Search catalog by Genre-Author?

[AlanMintaka]

Hi,
There's probably a simple answer to this one, but I haven't been able to stumble across it.

I wanted to use the "Advanced Search" to generate a listing of all books for a particular genre (in my case, "Fantastic Fiction > Science Fiction"), sorted by Author. I started by setting the fields as follows:

Title: (blank)
Author: (blank)
Reader: (blank)
Exact Match: (unchecked)
Keywords: (blank)
Category/Genre: Fantastic Fiction > Science Fiction
Status: Complete
Solo/Group: Solo
Language: English
Sort by: Alphabetical

This generated a listing of all audiobooks in the "Fantastic Fiction > Science Fiction" genre, sorted alphabetically by Title. Is there a way to get an Author-sorted list instead?

Thanks for your time,

[Availle]

I"m afraid that's not possible.

I can't think of a workaround either...

[AlanMintaka]

I"m afraid that's not possible.
I can't think of a workaround either...

Seems like a pretty arbitrary limitation. Clearly the catalog database is indexed by Author, since you can do an alphabetical search by Author, as in

https://librivox.org/search?primary_key=0&search_category=author&search_page=1&search_form=get_results

Maybe there's a way to play with that URL to get it to restrict the results by another index such as genre_id. Based on the URL generated by the Advanced Search for a Genre search, I tried modifying the "primary_key" author search as follows:

https://librivox.org/search?primary_key=0&search_category=author&genre_id=30&search_page=1&search_form=get_results

where "&genre_id=30" was taken from the Advanced Search URL. No soap, the URL was redirected back to

https://librivox.org/search?primary_key=0&search_category=author&search_page=1&search_form=get_results

i.e. genre_id was ignored.

Obviously it's total SWAG on my part. Anyone have any ideas about this?

[knotyouraveragejo]

Hi Alan. It was not an intentional or arbitrary limitation. Unfortunately, the coding for the Advanced Search was never optimized when the "new" catalog pages were launched back in 2013 due to time and financial constraints at the time. The API would be the best place to generate such a list, but that too needs additional coding. Someday, this will all be addressed, hopefully in the next major overhaul of the site, but meanwhile we are focused on our primary goal which is "to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet."

A number of our members have created alternate catalogs to access our books. You might try one of those to see if it will generate the list you want. For example, no fancy covers here, but this one will generate a list that you can sort by author. The data only goes up through Oct 2016, but you could try contacting ekzemplaro to see if he plans to update it.

http://ekzemplaro.org/librivox/catalog/

[AlanMintaka]

...
A number of our members have created alternate catalogs to access our books. You might try one of those to see if it will generate the list you want. For example, no fancy covers here, but this one will generate a list that you can sort by author. The data only goes up through Oct 2016, but you could try contacting ekzemplaro to see if he plans to update it.
http://ekzemplaro.org/librivox/catalog/

Thanks Jo!

[RajVO]

Hi Alan. It was not an intentional or arbitrary limitation. Unfortunately, the coding for the Advanced Search was never optimized when the "new" catalog pages were launched back in 2013 due to time and financial constraints at the time. The API would be the best place to generate such a list, but that too needs additional coding. Someday, this will all be addressed, hopefully in the next major overhaul of the site, but meanwhile we are focused on our primary goal which is "to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet."

A number of our members have created alternate catalogs to access our books. You might try one of those to see if it will generate the list you want. For example, no fancy covers here, but this one will generate a list that you can sort by author. The data only goes up through Oct 2016, but you could try contacting ekzemplaro to see if he plans to update it.

http://ekzemplaro.org/librivox/catalog/

This catalog looks pretty useful, to make a query with many details!

[BarryHaworth]

I came across this thread while looking to see if there is a Librivox catalog which can be downloaded and queried.

Background: The Project Gutenberg catalog can be downloaded here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/offline_catalogs.html

I'm in the process of writing a program to read the Project Gutenberg catalog and wanted to do the same for recordings on Librivox, in part to provide a quick way of comparing the two sites and identifying what works are available on Gutenberg but are not yet recorded on Librivox. I had a look at the catalog mentioned (http://ekzemplaro.org/librivox/catalog/) but that gave me a 404 error.

Is there any other catalog available? Can the database be exported in some way? Or are there any other users who are working on this?

Thanks,

Barry