Metric Dimensions

Rather than going book-by-book, is there a way to have all our book dimensions automatically listed in the metric forms instead of inches/pounds? There seems to be some interest for this feature:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/130812

Oh yes please, again

Is it possible to put metric on automatically for local LT versions (like .nl for the Netherlands) ?

Yes, it would make it meaningful for us to start using this feature.

I too would like metric measures as that is what librarians use.

(Though I do prefer the volume measure "bathtubs full" to kiloliters.)

Yes, an urgently needed feature. Would be very much appreciated.

By the way, the conversion from inches to metric doesn't really work. It gives values down to tenths of millimeters – no book can be produced (or measured) with that kind of precision. Apart from that the values are often simply wrong: When I check and measure my copies I usually find that the sizes LT uses are one or several millimeters off.

yes please

Agreed. Having some kind of user-settable preference to remember metric would be great.

James

@Ravic Yeah, I'm not trusting any of the LT supplied weights and dimensions. It looks like they were taken from Amazon and I'm sure Amazon just uses rough estimates for shipping purposes.
Glad I'm unemployed for once; I plan on going book by book through my library to input every dimension and weight manually (I have a postal scale that goes down to the tenth of a gram).

The book dimensions often come from the source you are using for import not from LT.

It's not that it's untrustworthy so much as it is "good enough" data by that industry's standards.

Librarians, so I have been made to understand, don't worry about precision to the tenth of the whatever. If it's a metric measurement, they round up to the nearest centimeter. And they often only measure one dimension, the height.

Confirming PhaedraB: not only do librarians round up to the nearest centimeter and only do height; there were times I barely got the tape measure out and just sort of guesstimated. The only reason libraries measure books so see quickly which size shelf they'll fit on. We had four shelf sizes: quarto, folio, oversize and x. Most libraries have two: quarto and bigger-than-quarto.

While everyone should feel free to measure and weigh whatever they want, there really is very little usefulness to the information outside of shipping and shelf size. The number of boxes needed to pack books, the number of shelving units needed to house them, and the weight of the books in the house can be approximated pretty well simply from the total number of books.

@aulsmith, you might not think it's very useful, but there seems to be quite a few people interested in it. Seeing as LT is an international site and only the US, Liberia and Burma fail to use metric, the option to set metric as your standard measurement should be an option, rather than changing it book by book.

12: No quarrel. You'll notice I was #5 requesting this improvement. Just didn't want you to spend your time weighing and measuring things if your object was to do something that a rough number would work for.

12: Having read your post on the other thread, I see that you think I was saying that being able to switch between metric and "English" measurement is useless. If we're going to have weights and measures than it is extremely important as you point out.

However, whether the feature of weights and measures is more than tangentially useful for an individual's library is debatable. However, it was added because libraries and businesses, who are actually the bread-and-butter of LT, need it. And it is fun to see how many bathtubs you could fill with your books.

When I was discussing the accuracy of the dimensions in post #9, I didn't mean that I intended it actually go down to the tenth of the gram (I'm assuming that's why you were talking about the extremes of accuracy). I just need something more reliable than Amazon's measurements which I've found to be off by as much as a pound (they can be very shady when it comes to shipping). As my shelves are all cheap particle board, the ability to know how much I can (safely) shelve is pretty important to me and requires a bit more accuracy than what Amazon gives (if each book is off by a few ounces, a shelf may easily be off by five or ten pounds) and I find metric to be far more accurate than imperial (especially since it's so difficult to turn imperial units into decimals).

15: Ah, I see. Makes sense.

>15 benuathanasia:

If you Amazon delivery is underweight when it arrives, can you put in a claim for the remaining pages to be shipped to you? ;-)

benuathanasia suggested I re-post this from the other thread:

Coming from the country that gave the US feet and inches and pounds weight and gallons, when the UK decimalised and metricised in the 70s it was assumed that old people would have real difficulties making the adjustment.

But four decades on I (as one who is in his sixties) get irritated by people my age unable to (a) mostly think metric or even (b) work out the equivalent. Even though we still (just) drink pints in pubs, all our volumes and product weights and recipes are metric, and even though we still drive miles down our roads most lengths are metric. (But, yes, I see that British publishers still routinely use inches in their dimensions.)

Surely those who use 'imperial' (as Brits used to call it) are in a global minority? Why can't LT give us readers the option at least of switching? (I don't care if they're spelled millimeters or millimetres, by the way.)

