy to find the book you are looking for.

On the topic of rate-limit. I am not sure adding a enter return would be great user experience. The project is however slowly moving away from directly using OpenLibraries API in favor of our own search infrastructure (that one can selfhost if they like), in part because of the rate-limits and that the free, accessible OpenLibrary API most likely should not be used in this way.

Our own search infrastructure was just recently announced with version 1.10 and is by default set as fallback if OpenLibrary is not available. Once the service gets more stable and feature complete, it will be promoted to primary by default.
Some more information about this can be found in the docs https://booklogr.app/docs/Configuration/Data-providers
and the release notes for version 1.10.0

Regardless of which API is used for searching, we should still return the best results possible so I will take a closer look into improving OpenLibrary results.

[KeatonMayhem]

I guess really looking for a way to do an advanced search? Not sure how that fits in with the UX of the service. I know sometimes, I personally just look for a specific author vs a specific title, or how sometimes I only remember part of the name (in reference to the "to be read" vs "currently reading".

Currently, its just easier for me to search for the specific ISBN on google, and go back to enter it in search.

EXAMPLE UI: