obsidian-author-today-book-importer

An Obsidian plugin to import book metadata from Author.Today into Markdown note

Author.Today Book Importer

Import book metadata from Author.Today directly into Obsidian.

This plugin:

• Fetches title, author, cover image, description, publication date, genres, series name & number, and estimated page count from a given Author.Today URL.
• Bypasses CORS using Obsidian’s built-in requestUrl API.
• Creates a new note in a folder of your choice, with frontmatter fields and body templated by you.
• Supports Mustache-style placeholders:
  • {{title}}, {{author}}, {{cover}}, {{description}}, {{source}}
  • {{date}} (import date), {{publishDate}}, {{category}}, {{series}}, {{series_number}}, {{pages}}
• Configurable via plugin settings:
  • Vault folder for new notes
  • Relative path to your custom note template

---

Installation

1. Clone this repo into your Vault’s .obsidian/plugins/author-today-importer folder
2. Build with npm install && npm run build to generate main.js
3. Enable the plugin in Obsidian’s Community Plugins settings
4. Run “Import Book from Author.Today” from the command palette and enter a URL

The plugin provides the following placeholders for your template

• {{title}} — the book title
• {{author}} — the author(s)
• {{cover}} — the cover image URL (OG-image)
• {{description}} — the description from the meta tag
• {{source}} — the original page URL
• {{date}} — the import date (YYYY-MM-DD)
• {{publishDate}} — the publication date (extracted from the data-time span)
• {{category}} — the genres (text from div.book-genres)
• {{series}} — the series name (without brackets; wrap in [[…]] in your template)
• {{series_number}} — the number in the series
• {{pages}} — an estimated page count (character count ÷ 2000, rounded up)