Apologies for the jokey flavour of the original; the request is serious though!

When I first started working with the physical dimensions feature in April, I found some of the Amazon data was off.

Way off.

A good number of entries were literally describing a 20 inch x 20 inch x 20 inch book that weighed 20 pounds.

Now that's a book I'd like to see if real.

James

Damn, that sounds like a tome from Dungeons and Dragons or maybe the Necronomicon, lol.

19> When I saw those (20x20x20) I thought that it must be that the original record had spaces in those fields and LT was interpreting it as a number because 20 is the ASCII code for a space. However, that's 20 in hex so I'm not sure that explanation makes any sense.

A good number of entries were literally describing a 20 inch x 20 inch x 20 inch book that weighed 20 pounds.

Now that's a book I'd like to see if real.

I wonder what it's made of...it's far too light for paper...

{There was a 84×60 inch book weighing 133 pounds, but that's genuine...}

While agreeing with the original post that the option for a change across a whole library would be good, I did not find that in measuring and weighing 5000 books the one extra click per book burdensome.
More of a problem is that on statistics page it treats all weights as being in pounds, even when they are clearly set to Kg. (Bug reported last June). This among other problems devalues my books (weight in gold) by $30,000,000 or more. Note - the statistics page for my library only makes sense when applied only to the collection "books".

bump
Is this being reviewed? Partly it's not interesting to me unless there is a way to make the LxWxH part of the data export. But if not, I'll set back the few books I've changed over and just leave it as a slightly irrelevant piece of information.

5-year-later bump. It's absurd entering all my books from sources that are in metric, having the site auto-convert them to imperial, just so that I then have to manually convert them back to metric, usually resulting in a different figure to the one that was retrieved to begin with.

>25 kuuderes_shadow: The source you're getting the details from is giving them to you in imperial.

>26 gilroy: Why would, say, Amazon Japan provide the data in an archaic British measurement system that is not used anywhere on the site and has never been used in the history of the country?

>26 gilroy: Because the vendor that gave them the data put it in that way.

Data from Amazon especially is suspect, since it comes from third parties as much as from their internal people, and is frankly more suspect than say, the National Japanese Library.

>28 gilroy: I'd be very surprised if a book in Japanese published by a Japanese company and being sold by a (admittedly American owned) Japanese retailer serving the Japanese market would use inches and pounds when they don't even have that as an option on the site.

Yes I know that the Amazon data is often dodgy. I've seen enough things where they give absurd figures, get stuff in the wrong category (e.g. height in the thickness column), or give different measurements for two books that are actually exactly the same size to know that. Unfortunately the only listed sources are 5 amazon things and a single university. Not that other sources would necessarily be any better.

Not that any of this is a reason against having the option to have stuff automatically entered in metric rather than having to do four clicks for every single entry in order to change them. It's more a reason for having the ability to power edit book dimensions, which is another one of my pet wants (or would be if power edit wasn't broken for some of its uses already).

>29 kuuderes_shadow:
Let me be clear, I'm not against either a power edit option or a profile setting. Would love it, since I have a mixture of both and it drives me nuts.

I'm just saying that the blame on the mixture of inches and centimeters (or centimetres) isn't entirely on LT's shoulders. They may be getting faulty data.

And a Japanese book, by a Japanese company, being sold to an American military person, who works in the imperial, would see something other than metric.

>29 kuuderes_shadow:

Do you have a specific example of a book that came in from amazon.co.jp with imperial dimensions, and of the exact search you did to bring up that book on the source? It's a lot easier to talk about where the issue lies with a precise test case.

But American military personnel isn't Amazon Japan's main market is it? Nor is it the main market of, say, a small light novel publisher...

>31 lorax: - every single book I've added from there has had imperial dimensions, and about 99% of my Japanese books were added through Amazon Japan. I enter books by putting in the ISBN on the "add books" page, then clicking on the correct option that comes up. If you want a random thing to experiment with then 9784041208205 will do I guess (just tested with this one and it returned imperial as I expected), selecting the paperback option of course. It doesn't matter what book you choose though - everything gives the same result.

>32 kuuderes_shadow:

That ISBN appears to only have a Kindle edition on amazon.co.jp. What you need in order to demonstrate that LT is at fault - since I know I have had many books come in with metric dimensions - is one where the dimensions on the site are quoted in metric but it imports in imperial.

