Allow loading covers locally

[jamaisVu4]

Because Open Library is blocked by GFW (Great Fire Wall), it is difficult for users from China mainland to add image from it. (The whole Internet Archive has been blocked.) Most such websites for loading information for books (including non-free ones) are blocked. Even visting this page requires the usage of VPN. (It is possible to access Open Library using VPN but the loading speed is extremely slow and sometimes there exists some risk for us to break the GFW frequently.) Besides, due to GFW, books writen in Chinese are hardly to found in the repositories like Open Library or Goodreads, and adding them manually is not convenient. The goal to have one page for every books have ever published is quite impossible to approach by this reason. The only resource Chinese readers can access normally is douban but it is neither free nor open, and books published outside China mainland is hardly found in douban since importing publications is strictly restricted... So the only accessible way for us to track books using this application without editing CSV files directly is to manually enter all information we want to add and load book covers from local storage...ಠ﹏ಠ

[fenimore]

I see this is an interesting problem, I'm not sure how to approach it other than adding the douban source, but as you mentioned it would make this app depend on a non-free service 🤔

I think I saw another book tracking app once that did use this service so perhaps there are alternatives

[ngocanhtve]

We actually need support adding book cover images from internal storage.

[ngocanhtve]

A lot of the Vietnamese books I add to Badreads don't exist on Openlibrary, so I need to add covers from my phone's storage. Please support that.