New data source: Barnes & Noble

[mlady_rebecca]

rivka wrote: "I believe it has more to do with specific actions Amazon has taken in the past year or two. Regardless, I doubt a discussion here is likely to be productive."

My apologies. I wasn't trying to start an argument, just to explain why some people seem opposed to Amazon above and beyond their API restrictions.

[rivka, Former Moderator]

I don't think anyone was trying to start an argument. :) I'd just like to head this off before things move in that direction, as this is not the place.

[Otis]

There is certainly a danger of B&N turning around and giving us the same restrictions, but in discussions with them we've become assured they wouldn't do this for some time. They are eager to work with us and willing to offer things Amazon won't, because they know they aren't the gorilla in the room in the online world. If worst comes to worst, we can always pay the money to purchase the book meta-data (which is still expensive, but we can afford it).

[Dionisia]

I was thrilled to see the move away from Amazon for purely selfish reasons. I would love an Android app! Hopefully using the B&N data brings us a step closer in that direction.

[Ben]

Hey guys,

I've got another file to take a look at. This is a list of descriptions for popular works where the Amazon and Goodreads descriptions match, but Barnes & Noble is different:

http://www.goodreads.com/system/bn_bo...

Roughly 55-60% of all books will fall into this category. Please let us know what you think about going with Barnes & Noble for these descriptions! The other option as mentioned above was to hide descriptions in places where the Amazon TOS doesn't allow us to use them (iPhone, API, etc.).

Ben

[Otis]

Just to be clear - the other 40% of descriptions will remain as is, as they were ones that librarians had edited to be significantly different from what Amazon had, or were unique to Goodreads (probably copied from the publisher site or something). We ran some smart computer science algorithms to determine what "significantly different" meant, and eyeballed it to tune it.

I think we could also leave the descriptions in Ben's file as they are if we need to. It's just that we wouldn't be able to use them in any mobile apps, and we wouldn't be able to show other bookseller links on our book pages for those books.

So our options here are:

1. Leave as is and deal
2. Update them, assuming they are on the whole an improvement, and deal with bad ones.
3. Try to programatically determine which are better (longer ones seem better)
4. Store both and use appropriately (major backend pain for us)

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Otis wrote: "were unique to Goodreads (probably copied from the publisher site or something)."

Many have been typed in by hand from book covers.

[Cait]

Otis wrote: "Try to programatically determine which are better (longer ones seem better)"

I'm sure I'll have a longer comment later, but I just wanted to say: longer book descriptions are not always better, especially from Amazon. Long Amazon book descriptions are often taken from professional book reviews and include exactly the sort of review-instead-of-description which we chastise GR users for adding!

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Also, I've seen some longer ones that are simply the same text repeated a second time accidentally.

[mlady_rebecca]

*looks at file*

It's such a mixed bag. With some, the existing Amazon descriptions are clearly better. With some, the B&N descriptions are clearly better.

Some descriptions (on either side) have embedded professional reviews.

Some descriptions (on either side) describe the book edition rather than the contents of the book itself.

Then there are book awards listed on some. Author bios listed on some.

I don't know that length is a good judge of better.

Is there a magical fifth option that will present both descriptions to the next librarian that edits a given book?

[Steven]

I would like to be able to check the B&N info on a book and re-source it if the information looks decent. Sometimes the librarian edits are pretty minor (and can be quickly redone by hand) and in other cases B&N may already have suitable information without an edit.

The sooner such a feature is available, the sooner librarians can start the re-sourcing process. Being able to hand-check books that matter to a librarian can make a big difference in both the quality of the data, as well as the user experience.

With a little time for librarians to re-source things by hand, GR gets a lot more flexibility in terms of how they decide to resolve the Amazon provided information. (A brute-force migration to the B&N information will be a lot more palatable if things can be checked and hand-migrated before-hand.)

[Steven]

It would also be great if a check-box could be added to indicate that the description was sourced by hand from the book. This would allow a by-pass allowing the GR description to be kept when it is identical to a data-source that is being dropped. (Amazon now, put potentially B&N in 5-10 years, who knows.)

[Cait]

mlady_rebecca wrote: "Is there a magical fifth option that will present both descriptions to the next librarian that edits a given book?"

...You know, if it were possible for the developers to whip something like that up, just a bare-bones librarians-only interface with links and a way to select between the two reviews (sorted by popularity? with some options for book defaults?), we could throw librarians at it for a few weeks and see if we could bring the numbers down enough to all feel better about the switch-over. There are a lot of big winter holidays coming up and there could be a lot of free time being harnessed!

[Paula]

I agree Cait - that would be good. Nice to have something to do while watching movies and eating

[Steven]

I just added a middle initial to a bunch of P.G. Wodehouse stuff that was pulled from B&N. (I still need to combine a bunch of it.) Any word on when it'll start including the middle initial in their data? (As their site has the middle initial.)

[Ben]

Hey guys,

Just a heads up that we're running the script to grab images from Barnes and Noble now for all books that don't have an image uploaded. Keep in mind that BNN doesn't have images for most of the books on Goodreads, so you'll still see a lot of books with their image sourced from Amazon.

Please let us know if you find any problems!

Ben