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message 1: by Tyler (last edited Apr 07, 2018 04:04PM) (new)

Tyler Crocker (cardtable) | 2 comments I'm trying to make a (personal) web application to help me manage my largish collection of used books. I currently am storing some very basic data to do this and I'm trying to figure out the volatility of IDs. I'm currently storing Shelf, Book, Work, and Series IDs, but the more I'm looking around I'm wondering how volatile some/all of these are? I've seen that Book IDs can change... is this common? I know I looked up a book that was released very recently and its ID was in the 9M ballpark, but I've got much older books that are in the tens of millions range... I'm fine with just storing all the information I need and then refreshing when I have to since it's a personal application, but I'd like to not be storing things in such a way that I'll get a lot of misses... Thanks!

EDIT: I know ISBN numbers are a thing, but my experience trying to add the "correct" book to my collection has shown that not all Books have ISBNs? I haven't checked if this carries over to the API... is there something different about the way I register what edition/copy of a book I have in my library vs what comes back from the API?

BACKGROUND INFO:
I'm trying to collect series information on my books (I have about 1700 in my collection atm, so it's getting to a point where doing it by hand/memory is getting silly, thus the app) and then generate a data-set detailing what series I have that are incomplete so I know what to look for while second-hand shopping.

The Goodreads app on my phone has been INSANELY helpful for managing my overall collection, but I'm to the point where I want to start focusing on completing series that I've already started collecting :) Thank you guys so much for such an amazing tool!


message 2: by Oleg (new)

Oleg Linkin (maledictus) | 60 comments Book id - it is book edition id. You should use work id as unique id for book in ur case


message 3: by Tyler (new)

Tyler Crocker (cardtable) | 2 comments Oleg wrote: "Book id - it is book edition id. You should use work id as unique id for book in ur case"

Yeah, I'm aware of that, I'm using a combination since I care about the edition that I have in my collection.

Sorry if I wasn't clear, I was mostly using Book ID as an example of IDs looking like they might be re-used over time

Any thoughts on volatility of ANY of the IDs would be appreciated!


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