Change: Add to your library

I made a change to the "Add to your library" feature on work pages. I mean this:



Now when you click it, it starts a search in the "Add books" tab. Before it added the book without any other screen.

This was easier in a way, but also had problems. Basically what it did was figure out the top edition, and give you it. It did it entirely from the LT data, however, so it could be influenced and even rather screwed up by member changes to the records. There was no way to ask for a different edition or for the record from a source of your choosing.

The new way solves those problems, but has others:

1. It's an extra step. Also, should it return you to the work page one you've added the book?
2. It searches for the title of the book and that's that. I can't search for all the various ISBNs and alternate titles involved. That's tricky.
3. It won't work for a work that's been manually entered.

Anyway, I could go on forever on this problem. It's deeply about the fact that LT is a collection of individual items which are combined into each other, but that there is no permanent "work" concept they can search against, and no true "edition" concept within LT itself—nor, perhaps, can there be.

I'm going out for a drink. (Literally, actually.)

Cheers.

Two gin martinis (dirty), a margarita and an onion-and-mushrooms pizza later, I'm still standi...

One thing you might do is add what would have been added previously as a new data source to search against on the "add books" tab. That might come in handy anyway.

Very cool, thank you! I've never much used this feature, because it would always involve lots of editing to get the work to match mine (the only thing I used it for was adding to my wishlist, where it didn't matter which edition of the work it was).

However, I would prefer it if adding a work to your library, either from here or directly from Add Books, took you to the Edit page for the book you just added.

Having a breadcrumb trail like
library > work > edit (or however you got there)
would then let the individual decide for themselves whether to go back to the work they came from, or farther back to however they got to that work.

I agree with rorrison that going to the Edit page makes sense. That way, you can fix any errors or omissions immediately, as well as add your acquisition date or other such data.

I love a dirty martini, although I prefer vodka to gin. Hope you had fun, Tim. You deserve it!

I am not happy with this "improvement". I have a lot of books which can't be found in libraries on the add books page. Now I have to guess and toggle through the libraries, basically I have no idea how to use this new function.

Means I am back to (even more) manual input.

What sort of books are they. Are you using the LT search funtion to find rare stuff and then adding it with the green plus? Can you give me an example of how this isn't working for you? (I'm not doubting it at all, I just want to understand the situation.)

Is this in any way related to the fact that when I add a book from the add books tab, then edit it and save the changes, it goes back to the add books tab instead of to my library? 'Cause I noticed that change yesterday I think, and I love it.

Heather

I would prefer it if adding a work to your library, either from here or directly from Add Books, took you to the Edit page for the book you just added.

YES! It would save me a step, and it might even prompt a few other people to fix some of the bizarre stuff that gets added from Amazon and from libraries.

It would be nice if there was still a way to add something that had been created with manual entry.

>11 myshelves:

Do you mean bypassing the "add books" screen?

T

I'm reasonably well satisfied with staying on the Add Books screen after adding a book -- it tells me whether I've already added the book (i.e. duplicate ISBN #), which I don't believe the edit screen does. I suppose I might like to have a button by each work on the Add books page to take me to the social screen for that work. then I can see how other people have tagged it.

But this is not as important in having LT be able to search the manual added books to see if one of my more obscure books is there. (from #12)

In another thread it was already suggested that the Add Books screen itself should show you if it's a duplicate ISBN, before you add it.

Of course, I have on occasion found an unknown second copy of a book, but it's nice to know before you add it.

I'm with #8.

A backward step,

For example, say one of my dad's football books from the 50s.

(This is talking about viewing someone else's library)

Or, someone's recent magazine they added in manually from this month.

The 'add from someone else's library' very handy for this sort of thing.

--

So this goes from one click and a few seconds to:

Load page work (often 20 seconds)

Click add work.

Decide what source it may come from.

Click that and wait for book to add from source, often a similar amount of time.

Be SOL if/when you know it doesn't exist, and have to go to manual add anyway.

So, you have added in multiple steps and 10 times the time used for people that don't particularly care about the precise edition?

Presumably this is why the 'add from someone's library' gives a 'this function disabled'. Would have been nice if it said why. It doesn't take you to the work page or anything.

#17

I don't think this new function is made for really large libraries. Mine is fair sized, and i will toggle through 4-5 libraries to find a book, but serials are real tough.

Almost all my books are manually added because they are in Chinese and none of the sources cover those books. I know I'm in the minority and I'm used to cut and paste by hand, but it seems like the limitation of not being able to add things entered manually in someone else's library penalizes anyone who has obscure books, small print press books, books from before international ISBNs were commonly in use, or books in a language for which LT does not have a fairly comprehensive import source (including some European languages).

