Two user-reported shelf-testing symptoms, both a third party answering
misleadingly and the app believing it.
1. Open Library's /api/books?bibkeys=... now 404s for EVERY ISBN, including
books OL demonstrably still holds, with OL's own x-ol-stats header on the
response while /isbn/, /search.json, /api/volumes/brief and covers.* all
serve normally. OL's docs call it the "Legacy Books API" that "may be phased
out" and it is gone from their API index, so this reads as a retirement
rather than an outage. The app had been effectively single-sourced on Google
Books since it broke: every failure the user saw was a book GB lacks.
Lookup now uses /isbn/{isbn}.json — current, non-legacy, edition-level, and
the only option of the three that carries a description. /api/volumes/brief
is a near drop-in for the old response shape and was rejected precisely
because it is also legacy.
Its costs, all handled: authors are references, so AuthorNameCache resolves
and caches them for the process lifetime (books by one author get scanned in
runs off one shelf); an edition may carry NO authors, in which case they live
on the work — 9780898707168 on the user's own shelf is exactly this, so
without the work fallback the move would have silently dropped its author;
author/work requests are best-effort and can only degrade a record, never
turn Found into Unavailable.
404 on this endpoint is authoritative NotFound. The legacy endpoint reported
a miss as 200 with an empty object, which is why every non-2xx there was a
failure. Every other non-2xx still is.
2. Google Books answers zoom=2 with a grey "image not available" PNG at HTTP
200 — not a 404 — for any volume it holds no full preview of. Coil loads it
as a success, so BookCover's placeholder never fires and the cover pipeline
uploads Google's placeholder to PocketBase as the book's cover. Measured over
18 real volumes: 11 placeholders at zoom=2, 0 at zoom=1&w=400. zoom=0/3/6 are
placeholders too. normalizeCoverUrl now pins zoom=1, adds w=400 and strips
edge=curl.
SPEC.md's "Book metadata lookup" is rewritten with both rules and the evidence
for them — it was the source of the zoom=2 instruction, and would otherwise be
the reason someone restores it.
Also fixed, because it blocked verification: LibraryViewModelTest never cleared
the view models it built, and LibraryViewModel's eleven WhileSubscribed(5_000)
flows kept running five seconds into later tests, racing resetMain(). It now
cancels each viewModelScope in tearDown.
NOT fixed, reported instead: AddBookViewModel.performSave's in-flight guard is a
check-then-act and two coroutines can both pass it. Unrelated to this change
(that VM has no metadata dependency) and out of scope. See HAZARD #13.
Verified: assembleDebug exit 0; testDebugUnitTest --rerun-tasks 378 tests,
2 skipped, 0 failures (was 355); verifyPaparazziDebug exit 0, no pixels moved;
0 "always 'false'" warnings; no build files touched. LIVE_METADATA=1 live test
ran (not skipped): 9/9 Found with cover art, with the GB key absent, so Open
Library alone answered through the new endpoint.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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