>33 lorax: what?

https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/4041208203 is the ISBN I just gave you.

商品パッケージの寸法: 18 x 12.8 x 1.8 cm
^dimensions in cm

once imported, Librarything lists this as:
Height Length Thickness Weight
7.09 inches 5.04 inches 0.71 inches 0.35 pounds

The height then becomes 18.01cm once converted back to metric.

Thanks! I suspect it may be returning different results for ISBN13 vs ISBN10 in a search, since that other box next to the Kindle option wasn't there when I looked with the ISBN you gave me. At any rate, that's a great example for the devs to test.

I have another issue. Some of my books have height 19,8 cm and some 19.8 cm. So, ... should that be comma or period? Apparently LT saves it as a text field (which actually makes some sort of sense, so we don't get 19.79999999 cm displayed anywhere).

I have another issue. I have books with height 19,3 cm and som with 19.3 cm. Should it be comma or period? LT seems to save it as a text field (which actually makes sense).

ETA: Physical summary turns 20 x 19,3 into 20 x 19 cm. And 20 x 19.3 into 20 x 19.3 cm, so period seems to work and comma doesn't.

Maybe a tiny help text for us non-US citizens?

ya, US uses . for decimal and , for 1000, EU switches it around. very annoying when entering data in spreadsheets.

At least 19,3 cm didn't get converted to 19300 cm :-)

And yes, spreadsheets are a pain when . and , are switched around.

ETA: I'm trying to sanity check height, length, thickness and weight and some of the errors are quite funny. Like 283 cm which should be the height of a paperback!

The comma vs. dot is a localization issue and different regions and cultures have different conventions and preferences.

Of course, in the U.S., one of the names for the dot is the "decimal point" so its use is prescribed. :) I don't know that one is better than the other but merely familiar based on experience.

James

>40 Keeline: Completely agree.

It seems that LT prefers decimal point at least when I'm using librarything.com. Also I have a lot of English/American paperbacks and it would be a pain to convert decimal point to comma so I'll stick with decimal point and go change the few commas that have invaded my book data :-)

>38 JerryMmm: US uses . for decimal and , for 1000, EU switches it around.

Parts of the EU perhaps. The UK uses a decimal point, and commas for thousands. The UK's still a member of the EU for the time being, and I wouldn't mind a little flutter that we stay members.

There's even a map here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_mark

Luxembourg gets special points (pun intended) for using both marks officially.

Luxembourg will take care of your money for you no matter how you write it.

But even here in Austria, where the norm is to use a space for the thousands and a comma for the bits smaller than 1, I saw a check being made out on television last week as 120,000.- (instead of 120 000,-). The person doing this was representing a large company, and has probably learned to use the US system so as not to confuse the Amis.

I think we've recently cancelled the idea of checks in Denmark, but the rule was to spell out the amount in words too and if there was any difference between amount in numbers and amount in words, the amount in words would win.

Same here, but this was to advertise the large amount of money being given to charity.

I am having a problem with measurements also but in a different way. looking at pre-filled fields I am finding that the thickness is oftern several inches whilst the height is less than the thickness, or even the depth. Having read the thread it seems that the original source for the data cares not a toss.

Can I just confirm for mortals that the height is as standing up for humans, the depth is front to back as in shelves, and the thickness is as for timber. In virtually all instances the thickness will be the smallest measurement. For some panoramic books the depth may often be more than the height.

I am going metric as that is what makes most sense.

Incidentally am I right in thinking that all my careful measuring and weighing is simply for me? Seems a waste if that is the case. At some stage dragging the book dimensions from several libraries might show a rough consensus and root out the bogus dimensions. If it sounds a problem .... I told my removal company how much my 2500 books would weigh based on LT .... possibly a mistake. !!!

>47 dieseltaylor: Incidentally am I right in thinking that all my careful measuring and weighing is simply for me?

Yes. And so I don't much bother with those fields, except occasionally to correct obviously wrong data in an added record.

>47 dieseltaylor:

Only for you and anyone looking at your catalog. Trying to percolate it up would be meaningless in the absence of an edition layer.

Also some books would have slightly different data anyway, since the binding / cutting can differ. But yeah, correcting obviously wrong data would be a help. I don't see that coming without an edition layer, though.

(FYI: I'm currently tracking down some of my paperbacks which Amazon claims as 0.5 kg while I think 0.1 kg is more like it.)