What's sadder, my friend who enters everything manually and checks every piece of data directly from the physical books? I can't add from that library, even when I know the data is immaculate. I know it's not meant to be, but it feels like that library isn't as important as one imported from some place like Amazon.

edit: clarified a 'you'

Oh, I also want to say, I think this change is good over all.

Also, in some cases it has problems it appears.

For instance anthologies, by the looks.

Isaac Asimov's Robots as an example, it appeared to just go to a default search for robots, and the examples on the add screen, nothing to do with asimov, greenberg, or anyone remotely associated with that book.

With the 'Catastrophes' anthology, similarly :-

Full Catastrophe Living by Jon Kabat-Zinn (Piatkus Books, 2001), paperback
A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign by Edward J. Larson (Free Press, 2007), hardcover
Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert (Bloomsbury USA, 2006), paperback
Catastrophes and Lesser Calamities: The Causes of Mass Extinctions by Tony Hallam (Oxford University Press, USA, 2005), paperback
Christmas Catastrophe (Geronimo Stilton) by Geronimo Stilton (Scholastic Paperbacks, 2007), paperback
Crisis, Pursued by Disaster, Followed Closely by Catastrophe: A Memoir of Life on the Run by Mike O'Connor (Random House, 2007), hardcover
Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe by Robert Gellately (Knopf, 2007), hardcover
Cosmic Catastrophes: Exploding Stars, Black Holes, and Mapping the Universe by J. Craig Wheeler (Cambridge University Press, 2007), hardcover
The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: How a Stone-Age Comet Changed the Course of World Culture by Richard Firestone (Bear & Company, 2006), paperback
Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of Modern Civilization by David Keys (Ballantine Books, 2000), hardcover

Not sure how you'd get around amazon etc. problems with cataloguing editors, but this is making a few second add from a catalogue in something 20 times longer than that.

I really miss the ability to add directly from someone else's library. Now I get the message This function has been disabled. It isn't clear if this is temporarily or fo good.

I liked the feature as it was before, but then, I only used it to add books that I didn't care about the specific edition, etc - wishlist/tbr or read-but-not-owned books.

> #9 Sorry for late reply ('cause of downtime on Sunday).

I specifically had that problem with the following book:

Central Asia. 130 years of Russian dominance. A historical overview by Edward Allworth (1994), Paperback, 652 p.
0822315548

It also happened with one or two other books but I haven't kept a record.

I agree with #19 and #22; I think the old function had certain advantages which the new method lacks. It is especially good for obscure books and books you haven't got at hand.

Now I get the message This function has been disabled

Ah, I see. Sorry, I was thinking of the function as something appearing on the work pages, and not in the catalog. Anyway, I've updated it as follows:

1. Work-level adding works the same way.
2. Catalog-level adding works by using the source used by the person who added it, and the ISBN or title in that user's catalog. The addition of the source should increase the success rate.
3. Manual ones still won't work, so that needs to be solved.

The basic problem remains on the work level. LibraryThing works have no direct counterpart outside of LT; other sources have no unifying concept like it.

I think the solution will have to be some sort of blended thing—asking for some popular ISBNs plus the title and maybe the last name of the author and mixing it all together as best as possible.

Maybe I'm confused, but that sounds to me as if you want to use data from manually entered titles to query some source, when what everyone has been asking for is to just copy the data.

Is there any particular reason for not doing the latter?

I think that for manual entry, that's the answer. It's trickier if there's work and some of the data is manual and some is not. Works aren't books. They're arbitrary collections of books, with no assurane that the data lines up.

For books within a library, however, I think the answer is just to copy the data verbatim, minus the tags, comments and etc.

Ugh!

Can I add another vote for "This is bad for the manual entry people"? I am routinely moving manually entered works around to different accounts (Oh, how I yearn for collections!) and now instead of one click and I'm done, I have to manually enter the information all over again because these works don't exist in any of the Add Books sources.

#28

The way I'm reading Tim in #25 and #27 he intends that fully manual entries will work (even if at the moment it doesn't) the way you want if you copy them from a particular catalogue.

the quickest way for me has always been to add the work then edit the details. Didn't have to deal with any of the garbage Amazon puts in the fields ore any of the quirks of any of the other sources. Another LTer will shortly be adding a few books that I've given her, with all the details exactly correct, no problem the old way, now she's got to pick any old edition and edit it all or spend time finding a more similar one from the search results.

