Usage

I. Store eBooks

You have to check if storage:link is effective with

php artisan storage:link

On Bookshelves you have to store your EPUB files into one directory: public/storage/data/books

If you want to know why, it's simple, EPUB files aren't on git of course, but more it's not really practical to store all ebooks into Bookshelves directly, it's more convenient to set symbolic link from your eBooks storage which is not into Bookshelves. But you can store EPUB files into public/storage/data/books directory, of course, Bookshelves scan recursively this directory, you can have sub directories if you want.

Option 1: store directly EPUB files

Git won't track any file into public/storage/data/books

.
+-- public
|   +-- storage
|     +-- raw
|       +-- books
|         +-- my-ebook.epub
|         +-- ...

Option 2: create symbolic link

This is best solution for my usage, I have some directories with different eBooks but I want to refer all these directories.

ln -s /any/directory/books-fantasy public/storage/data/books
ln -s /any/directory/books-classic public/storage/data/books

.
+-- public
|   +-- storage
|     +-- raw
|       +-- books
|         +-- books-fantasy -> /any/directory/books-fantasy
|         +-- books-classic -> /any/directory/books-classic

With variant: EPUB -> link

It's possible to link all EPUB files too but if you have any update from original directories, it can broke links or you have to link again.

ln -s /any/directory/books-fantasy/**/*.epub public/storage/data/books 
ln -s /any/directory/books-classic/**/*.epub public/storage/data/books

.
+-- public
|   +-- storage
|     +-- raw
|       +-- books
|         +-- my-ebook.epub -> /any/directory/books-fantasy/my-ebook.epub
|         +-- another-ebook.epub -> /any/directory/books-classic/another-ebook.epub

II. Custom data

When Bookshelves parse EPUB to generate data, it will try to find extra data from Internet on GoogleBooks and Wikipedia. If you don't want to get these data, you can use --local option to skip it. But if you want to set custom data directly from parsing by Bookshelves, it's possible.

a. Description and link

For extra data with authors and series for description and link, you can create JSON file. If an entry with slug of author or serie exist, Bookshelves will take it and don't use external API.

cp public/storage/data/authors.example.json public/storage/data/authors.json
cp public/storage/data/series.example.json public/storage/data/series.json

An example for authors.

{
    "hugo-victor": {
        "description": "Victor Hugo est un poète, dramaturge, écrivain, romancier et dessinateur romantique français, né le 7 ventôse an X (26 février 1802) à Besançon et mort le 22 mai 1885 à Paris. Il est considéré comme l'un des plus importants écrivains de la langue française. Il est aussi une personnalité politique et un intellectuel engagé qui a eu un rôle idéologique majeur et occupe une place marquante dans l'histoire des lettres françaises au XIXe siècle.",
        "link": "https://gallica.bnf.fr"
    }
}

b. Picture

Bookshelves will use cover of first book of a serie to generate cover's serie and will use Wikipedia API to get picture of an author. You can set custom pictures for series and authors. Just put JPG file with slug of author / serie into specific directory.

public/storage/data/pictures-authors: for authors
public/storage/data/pictures-series: for series

.
+-- public
|   +-- storage
|     +-- raw
|       +-- pictures-authors
|         +-- hugo-victor.jpg
|         +-- ...

You can set symbolic link like this to get pictures from another directory.

ln -s /any/directory/authors public/storage/data/pictures-authors
ln -s /any/directory/series public/storage/data/pictures-series

.
+-- public
|   +-- storage
|     +-- raw
|       +-- pictures-authors
|         +-- authors -> /any/directory/authors

VI. Features

g. MetadataExtractor

TODO

i. Wikipedia

TODO

WikipediaService