... Still hoping that we will get the ability to choose metric as default for our library rather than have to individually change each entry ...

Meanwhile, like >47 dieseltaylor: I get a bit confused by the terms 'height', 'length' and 'thickness'. Well, height and thickness are reasonably obvious but 'length' throws me. Would 'width' be too confusing? or would it be possible to separate the boxes by cover (height & width) and spine (thickness)?

>51 libraian: height and thickness are reasonably obvious but 'length' throws me.

I agree; 'length' isn't helpful. If the book is flat on a surface in front of you, 'width' makes sense. Personally I would prefer 'depth', as the book stands on a shelf.

If two out of the three dimensions are "reasonably obvious", though, surely the third can be deduced?

>53 lorax: If two out of the three dimensions are "reasonably obvious", though, surely the third can be deduced?

Why rely on deduction?

>51 libraian: I agree. When we can use more precise terms, why not?

> By the way, the conversion from inches to metric doesn't really work. It gives values down to tenths of millimeters – no book can be produced (or measured) with that kind of precision.

Reminds me of elevation signs in the USA which read
4000 feet
1219.2 meters
No wonder Americans think the metric system is complicated.

>56 brycenesbitt: Funny!

>56 brycenesbitt: Yeah, while true - it's silly. I can't imagine the measurements in inches / feet being that precise either.

That sort of false precision drives me batty. My middle-school science teacher had zero patience for it - if you had too many significant figures in an answer, you lost points.

>59 lorax: Don't all science teachers deduct points when you do that? That held true for me, from middle grade to university.

One of mine once apologized for having written "1000" in an exam without specifiying whether that was one, two, three, or four significant digits. (IIRC, the intention was four.)

anglemark (#60):

I'd assume so, but it was sufficiently drilled in that I never encountered it at a higher level.

>60 anglemark: I bought an old book yesterday. Depending on how much I squeze it it has a thickness of 0.9 or 1.2 cm :-)

>63 bnielsen: Ah, now you have to find out whether that is statistically significant. If you squeeze and unsqueezed it 10 times, do you get the same results? What is the standard error? p value? Perhaps plot a bar graph? Do you need to do a power analysis to determine how many squeezes are needed for statistical relevance?
(Hint: Always say that you will base your data on previous experiments. Don't promise to do a power analysis.)

Also, does the number of times you squeeze it alter the extent of the change in thickness? Does it slowly get thinner after multiple squeezings? Plot number of squeezes on x-axis and thickness on y-axis.

:-)

ETA: I thought a t-test would be OK under these conditions, but you aren't really comparing squeezed and unsqueezed. For that you would have to purchase another copy of the book with the same age...

>64 krazy4katz: Thanks for lining up my work for me :-) I also have several means of measuring thickness and the position of the book (i.e. lying on my table or standing on a book shelf) also matters and the gravitational and electric forces of the other books and ...

I started being very exact but it soon got me stressed, so now to avoid that problem I always write down my measurements in 0.25cm intervals.
So most of my paperbacks are 20x13, some 19.75, 12.75...
Again for thickness, 4 or 3.75, 5 or 4.75.

>65 bnielsen: You also have to try it in different places around the world and at different heights, to see what difference the varying value of g makes. Come, on: FOR SCIENCE!

>66 ScarletBea: I was trained to round up to the nearest centimeter in my cataloguing classes and career. I do that now with height and width, but somehow thickness I go with .5 cm.

I have a feeling that you people are making fun of a very serious issue here.

>59 lorax: Was that zero or 0.04 rounded down?

>63 bnielsen: 😂
>64 krazy4katz: 🤯

>56 brycenesbitt: Whereas I've just entered several books which told me they were 7.75982 inches high.

>70 humouress: Wow! The books said that?! I wonder if their height changes when they talk? And 5 significant figures? Amazing!

>71 krazy4katz: They do! I clicked to convert to kg/cm instead of pounds/inches so they’re 19.8cm but if I change back to inches they’re only 7.8.

>72 humouress: I think you should have kept some of them at 7.75982 inches just to see if they go to 7.75983 inches when the weather is wet and 7.75981 inches when it is dry :-)

In physics at college they emphasized "significant digits." Clearly the conversions on LT are mathematically correct but really unlike a measurement you could make with a physical analog ruler.