>30 keir:
If I understand 27 correctly, your friend will be able to add the books directly from your catalog, picking up your catalog data. It's only if you add from the work page that it'll pull from other sources.

How it works right now:

1. On work pages: Triggers an "add books" search, using the work title and the source you have selected.
2. On someone else's catalog: Triggers an "add books" search, using the source the member used, and the ISBN (if one) or the book title (if no ISBN).

Planned by me:

3. On someone else's catalog, when they did it by manual entry. Copies the data verbatim.

Proposed:

1. On someone else's catalog, no matter what the source. Copies the data verbatim.

I disagree with this proposal for the following reason. Users sometimes add a book and edit it rather haphazardly. For example, people will see a particular manga book and add it ten times. Then they go in and say "vol 1," "vol 2" etc. That's what they want, and beause of that they make no effort to change the ISBN, the DDC, LCC or etc. I've even seen people add a book a bunch of times beause they want the author, and then they change the titles—"Hard Times," "David Copperfield," etc. etc.

When you do this you create a sort of monster, with data that crosses editions in uncomfortable ways. While we always allow users to do what they want, data does have global consequences, so we want to avoid things that make it easy to create monsters.

Convinced?

I like #3, but can it be implemented soon? Like, yesterday? :)

>32 timspalding: Tim
You wrote, "For example, people will see a particular manga book and add it ten times. Then they go in and say "vol 1," "vol 2" etc. That's what they want, and beause of that they make no effort to change the ISBN, the DDC, LCC or etc. I've even seen people add a book a bunch of times beause they want the author, and then they change the titles—"Hard Times," "David Copperfield," etc. etc."

Wow. It would never occur to me to do that. I can see where that could become a monster.

Ah, I see! I think 'planned by you' would be wonderful. 'Proposed' is shocking and I'm completely convinced. Thank you.

what does 'manual entry' mean? If I have entered a book completely manually that obviously is, but if I've used the work here, added that then edited my book heavily so it's accurate for my copy, to save a little time over manual entry, with the same end result, is that 'manual entry?'

when I hit the green + looking on someone elses library I want the book added to my library imeadiately, with the details as shown. Personaly I would like it to include copying tags and comments, in fact everything except reveiw, but that may be asking too much. (this is because I am almost always moving a book between my two accounts). When adding from the work page for the book however I think going via add book and looking up editon is a good idea.

I just have to say that the more I mess around with this new feature, then more I don't like it. I have had days in the past where I add 100 books in one sitting, each of them by clicking the "add" button on the works page, and it takes awhile but that was okay. Now it takes a LOT longer, and I really don't like being directed to the "add books" tab when I already know that I want that book in my library, now. It's extra steps and it doesn't feel like a step forward in any way.

Heather

Message #25looked reassuring, so I thought things were going to be OK. Today I just went over someone's catalogue and tried to add some books. The data + cover exactly matched mine. However, clicking "Add" sent me to a long list of publications to choose from in the LC.

I agree with >>#37: when I hit the green + looking on someone elses library I want the book added to my library immediately, with the details as shown.

Could we have this variant of this function at least somewhere?

39, yes I would really like it if this could be one of those functions that we choose whether or not we want it... I want the easier add back, but some people might like this way better.

Heather

from the work as well, because it's extra steps to go from the work to the book in someone's catalogue. This is all just extra work for me, generally I find the library data I add needs more editing than the LT database data did.

Maybe have a checkbox near it for a search, and use the previous behavior otherwise?

Yeah, after a while the not being to add immediately I think is the worst change LT has ever made.

Extremely annoying, now.

Both options would be good, 'add now' or 'add via lookup' if you want the other one, but the 'add now' should work from browsing someone else's catalogue compared to the work itself.

Tim? Any way possible that this could be an optional feature? I reallllllly don't like it, and it seems like others don't as well.

Heather

After watching this discussion for a few days, I'd like to have something clarified by Tim.

In message 32, Tim wrote (sorry it's a long paste):
"Proposed:

1. On someone else's catalog, no matter what the source. Copies the data verbatim.

I disagree with this proposal for the following reason. Users sometimes add a book and edit it rather haphazardly. For example, people will see a particular manga book and add it ten times. Then they go in and say "vol 1," "vol 2" etc. That's what they want, and beause of that they make no effort to change the ISBN, the DDC, LCC or etc. I've even seen people add a book a bunch of times beause they want the author, and then they change the titles—"Hard Times," "David Copperfield," etc. etc."

