Importing Existing Books

[Vadigor]

Suppose I come across a collection of books by an author or a series with almost no useful information. Perhaps only the title is present and it might even be wrong, they're missing metadata and covers and lack ISBNs.

Can I now import those books from a CSV or perhaps from a website to save me a great deal of trouble in manually modifying all the fields involved? I could merge and delete faulty entries much faster than if I had to correct them all by hand. Is this against policy or is it a valid approach to correcting problematic books?

I should note that this exercise is mostly theoretical as I realised while writing it that GR would already have imports from foreign-language Amazon sites such as the Japanese branch which is where the series I was considering was on. As such I only have to merge and delete the faulty copies and won't have to import anything myself. But I still found the question interesting so I'd welcome any input.

[Cait]

Vadigor wrote: "I should note that this exercise is mostly theoretical as I realised while writing it that GR would already have imports from foreign-language Amazon sites such as the Japanese branch which is where the series I was considering was on."

Actually, while that used to be true, GR and Amazon (all sites, including amazon.co.jp) parted ways about a year ago and GR can no longer legally use data from Amazon sites.

[Banjomike]

Vadigor wrote: "Suppose I come across a collection of books by an author or a series with almost no useful information. Perhaps only the title is present and it might even be wrong, they're missing metadata and co..."

I'd start buy posting a few examples here. If the Goodreads scripts are missing something from their import websites (and we CANNOT NOT use Amazon, any flavour of it) then the developers can probably add some sneaky parameters to fix the omission.

[Cait]

That said, I don't think that there is a way to do a manual import like the one you're describing; the imports which currently run are set up by GR staff against the APIs of the websites in question.

(There is an import function, but all it does it match up your list against existing records in the GR catalog and put the matches on your shelves.)

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Cait wrote: "I don't think that there is a way to do a manual import like the one you're describing"

Correct. There is not, currently.

[Vadigor]

Banjomike wrote: "I'd start buy posting a few examples here."

As I mentioned, I realised that the books I had in mind already existed in the DB but were unlinked with their romanised counterparts so I no longer have any examples to show.

Cait wrote: "That said, I don't think that there is a way to do a manual import like the one you're describing; the imports which currently run are set up by GR staff against the APIs of the websites in questio..."

Ah, from what I read on the import page I assumed that it would create book records for anything not yet in the database. But I suppose such a feature would be prone to abuse.

So despite the fact that Amazon feeds are no longer used, can I assume that all modern releases, say in the past few decades, are already imported into the database? If so, this whole topic has probably become moot.

[rivka, Former Moderator]

It varies. If it was available from Ingram or one of our our import sources, then yes.