I would still rather be able to default to always use metric because I can enter the weight as a decimal and not have to deal with pounds and ounces which LT cannot handle. The local Dollar Tree store provided me with a nice square with English and metric marks on each side. This helps when getting the dimensions of the book.

James

Significant digits and unit conversions do not really play happily with each other. If you have the appropriate significant digits in one system, the other will of course have more digits because the two systems are not commensurate. If you chop the extra digits in the second unit system and then switch back, you will get a different answer. And so on....

>75 al.vick:

Yes indeed. That's why the true data usually has a much larger number of significant digits, which is reduced and rounded for display. I used to work for a payroll company, so dealing with money values (£9.99) but fields where there were arithmetic calculations were always held to one further digit (£9.999) at least, sometimes more.

>76 sarahemmm: Which is really just a very odd rounding method. I remember trying to figure out why me and my bank couldn't agree on something that was basically just the result of a multiplication of two numbers. Bank: We round to three digits after the decimal marker and then to two digits to make sure that it is correct. Me: I'm a mathematician and you're doing this WRONG! (In the end we agreed to disagree.)

the decimal point/comma problem could be resolved if you used millimetres, not centimetres (and surely no one is going to use a fraction of a millimetre): it was the unit we used for printing specifications when I worked in publishing.

>77 bnielsen: Was it not done by (one of the) bankers' rounding method? As I said, in some situations you definitely need more decimals. ISTR that I wrote one app for NI calcs that required 6.

>79 sarahemmm: Yes, but the banker wasn't aware that it sometimes gave a slightly different result compared to rounding the mathematical way.

In my opinion there are two things to think about:
- calculating
- displaying

I am a user of the metric system. So as >78 overthemoon: said I would calculate in mm, with at least 3 digits after the decimal marker. And display the result in mm (no digits).
I do not know what would be best to round the result (xxx.xxx mm) in an non-metric dimension (1/4, 1/6, 1/8, ??? Inch).

Just as long as I can have the option to choose my preferred units (without having to change it for each book individually), I'm happy to measure to the nearest millimetre.

>82 humouress: Same

Any luck yet?

bump

As a newbie to LT I am bewildered why there is not a user setting to default the display/edit screen to either metric or imperial, and that this is such a long-running (decadal!) request from users. It seems a no brainer for me, and it cant be such a big deal to implement...what reasons have the developers given for their resistance to do it?

>86 Acronema: I'm guessing because it's not that straightforward to code since the values come from the source. I'm among those that have no use for inches and stuff, but nowadays I practically never use Amazon, which is the main, if not only, source not using metric. Even US libraries usually have data in cm

>87 SandraArdnas: But if the source provides it in metric, LT still gives it in imperial. Even the things I bothered to measure/weigh myself, are recalculated to imperial. (It's why I pretty much gave up on that feature).

>88 Nicole_VanK: What do you mean? I get the data from the source. Libraries only record spine length, so that's all you get. Weight than often appears (in green) in pounds, but the data from the source is always in its original form.

So if I wanted to fill in the rest of fields myself, I could fill in width and thickness without having to switch, but weight still defaults to pounds, so I'd have to switch each time.

Although I have seen LT do some odd things with the dimension fields I can't say that I have seen them switched after they were in place, unless I did it. I had one book I recently added manually "Babar's Bath Book" that I added manually. I did not bother with the dimension fields, thinking I would fill them in later. But when I went back to the entry I saw all three dimensions entered in inches, and in green? I am not sure where they came from because I did not import the information about the book as I could not find a copy to copy. I normally put in dimension fields in CM even if they imported in inches. I do not trust library measurements. I have also noticed that with an oblong book they often will give the longest dimension as the height, and I correct that when I see it. So in that case they are not measuring the spine to get the books height. I suspect that with many libraries the books measurements are just a vague after thought, they do not seem to be concerned if they are accurate or not.

Green values mean that the data is computed by LT based on what other users have entered for the same book . It isn't really in your book record so that if you export your book data the green data won't be there

bump

>88 Nicole_VanK: I don't know what source the books I add to my catalogue use - probably they all use Amazon? I scan most of them in using the LT app and the barcode on the book (or enter the ISBN manually if it doesn't register that way). But when I look at my catalogue in the 'Your Books' tab, the dimensions are all always in imperial, if they are there. Occasionally some of the fields (like weight) are blank.

So then I have to go into each record individually and toggle the dimensions from imperial to metric.

