Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

I cannot find the following ISBN that aNobii has no problem to find. Do they use a different database?

9788842903420 9788842902423 9788842907022 9788842908753
9788887485691 9788842907107 9788842910886 9788842908104
9788842909439 9788842907794 9788842910459 9788834404393
9788834402818 9788820319946 9788834405024 9788834404416
9788842902768 9788834405000 9788841213186 9788830409811
9788876922947 9788842909965 9788884120113 9788863161892
9788834404683 9788834404409 9788842911548 9788834403570
9788834404850 9788834404614 9788834404973 9788842901396
9788842900252 9788842900429 9788842901327 9788842901334
9788834404539 9788842901297 9788842901273 9788842901259
9788842900856 9788842900474 9788842900504 9788842901303
9788842901556 9788842901907 9788842901525 9788842901501
9788842901754 9788842902324 9788842901815 9788842901495
9788842902010 9788842901747 9788842901716 9788842901983
9788842901952 9788842901686 9788842901921 9788842901587
9788804354161 9788842901891 9788811942016 9788818700237
9788850202669 9788834700334 9788834701652 9788834700136
9788834700570 9788834703106 9788834701638 9788834703151
9788834700518 9788834700716 9788834701003 9788834701621
9788834404010 9788806596262 9788834403273 9788834403792
9788834403891 9788842907435 9788842907640 9788842910077
9788881111145 9788842908050

I don't know what aNobii is. GR uses B&N and Amazon.

Plus, of course, reader additions...I searched for the first two you have listed, and google also has trouble finding them...the only results that come up are from aNobii.

Amazon doesn't have anything with at least the first ISBN - what are the books?

Dee wrote: "Amazon doesn't have anything with at least the first ISBN - what are the books?"

They appear to all be non-English translations...

Well, the two numbers I looked up do only appear on aNobii and both are OOP translations.

So I don't think they will turn up here unless a Italian member is going to add them manually at some point.

GR is actively working on improving Italian support, and Amazon.it just enabled their API a few weeks ago. But there are probably still thousands of books published in Italy (which is what the 842 sequence in the 4-6 positions of the ISBN indicates, I believe) which have not yet been added to our database.

anobii uses reader addition too (and there are a lot of Italian and Spanish members there).

Beth wrote: "I don't know what aNobii is. GR uses B&N and Amazon."

aNobii is like Goodreads, one of the best site for social library sharing... http://www.anobii.com
It has also a very powerful free iPhone app

Amazon is not a reliable base for worldwide books, because it is a commercial one and originated in North America. So you will hardly find books that are sold out, with no ISBN, or in languages different from English.

Well, Amazon.it is quite young, and in any case, most of Italian books before 2000 had no ISBN at all. They will be never added on Amazon.it They focus on sales, whereas most readers have a lot of old books at home ;-)

as rivka pointed out GR recently linked up with Amazon.it; and IIRC, they are already linked n with Amazon UK and maybe Amazon.de, so as they establish that interface, books from other countries will be imported - it just takes time

Dee, Amazon is mostly a platform to sell books. I have more than 5.000 books on my shelves and I hardly think most of them will be loaded in Amazon.it since they are sold out. I think that the target of an ecommerce platform for books and a social readers' platform are different: a real reader love his/her books. Some are also inherited from parents or ancestors. Real readers would never give away a good book, and the family library increases in time. It would be nice to have a virtual equivalent in Goodreads because there are a lot of great books that are not sold anymore and it is important to let other people know. That is the great value of a platform as Goodreads: to share unknown great works. The most popular bestsellers are everywhere, but there are unknown treasures in worldwide home libraries.

the problem with that is what other database could GR use to draw this book information from? it needs to be readily accessible; up to date and likely free...if the books aren't being sold anymore or published anymore who is tracking them...while I see the validity of your point, I do not see how GR could do it without either doing user uploads (which they already do), or potentially spending money to get data from another database

The best way for these books to get added to GR is for users who have them to manually add each one. I realize that's a fair bit of work, but think of all the users who will benefit!

Not much more work than listing all the isbn's...::wink::

That is why I propose the same as aNobii. aNobii platform is like Goodreads. Give a look to it.

@Rivka, the aNobii database contains millions books that Goodreads has not... :-)

From what database does aNobii draw?

Dario wrote: "aNobii is like Goodreads, one of the best site for social library sharing... http://www.anobii.com
It has also a very powerful f..."