TIM - Please clarify this for me. People seem to want to be able to add the *exact same book and details* to their catalog when they see someone else has the same copy they have. If the person adding is trying to copy an edition of "Hard Times" from another's catalog, but it was actually a copy of "David Copperfield" that the previous cataloger just added eight times and then changed seven of the titles, WILL THE PERSON NOW TRYING TO ADD IT END UP WITH "DAVID COPPERFIELD" INSTEAD OF "HARD TIMES"? Will it copy the details from the original source that user 1 added, rather than the details NOW in user 1's catalog, which is really what user 2 wants to add with a click and little or no editing?

If it will add the book in user 1's catalog exactly as is, then that is the best option for user 2, but if it's going to add it from user 1's ORIGINAL SOURCE, then user 2 would have to do lots of editing anyway, and/or will post a bug report saying, "I tried to add "Hard Times" from another catalog and I got "David Copperfield," what the bleep bleep is going on here?"

So, please clarify this for me! Thank you!

>45 HeathMochaFrost:

I think the problem is that there are two types of people wanting to use the "Add books" tab.

One type is like you are suggesting - wanting to add all of the details that the first user as added as they are important to them, i.e. "Hard Times" from that year and this publisher etc.

The second type just wants to add a copy of "Hard Times", details don't matter. They just want a list of books that they own/read/want.

I think what Tim wants to avoid is that the second type of person exacerbates existing problems like copies of "Hard Times" with ISBNs etc. from "David Copperfield".

My understanding is that what happens when you click on "Add" will depend on how the data was added to the first library. If it was manually added, then the details will be copied verbatim. If not, then you will be sent to the "Add books" screen to add it yourself from a source. So that "David Copperfield" will not be added, but neither will the exact details from someone else's catalogue.

I also don't like this change. let me say why.

tonight I was trying to enter a bunch of text books. many have really exciting, distinctive titles like 'calculus' (or even 'maths'). I despair of wading through all the amazon results... I search LT and find someone with my book... maybe not the same edition, but near enough for me. I click 'add this book'. I come back to see a list of amazon results... and grunt in frustration and disbelief! 'I just found the *** thing!' I say.

this used to be my work around when the amazon results were too messy to navigate. I only realized after more than an hour's frustration that this was a 'new feature', rather than simply erratic behavior.

I got through about twenty books tonight. I'd expected to do at least fifty.

Some people add a book and edit haphazardly - true. But some people add a book and edit carefully. It does no harm and can save time to find a reliable user and add books from that library. If I look at a book in someone's catalog, or on the details page accessed from there, I know what I'm getting if the data are copied into my library.

We don't want to encourage the creation of monsters. It is already very easy to create monsters. Making copying of good data more difficult is counterproductive.

I have to agree with the "don't like" crowd. I have some oddball obscure books in my library, and lots without ISBNs. If I can't find them through the databases, sometimes I find them in other users' libraries. But if I click "add", I'm right back into the databases that don't have the book. So a very useful feature is now pretty useless for me.

I've also used the add feature to assist in combining some titles (adding then deleting from my library later), but as far as I can figure, it can't be done that way any more.

I so much prefer the old way of quickly adding books.......

Would it be possible to twin this function, enabling one "add this book as is" and another "add this book via database search"?

I would like at least to have the option to add books the old way. There are way too many books where doing a search by title comes up with dozens of books that have nothing to do with what you're looking for, so the whole thing is useless and frustrating.

>>53 bluesalamanders:, 52, 51, 49, 48, 47... Amen and ditto (carefully edited, of course :-)

I just encountered this change today and it's really frustrating me. The idea that it somehow prevents bad data from propagating seems mistaken. Bad data shows up from outside sources all the time. It feels like the majority of users are being "punished" just because the least interested users are creating flawed records in their own libraries, a problem that can never actually be stamped out. ISBN mismatches (and other kinds of mismatches) in the system are of course a problem, but the beauty of this system should be that we all get to deal with those problems together rather than being rerouted inconveniently for our own protection.

What if, say, you allowed attentive users to flag records of other copies of works as "faulty" for the good of all, without actually tampering with the data in those records? A flagged record would be internally prevented from ever becoming the "top," addable edition. A user would always be free to remove a flag from his/her own record, but to do so would presumably prompt him/her to investigate and correct it. There might be flaws in that concept but the form of it seems closer to being a real solution to this problem than the current annoying not-quite-fix.

I have to throw myself on the "don't like" side. And I strongly second the suggestion to configure the behavior of the Add link. For me, one of the best LT features is to be able to find one book, add it, then walk through the suggested books adding as I go. The new "add me" behavior completely breaks the flow.