What a shame the Romans (or whoever) didn't have twelve fingers. A metric system based on duodecimal would be easier to work in all round :0)

I just checked my catalog and the values which I didn't switch to cm usually have a lot of digits. I don't think Amazon (.de if that matters) stores "1.6203976257 pound" in their database. "0.74 kg" sounds more reasonable.

>94 Cairlinn: See >70 humouress:

I wonder if that means that LT is set to automatically recalculate measurements to imperial, no matter which system the source uses?

>95 humouress: No. It uses whatever source is using

Amazon.de uses metric dimensions. So does Amazon.co.uk.

>96 SandraArdnas: >97 MarthaJeanne: But LibraryThing is always in imperial. At least in my experience.

I think LT uses US customary measurements, not imperial. For inches, feet and yards, this doesn't matter. But US and imperial volume measures use the same terms to refer to different amounts.

Whatever you call them, you can't just blame the sources.

>99 MarthaJeanne: Of course, forgot that.

If only we had six fingers on each hand. Or 10 was divisible by 4.

All jokes aside : it's a simple recalculation. It can't be that hard to make your preference stick. Inches and feet and lbs (and gallons or whatever) don't mean a thing for me, being European. And I refuse to recalculate everything all of the time. So for me, it's trash information and I don't bother.

I can work in US and imperial measures and do so to use my various cookbooks, (Oh yes, Australia is different again.) But I don't want to have to all the time. So I don't use the dimensions.

At a tangent, having just missed the metric system in the UK education system, and then a career as an archivist, imperial makes more sense to me than metric.

I've always wondered, do the general populations of continental European countries that had the metric system imposed on them during Napoleonic times retain a mass (folk?) memory of their traditional weights and measures? Or is it a specialism left to their archivists and historians?

How about other parts of world, where it's not just weights and measures, but often also calendars, compass points, clothing, religion, alphabets, musical notation and goodness only knows what else imposed or layered on top of traditional standards?

>103 Cynfelyn: I've always wondered, do the general populations of continental European countries that had the metric system imposed on them during Napoleonic times retain a mass (folk?) memory of their traditional weights and measures? Or is it a specialism left to their archivists and historians?

As a citizen of a country (France) that had the metric system imposed even earlier - during the French Revolution - I'd say the *practical* memory is all gone, except possibly for the pound ("livre") which was rounded up to half a kilo and integrated into the metric system in 1812. It's never used on packaging, but I can ask for a pound of mushrooms at the farmer's market, and people will understand, unless they're very young and inexperienced.
Otherwise, traditional units are still used in fairy tales (seven-league boots > bottes de sept lieues) :-) *
There might be other niche uses, but I can't think of any off the top of my head.

* ETA: and a handful of idioms (he didn't move an inch > il n'a pas bougé d'un pouce)

Here in Vienna you can order a Seidel of beer and get 0.3i as opposed to a Krügel (0.5l). However, that is based on the Viennese Seidel (0.35l), which was different from the Bohemian Seidel (0,48 l), or the Hungarian Seidel, or the Bavarian Seidel (0.71l). These traditional measures were very local, and there were obvious advantages to using a system in which a liter/litre was the same size wherever you went.

Here in Sweden, none of the traditional units retain any widespread practical use, except the mil, which was rounded to 10 km (the pre-metric version was about 10.5 km) and remains widely used for longer distances, and the tablespoon etc used in recipes, all long since standardized as exact multiples of the ml.

I expect most people are unaware that the old Swedish inch, foot and so on were different from the Imperial / US customary ones one encounters on imported tools and the like.

>106 AndreasJ: Oh yes, this as well! There are more traditional units than I first thought that were repurposed to fit into the metric system: encablure (cable length) is another one.

There are so many archaic measurements - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_French_units_of_measurement gives some French ones

To add to what >106 AndreasJ: wrote, inches etc still exist in idioms.

>109 anglemark: as in "Britain will go metric. Every inch of the way."

I just made an American cookie recipe. I (more or less) used the metric measurements it gave.
11/4 cup rolled oats - 112 g
10 T butter - 142g
1/2 cup currants -71 g
Get real!