*coff coff*
Spam? Anobii is loosing all their members because of all their bugs that nobody fixes? ;-)

Dario wrote: "@Rivka, the aNobii database contains millions books that Goodreads has not... :-)"

There are a lot of italian books on GR and if they aren't you can add them manually. Here, unlike anobii, you can become librarian and you are free to add them without waiting months before a librarian does it. There are some rules to follow but it is nothing difficult.
I see that you speak a good English but if you want there is also an Italian Group where you can make questions and if necessary we can help you to add your books.

PS: read this and this discussion, I am sure you will consider them interesting.

Spam? I am not connected at all with aNobii. Easy to verify. Which bugs are you speaking of?

About Goodreads, I surely prefer GR to aNobii, but I would also like to load my books in GR and I cannot. Yesterday, in few minutes, I loaded over 250 books in aNobii. I tried to do the same in Goodreads, I also exported the aNobii shelves of mine to import in GR with no success. Most ISBN are not recognized. Manually insertion is NOT an option. Not when you have few thousand books!

About groups, I prefer to communicate in English, even if my English is not so good as I would like.

@dely Very interesting those links. Thank you. I joined that group. It looks like there are Italian developers that can work on GR code too. This is important. Great.

Dario wrote: "About Goodreads, I surely prefer GR to aNobii, but I would also like to load my books in GR and I canno..."
Ok. I was suspicious because knowing anobii and all their bugs it was strange to read that anobii is the best site of social library. Last year they had a lot of bugs everywhere: search, connections, books desappeared from the shelves...I run away from the desperation. I don't know how the situations now is because I have left but there was nobody of the site to speak with. They communicated only with twitter of facebook but not everybody has there an account so it was difficult to talk with somebody.
Yes, GR is thousand times better.

The only way is to add books manually and I know it can be boring and you need a lot of time. But once they are added the Italian books on the site increase and this is a good thing for Italian users. We are only a few but GR is doing the possibile to help us like you have read in the discussions I have linked you. So, coraggio e pazienza, and one book a day you will add them all.


Dario wrote: "@dely Very interesting those links. Thank you. I joined that group. It looks like there are Italian developers that can work on GR code too. This is important. Great."

You're welcome!

@dely Well, I did not experienced all that problems with aNobii but I mostly use it from iPhone. So, I take you point. Back to GR: if I have to load several books manually. I would appreciate the possibility to use an IMPORT service. I know I can import files by CSV but it works only if they have an ISBN and GR can validate it. I have thousands books without an ISBN but I have also several catalogs on my PC for them, so I do not need to load data one by one with books in my hand. What I propose is to setup an XML import file that allows to import several books at once, included cover, even if they have no ISBN number. Of course, this service should be granted only to trustable advanced users. I may try to write such a language (I published a book about XML, so I have some expertize) if you are interested. Preparing the XML file and all cover images will still require some work, but it is a more sistemic approach than loading a book per day :-)

Without adding something really useful to the discussion: I tried Anobii for ca. 4 month before coming here and I was very happy about my decision to join Goodreads almost from day one. Maybe it was because of the few English speaking members at Anobii's, but I was very lucky indeed if my review of a certain book was not the only one available. It felt very lonely. Plus there were a lot of spammers advertising their law-firms etc. masked as book reviews that stayed and stayed and stayed on the starting page. The only, really only thing I miss here are re-reading dates (including multiple ratings).

Here is a draft of a simplified language for book import/export I designed today. Comments are welcome.

Just an explanation about




Just consider «The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes». You may want to sort by "Adventures", so you write

The
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

If you want to show the full title you concatenate prefix and sortable (with a separation space), otherfile you write [sortable, prefix].

A similar approach is for names:








For example «Sir Arthur Conan Doyle»


Sir
Arthur Ignatius Conan
Doyle


Similarly, «Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force»


Charlotte-Rose
de Caumont de La Force

I forgot... sorry

Dario - Since this has gone from not able to find books via ISBN and turned to review of the import program you are better off taking this to the GR Feedback group since this is out of the control of the Librarian team

This XML is language independent, since tags are in English but content can be in any Unicode alphabeth. So we do not depend on excel label language.

@Paula What is the nest way to move/reference this thread to that group (apart cut & paste)?

Its cut and paste,

rivka maybe be able to move it between groups, normal users can only edit and move between topics in a group as far as I am aware

OK, is there anybody in that group that could be interested to develop that XML-based mechanism? We could debate on XML elements, and if and once we have an agreement, I could create the corresponding XML Schema and DTD.

In the Feedback Group, the programmers etc do look at members requests. If I were you I'd create a new topic and ask the programmers to respond.

ok

Paula wrote: "rivka maybe be able to move it between groups"

Nope. I'm pretty sure even the developers can't do that.

