Automate Language setting?

[Debbie]

It occurs to me that GR could automatically update the language settings for a lot of books based on the first digit of the 10-digit ISBN.

ISBNs beginning 0 or 1 are in English, 2 is French, 3 is German, 5 is Russian, 8 is Spanish.

Thoughts? Could save a lot of sqrl hours!

[rivka, Former Moderator]

There are too many exceptions, I think.

[Otis]

Squirrel,

You opened a whole bag of nuts (pun intended:). There is a lot of data we could potentially gleam from ISBNs. However Rivka is right - it would take a lot of research to figure it all out. If you know of any good web resources for listing the rules though lets post them to this thread.

[Lindig]

But is the default language English? I should have looked this up before posting, shouldn't I? Anyhow, I think it should be as the great preponderance of books listed here are in English. Setting the default to English would save a step.

[rivka, Former Moderator]

The default is no language selected. Which is better, I think, than defaulting to English. This way it's easy to tell which books have had their language set and which have not.

[Lindig]

Okay, if you say so. Is there a way to pull up all books that haven't had their language set?

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Not yet.

Otis has mentioned that the language settings are going to be used more at some point in the future.

[Eva-Marie]

I think the default is better set to none selected either. I think too many people would fly right past it without changing it if it were set to English (or any other language).

[vicki_girl]

To answer Otis' question in message 3, I use the following when I am trying to determine whether an ISBN is legit.

http://www.isbn-international.org/en/...