Well, I understand your concern regarding having a third party plugin in Obsidian and their fragility in a long run. All users of Obsidian have their own way of using this application and their custom workflow. Because of the main USP of Obsidian, that it stores everything offline, it gives a lot of customizability power to its users. And Plugins supports further makes it highly powerful.
To comment on the stability of the plugin with the main application. If you are using any specific plugin and its support has been stopped, but you still can’t work without it. You have the option to stick to the older version of Obsidian.
Really appreciate for sharing your ideas for a integrated functionality in Obsidian itself for managing books, articles, etc. I was planning to build a plugin for the same recently. Well, my requirement was more of like speed reader or in other words using pdf/epub books as audiobooks, which you can read more here : Wanted a better approach to manage my offline books library - #6 by Tu2_atmanand
I have planned features like a custom view to show the homepage of the plugin, which will include :
- Recently read books
- The book’s thumbnail will be extracted from the first page of the PDF.
- There will be a progress bar for each book card.
- Each book card will have a button, to open the corresponding note, which will include the notes you are taking from the PDF.
- You can specify the folders from your PC, which might be outside the vault, to see all the pdf/epubs/audiobooks in a gallery format, to explore in a better way.
- You can also sort books based on Authors, year, genre, etc.
- Make collections to manually group books together.
From this post I got a lot of more ideas like having an online source. I early planned to work with only local files, but your point of storing locally and filling up space is valid, and it will be easier to sync as well. Following is a rough UI design I had in mind on how the plugin will be going to work, updated after the online source idea :
Now, my plugin will be majorly based on the PDF++ plugin itself, since I have found it to be the best plugin for working with PDFs, adding highlights and taking the corresponding notes in a markdown file. In the future, I believe we can come up with a better coding practices, so the plugin works better with the Obsidian’s core APIs, but for now, the plugin has been working without many problems, so can be used for daily workflow.
Also, the plugin ill be developing is nothing special, it’s just for a proper management of all books, articles, audiobooks, etc. and can be also done using dataview plugin, but I am not a big fan of dataview and would prefer a custom view rather than seeing the gallery view inside a note. I am not sure if I can do the above thing using dataview, like whether we can extract the thumbnails (the first page of PDF), and show them in the cards. I have found one dataview script to do that, but it’s pretty manual, so it can detect the progress of the book and all.
Edit : Here is the link to my repo for the plugin development : Library - plugin for Obsidian
Feel free to join the development or contribute by suggesting features and improvement for the plugin.