Polka v0.1.19 — curated book collections

[vestigiumincaligne]

Polka 0.1.19 adds collections: well-known book lists that show up as shelves on your home page, matched against what you actually have in your library.

What's new

• Bundled collections. Five lists ship with Polka and load on first start:

  • 100 Books of the Century (Le Monde, 1999)
  • The Big Read — 200 best-loved novels (BBC, 2003)
  • 100 best books of all time (Norwegian Book Club, 2002)
  • 100 books for schoolchildren (Russian Ministry of Education, 2013)
  • Russian classics: where to start (a small example list)

  Each one appears as a home-page shelf titled with how much of it you have — e.g. "79 of 100 in the library". Lists that match nothing stay hidden. Delete a bundled collection in Manage and it won't come back on the next start.

• Your own collections. Upload a JSON file in Manage → Book collections, or run polka collections import my-list.json. The format is deliberately simple — a title plus a list of "Author — Title" strings (objects with isbn, year, note are supported too). See collections/README.md (https://github.com/vestigiumincaligne/polka/blob/main/collections/README.md) for the format and where to find good lists (Wikipedia tables and Wikidata award queries convert nicely).

• Smart matching. Books are matched by ISBN when known, otherwise by normalised title + author surname, tolerant to name order ("Leo Tolstoy" / "Tolstoy, Leo"), declensions, subtitles ("Title: subtitle", "Title (novel)") and volume suffixes ("War and Peace" → "War and Peace. Vol. 1"). Anthologies with many authors are never fuzzy-matched, so a namesake in a 60-author poetry volume won't slip in. Matching is recomputed automatically after every catalog import.

• External sources (off by default). Polka can now pull collections from websites on a daily schedule. The first source is Forbes.ru ("book selections" tag): every article becomes a small collection of 5–10 books. Enable it per source in Manage → Book collections → External sources; only titles, authors and the article link are taken. Disabling a source hides its shelves without deleting anything.

• Search fix. Full-text search now treats ё and е as the same letter — "Вишнёвый сад" finds "Вишневый сад".

Notes for existing installs

• Collections live in a new collections.db next to polka.db and users.db; nothing about your catalog or user data changes, and import --replace leaves collections intact.
• After upgrading you'll see up to five new shelves on the home page. If you'd rather not, remove them in Manage — that's remembered.
• The Forbes source is opt-in and never runs in demo mode.

Downloads: binaries for Linux (amd64/arm64/armv7), Windows and macOS, .deb/.rpm packages, the Windows installer and the Docker image are on the release page (https://github.com/vestigiumincaligne/polka/releases/tag/v0.1.19).

Feedback welcome — especially lists you'd like to see bundled, and matching misses (post the list entry and the book as it's named in your catalog).