I am trying out the Books Search plugin for Obsidian. I keep notes on all books I’ve read, own or have come across. I add meta data to those notes manually. The Books Search plugin helps make that easier by picking up that meta data from Google Books through their API. You install the plugin through the Community Plugin list, and can then add an API key. Without that key, after a few tries you will get an error message.
The plugin documentation does however not state how to connect the plugin to that Google API.
These are the steps I took after a bit of searching:
- In the Google cloud console first create a project. (A Google account is needed)
- In the same console, under credentials, click create credentials and create an API key. Copy that key and save it in the settings of the Obsidian Books Search plugin.
- In the same console, under Enable APIs & Services, enable the Google Books API.
- Go back to Credentials, edit your API key, select Restrict Key under API restrictions, and select from drop down list the Google Books API you’ve just enabled. (If it doesn’t show any APIs to choose, you have not enabled any APIs yet.) Now the key works only for the Google Books API.
- Ignore the warning in the console about OAuth consent, as this is not needed (the books API is accessible without authorisation, and you’re also not building an app for others to use.)
Using the Book Search plugin I notice it is by default restricted to English books, not finding titles in other languages that Google Books does have in its lists. The locale settings in the plugin allow me to switch language before a search in the search form through a very long drop down menu, but doing that (or doing the same search for each of three or four languages) quickly negates the effectivity gain the plugin provides.
It is unclear from the Google API documentation if locale can be set to multiple languages.
Probably not, given Google’s long history of interpreting multilingual as serial monolingual (see this 2007 presentation at Google by Stephanie Booth pointing this same stuff out), ignoring that multilingual people tend to change languages throughout their activities even for just a single word or short phrase. (I don’t have Dutch, English or German days or topics, in the case of books I may want to find the German original of an English translation, or want to search for a specific thing in French because I know it exists, while also interested in any Dutch translation that might be available or the Italian original. My notes are always in multiple languages.)