Any way to make hardcover the primary search result?

[Patrick]

Sorry if this has been covered - I did search for the answer. Background: I love the greasemonkey extension in Firefox that searches in my local library for a book when I am on the main page for a book on Goodreads. Problem is that it generally only works with the hardcover ISBN (because of how the library supports ISBN search), and the primary search result in goodreads is often not the hardcover version. Is there any way to prefer the hard-cover in search results, so that integration tools that depend on ISBN would work better? Could it be set by hand? I have sometimes combined editions of books, but I do not remember seeing any way to set a primary or preferred version. Doing it automatically would be better, but this might be a work-around.

Thanks - Patrick

[JG (Introverted Reader)]

For a title search, the primary result will always be the most popular edition, regardless of format. There's no way to change that. But if you're searching by ISBN, it will return the exact edition you're looking for.

[JG (Introverted Reader)]

Have you tried adding your library catalog to your custom links here on GR? That might work better if you're having trouble with what you're using now.

[Patrick]

The problem is the conflict between "most popular version" on GR, and libraries that index books by the ISBN of the hardcover. E.g., San Francisco PL has paperbacks, but they are other versions of the book indexed by the hardcover ISBN. If there was a GR API option that would search by title and return the hardcover version, or an API that given one ISBN would return the associated hardcover ISBN, then I could probably hack things to work.

I do not need to add the custom link - the firefox script automatically searches SFPL for a book when I am on a GR details page, and if it finds it, it adds a little note just under the title with a link to the library page for that book. It is a great integration tool (when it works).

[JG (Introverted Reader)]

You probably need to post that suggestion in the Feedback group.

[Bill]

You can add 'hardcover' to your title search, eg, hardcover "The Hobbit" to get presented with a list of the hardcovers. The results are not ideal, but it helps me a lot since I generally only read hardcovers.