[Request]: Make collections of which a book is a member available as metadata

[banj]

Feature Request Checklist

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What feature would you like to request?

I thought I'd seen another request that touched on making more metadata available from the import. This request would probably also be served by #41 , but I'm looking to update my template to add tags in the front matter to relate books together. A good solution for me would be if the collections that a book is part of in Apple Books was made available as part of the import metadata.

For example, in Apple Books, I have a collection for "Science Fiction" and another for "Fantasy", and I'm free to put any book I like into either or both of these. If these collections were available as metadata, I'd be able to include them as tags and cluster together the highlights which share common collection entries.

Thanks for considering!

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[bandantonio]

@banj Thank you for the request.
Making collections available to use in templates would be a great addition, indeed.
I haven't added them initially because they were more like convenience rather than necessity.

The only thing I should mention is that there are two types of collections: default ones (predefined, like Books, PDFs, Finished, etc) and custom ones (created by the user). Each book has several collections assigned depending on its type (like Book, PDF, Audio), state (Want to Read, Finished, etc.) and your custom criteria (user-defined collections). I believe there would be no problem with pulling collections for a particular book, and using them as tags, but these would be unmanageable items, as even if you delete some of them, the list will be updated on each import that affects this particular book.

What do you think? Will this workflow be useful for you?

[banj]

That’s really useful context! I didn’t know the data model in Books worked like that.

Yes, that definitely sounds very helpful. For my use case the more metadata brought over the better, but collections (both automated and user controlled) are really helpful for clustering the highlights files together