The add books dialog is modal.  Is this necessary?  It would be convenient to be able to access the library while the
add dialog was open.  For instance, to look for similar or misspelt titles or authors.

Date: 2009-07-28 08:42
Sender: Sami Khan

I think making it non-modal does introduce more complexity as
one has to worry about other dialogs popping up and how anything
else might be affected. Definitely a feature that will need some
time and thought. I also don't see a great amount of improvement
in efficiency as there is ISBN checking so even if you had something
misspelt it would be a problem. However I think the preferences
dialog should be able to do a search against the providers to
make sure your details are accurate, etc.

Date: 2009-07-16 19:24
Sender: Cathal Mc Ginley

As far as I can tell, the reason for this was to prevent problems
which could occur when multiple add books dialogs are open at
once. I'm not sure if it would be a major issue, but Alexandria
isn't very thread-safe at the moment.

I will keep this request in mind for future development (probably
not the next release though, as it might have unforseen
consequences).

In the mean time, if you'd like to change this immediately on
your installation you can use a text editor to edit these files
(as root, perhaps using 'sudo gedit' or similar):
/usr/share/alexandria/glade/new_book_dialog.glade
/usr/share/alexandria/glade/book_properties_dialog.glade

In each file, look for
  <property name="modal">True</property>
and change it to
  <property name="modal">False</property>

Save the files, restart Alexandria and give it a try. Add notes
to this bug report if you uncover any unexpected behaviour.