Book Manager

Keeping track of a large number of PDFs is a pain, especially when they may be scattered around a filesystem, inconsistently named, or missing identifying metadata.

This program provides a simple CLI for constructing a database of documents (ebooks, academic papers, music, ...) in the form of a YAML file, which can then be easily searched and parsed.

Possible query output includes the path to the file on disk, a BibTeX entry for referencing, and of course the entire database entry.

By default the library database is saved in $HOME/.bookmanager, although XDG_DATA_HOME will be honoured if it is set. A single user may have multiple libraries under this directory, which can be selected via the -l option.

Usage

> $ book_manager.rb --help
Usage: book_manager.rb [OPTION]... [COMMAND] [ARGS]...
Manage a library of digital books and papers.

    -h, --help     display this help and exit
    -l, --library  name of the library

When invoking, options are specified first, then a command, followed by a list of key-value pairs for that command. Omitted key-value pairs have sane defaults, and are unordered.

For example, to add a few papers

> $ book_manager.rb add title 'Groundbreaking paper' author 'A.N Author' \
	date '1990' path '~/Papers/gr-paper.pdf'

> $ book_manager.rb add author 'Author B. Two' title 'Lotsa Research'
	uuid 'ab2:lotsa-research'

To get the full database entry

> $ book_manager.rb find title 'Groundbr'
---
- uuid: 542c3e4b-6057-4c36-9fe7-1f1bb86aa130
  title: Groundbreaking Paper
  subtitle: ''
  author: A.N Author
  coauthors: []
  date: 1990-01-01 00:00:00.000000000 +00:00
  abstract: ''
  path: '~/Papers/gr-paper.pdf'

To generate the BibTeX entry

> $ book_manager.rb bibtex uuid ab2
@book{ab2:lotsa-research,
      author = "Author B. Two",
	  title = "Lotsa Research",
	  year = 2017
}

To open the file (~ is expanded to the user's home directory) in evince, say

> $ evince `book_manager.rb path author 'Two'`

Querying

To search for a document, specify the entries to filter by in the same way as when adding a document. String arguments are checked by substring, although when specifying a UUID the start must match.

For example

> $ book_manager.rb find author 'James' title 'group' uuid 'ab'

will return all documents with an author containing the string "James", a title containing the string "group", and a UUID beginning with ab.

TODO

See the Github issue list.