Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Extremely pedantic, minor issue alert! It may possibly be of interest to some.

I've noticed that amazon_kcw imports descriptions in HTML, and although it's more difficult to read in the book edit page, as long as there are no additional line breaks it results in perfectly good formatting on the website book page.

I've taken to doing this myself when copying descriptions from Amazon (by copying from the source of the frame that carries the description on Amazon) since it avoids the need to go through the text and manually mark up which bits should be bold, italic, etc.

Unfortunately, it seem that the iOS app (I don't know about the Android one) doesn't parse almost any HTML, and in fact it doesn't even respect line breaks inserted by hitting Enter twice, resulting in a "wall of text".

The only HTML it *does* seem to do anything at all with is when something is embedded within either Paragraph and Bold tags (like < p>< b>this< /b>< /p> without the spaces) or Paragraph and Italic tags (like < p>< i>this< /i>< /p>). In these cases, it doesn't actually make the text bold or italic, but it inserts an indentation at the beginning of the paragraph.

This looks a bit unsightly when this happens right at the beginning of the Description, for example where there is a bold heading to start. It can be avoided by deleting the paragraph (p) tags around the heading. They aren't necessary anyway, as this text isn't really a paragraph but a heading; omitting them results in well-displayed text on the website and still poor, but I think the best possible, formatting on the iOS app.

It's very possible that I'm the only person to notice or care about this...

That is not something that librarians deal with as we are volunteers fixing the database re books & authors.

What you are talking about is site functionality and if you would like changes etc you need to go to the Help function at the bottom of every page.

I'm not looking to change site functionality (it would be nice if the iOS app formatted descriptions better but I'm not going to go to the trouble of petitioning for it to be changed). I'm just sharing my observations as a GR librarian on different methods of entering/correcting data in the Description field that makes no difference to how it then gets displayed on the website but makes a small difference to how it gets displayed on the iOS app.

As I said, it's a small thing and I don't expect many, or perhaps anyone, to make use of it. But it seems like a good practice to share findings like this with other librarians in case anyone *is* interested.