This thread is now a dozen years old with over 100 people asking for a metric default. How many more decades must we wait? And btw LT, most metric users use millimetres in preference to centimetres. No decimal dot, less chance of confusion, and quicker to write or type.
A European LT shorn of its funny old Americanisms would be a welcome start-up.

bump

So I've recently had my Thingaversary (thank you, thank you) and done the necessary, not to mention I haven't updated my catalogue for a while; the upshot of which is that I'll have to go through about 26 physical-book records and individually change the dimensions from pounds and inches to metric.

PLEASE can we have the option to choose which units our catalogue will be in so that those units are automatically used when we enter new books?

I suppose I'll add my voice to the petition for choice for metric default here. Maybe someday that wish will come true. I say that as an American who has used Imperial most of my life. I still prefer the accuracy of metric, especially for smaller items-such as books....

Considering the deference to other languages and countries and the popularity of the metric system in them, it is always surprising to me that this has not been worked in.

There might be a way to manipulate the site with Javascript code that runs just for this domain name — TamperMonkey on Chrome as a plugin with a user script. But it is a little beyond my programming skills.

I prefer inputting metric measurements because of the decimals for partial units. Measuring in fractions and converting to decimals is tedious and slows me down too much.

James

Since I translated the expression "Convert all physical measurements to kg/cm or pounds/inches" into German, the two links "kg/cm" and "pounds/inches" have disappeared.
I don't think I damaged the necessary tags during the translation.

I noticed the same behavior in my translations on the home page.
All links in the news section are affected except for the "March Early Reviewers Batch".

And while I'm on the subject of translation bugs.
On the German registration page, "Join groups and talk with other book lovers." cannot be translated.

MacOS: 12.7.6
Firefox 136.0 (64 bit)

PS
I would have liked to have attached screenshots of the errors. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any instructions on how to embed images from my computer into the posts. Attempts to load images into my gallery and insert them via the link there also failed.

ETA:
Thank you >118 Cynfelyn:

>117 birder4106: "I couldn't find any instructions on how to embed images from my computer into the posts."

Try Talk / The Green Dragon / The New How To Do Fancy Things In Your Posts Thread (https://www.librarything.com/topic/177029).

Instructions for embedding pictures in messages is in the first message.

I keep this "Fancy Things" thread starred, so as not to lose it.

>117 birder4106: The German translations were using lower case letters in SUB (sub) instead of upper case. It looks like that worked previously, but apparently LT2 is case-sensitive. I fixed it for the physikalischen Angaben and for the author interview. You can search for all instances and fix them on https://www.librarything.com/translate.php?page=&pnum=1&remaining=2&...

>117 birder4106: Would you mind putting this into a bug report in the Bug Collectors Group? Thank you!

>119 anglemark:
Thank you for pointing out the capitalization. That was the mistake. In retrospect, I don't understand how I could have missed it.
And thank you for correcting the errors in the book edit page.

>120 kristilabrie:
Thank you for the quick response.

I suspect that this will no longer be necessary since the errors have been corrected.

>121 birder4106: I suspect that this will no longer be necessary since the errors have been corrected.

Some of the capitalization errors were really old, so this function must once have been case-insensitive. If it is no longer, that might be considered a bug.

I see that this thread from 2012 still has some interest. I proposed a method of handling this on the edit book and blank new entry form pages. I have made an experimental TamperMonkey (Chrome plugin) User Script. It works for me. This is the forum thread where it will be discussed if there is interest.

https://www.librarything.com/topic/372470

If you have a record with non-metric units, it will be as if you clicked the "convert to metric" link on the edit book page. Then when you save you will have the metric values stored. These should show up in book lists and detail pages that display them. Some conversions will add a lot of decimals after the mantissa. That is for you to edit if it is important.

After some testing, if this proves OK, we'll see about adding it to the GreasyFork repository of user scripts. But I want to be sure it works for more than just me (Chrome on Mac) before storing it. I'll provide a link to the script in that thread once we have some interest expressed.

This involves installing a plugin (GreasyFork) and a custom Javascript code. This sort of thing is basically safe but it is a little technical and not for everyone. The thread is in the Hacking LibraryThing forum where people share customizations such as User Scripts and custom CSS to change the appearance of the LT pages. These are for computer browsers. They won't affect the app and probably won't work in a mobile browser. I'm not 100% sure of the latter since things are always changing and TamperMonkey had a notice about installing on mobile but I didn't try it.

Eventually LT will have their own metric preference implementation but for now this is a stopgap for those who are really annoyed by having to click "convert to metric" on every edit or new entry.

James