Dario, we don't use author titles (like Sir), and the system does not currently distinguish between parts of names and suffixes. There are both title and sort-by-title fields in each book record, though.

And we only specify author role when it's something other than "author".

There is also only a single field for language. The system can only handle ISBN-10, ISBN-13, and ASIN.

Tags are not entered via the book record, and really neither is series (with the exception of when a series is created). I'm not sure what the "references" section is for, but I'm fairly certain it does not correspond to any field that currently exists in the book records.

Also, rather (or in addition to) than the main Feedback group, I'd suggest the Developers group.

@Rivka One of the advantages of XML is that you can use the fields that you support and you can ignore the others. So, you can ignore author title, and use it in future if you decide to adopt it, or ignore it forever. The advantage of using a more complete standard, as taking in account codes different from ISBN-x or ASIN, is that you can in future accept new codes and we have not to change the XML file. If I provide a code that you do not support, probably because the book has no ISBN or ASIN code, you simply ignore it, that is, you consider that as a no-ISBN book. Series are very important for several editions, especially in fantasy and science fiction. A lot of readers tracks series & numbers. Of course, you can ignore it, but if I use the same XML file in different situations (Goodreads, aNobii, personal database, exchange with friends) it is better to have it. Reference is a way to link togheter different versions of the same book (for example, the original work, if translated, or various editions by different publishers). You can also use it to link a book with an essay that reviews that book.

To the best of my knowledge, any data that is not imported into a (new or existing) GR book record is not stored -- GR has no way to do this. So fields that don't map to fields that currently exist in GR's book records would just slow things down, and possibly confuse things and cause errors.

And I was not saying that series are unimportant. GR book records support series. However, the way books are linked to series would not support importing the way you are taking about.

Dario. You may not be able to move the discussion to the Feedback group but you can start a new topic there and reference this thread url so you don't have to cut and paste everything.

Well, here's 2 cents from someone who's been both a member and a Librarian in both aNobii and Goodreads, 5 or 6 years with the former, a few months with the latter.

When I first subscribed to Goodreads, I was of a serious mind of dropping aNobii altogether, mainly because of the "few glitches" of its database (that's putting it very mildly), and its having rapidly become more of an Italian colony rather than an international community, to nobody's "fault", mind, it just happened that way, and I certainly have nothing against chatting with my compatriots, I'm just looking for "wider horizons", so to speak.

However, after a few months, I've come to the conclusion that neither environment could entirely replace the other.

The way I see it, aNobii is more angled toward social interaction between the users, which unfortunately left behind the database development, while Goodreds started, wisely, with a solid DB at its foundations, but it's still catching up with the "socialising" side of things.

And then there are annoying little details... aNobii's DB lacks some really basic concepts, like that of "work", or original opus, they only have "publications", which makes the life of a Librarian a nightmare when trying to straighten the horrible mess the end-users, by genuine mistakes, have made of the links (or mergers, in aNobii parlance) between editions/translations of the same book.

And names, oh dear... no differentiation between first names and surnames, there, you still find floating around aNobii stuff like...

Edgar Allan Poe
Poe Allan Edgar
Poe Edgar Allan
Allan Poe Edgar

... and so on and so forth...

And yet, adding an alternative cover for the same book is a piece of cake in aNobii's toy-DB, still impossible in Goodreds, I understand, despite it being a pretty common occurrence.

In the end, I can't really choose either, at the moment, I'll be sitting on the fence for a while more, one foot on either side :)

rivka wrote: "To the best of my knowledge, any data that is not imported into a (new or existing) GR book record is not stored -- GR has no way to do this. So fields that don't map to fields that currently exist..."

If the field is unsupported, the parser will skip it. It will not affect performances.

@Gomez Good points. In my opinion, the real weaknesses of both platform is about flexibility to evolution. aNobii beacuse of the little care they have about development, Goodreads because it seems that changing the DB is a mess. I do not why. I have been a programmer since 1978, and I know that usually thsi kind of problems is related to bad architectural design. Please, no offense is intended. GR is a great site, but probably the code lacks of those characteristics that few software has, that is, mainteinability. Even Windows has the same problems, so you are in good companion. The point is that a good object-oriented architecture can uncouple the DB from the web services that use such a database. In sucha case, adding a new field is not a mess at all.

Parsing unsupported XML creates nominal load - that's part of why the specification supports it. Definitely will want to move this conversation to a location that will engage programmers. If you don't mind, message me when you do so I can follow it - I'm curious to see it develop.

ok, I am discussing of that with Virgilio. I'll keep you in touch.

http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/6...