I'm still roughly 1000 books away from complete transfer of my catalog into LT -- the books I had ISBNs written down for went first! I'm not so focused on entering the edition correctly, but being bounced out to the Add Individual Books page everytime I want to add something really slows down the entry.

Does 56 apply to adding it from a work or just from a catalog?

I'm going to jump in here and throw my support against this new "feature". I tend to add books I run into on the site for a wishlist and it's really annoying to have to add another click. I already found the book once and I really don't care, since it's a wishlist book, about the precise details, and Amazon's data isn't trustworthy anyways. I typically add from the work page. It's just annoying to deal with just for the sake of not cluttering up the data that someone will eventually correct anyway (me possibly!).

Well, I think it's unanimous—everyone likes it.

Exactly =)

So don't you dare change it back or a lot of us will be really really mad!

*57 (timspalding)

Incidentally, is there an easy way to go from the work page to seeing the book in one of the owner's catalogs?

>61 khms:

No, but there will be soon.

#62:

Any chance of a way to see all copies in catalogs (well, groups of 100) together? That would make it much easier to pick the one with the best data (from my point of view) - especially if you also give us more than seven columns.

I'm glad I found this, I have spent hours (well it seems like hours ;-)) trying to figure out why adding books and been a major cluster #$# for me the past few weeks. This "new" feature works for me occasionally, but more often than not it does not and I spend, instead of seconds adding a book, sometimes ten or twenty minutes before I can finally get it entered. At which pint I feel like an idiot for not jsut adding it manually, but I do NOT want to add all my books manually, if I wanted to do that I wouldnt have joined librarything.

Could you, assuming this is helpful for some people, at least make it optional? Could you make a separate button to add books the old way when this one fails to work?

is message 59 three messages after message 56 a joke?

is message 59 three messages after message 56 a joke?

Tim? A joke? You must be joking.

Is this related to the fact that the 'Skip confirmation' doesn't work any more? Whether or not I click that checkbox, I have to click on the link to accept a searched-for or added book, even if there's only the one link. It did _use_ to work...

Replying to 57 (now that I'm back online :-)

I add from a work, I'm much more likely to go from work to work via Suggestions or the author page than browse other catalogs.

Yes. It's a joke.

Suggestions is another place—I forgot it was there too.

This is on our list. Elsewhere you'll see we changed things hugely last night. I didn't want to make this change until the whole system settled down and the fields had the names they were going to get today. But this is high on my lit.

Guess I should learn to type more quickly. Thanks for the update, Tim.

*bump *

I don't want this thread to get buried under all the talk about the shiny, new book/work features. Please think about restoring the old functionality, especially since I'm amassing a backlog of books I want to add to my personal catalog from another catalog I maintain. I'm not horribly excited about entering all the info manually, again.

No one has yet mentioned that without the "Add this book" from one already found in someone else's library, we are in fact proliferating the variety of ways to enter those books.

I monitor the "Compleat Anachronist" series of booklets. Every author has a pseudonym, so already there are two ways to enter a book. I keep the author names associated when new variants show up, best as I can. Each issue has a number (which might be #6, #06, #006, with and without commas, spaces, or parentheses), and each issue has a title. Sometimes people list the illustrator as author. Sometimes people spell it "Complete".

When you could easily copy the data from someone else's catalog, there was hope of establishing an informal standard. Now I'm seeing more and more unique ways of entering the titles. It has become less standard, not more so.

I'm new to LibraryThing and I must say this feature really confused me. I would really like to be able to add a record to my library that is a copy of the record I've found on LibraryThing without having to search through Amazon or someplace else.

I did a search on "Isaac Asimov" a little while ago and brought up the record for his "Foundation." When I clicked the "Add this book" button it did a search on Amazon that brought up over 100,000 hits! I certainly don't have time to search through all those hits, and since I don't have the book in hand, I can't do an ISBN search.

It would really be so much easier to be able to copy a record from another person's catalog, especially if you have that record open.

Please reconsider your change to this functionality.

Thanks!

JL

OK, new oddity (though I suppose Bug Collectors would be just as good...didn't see a post on there about the new Add, though).

I just added a book from someone's library by clicking on the green cross. After approving the add, it went to the Add Books page - with an error:

There was an error. Generally this means that a library is temporarily down. If problems persist report the problem ("Error: server connect failed") to casey@librarything.com. Please include information on what data source you were searching and what you were searching on.

The selected source was 192 (???!!!). I have also had (on previous books) a source of amazon.com (as opposed to Amazon.com, which I already had in my list) and the same error. I've removed the lowercase amazon several times, but it keeps coming back with a new add; I presume 192 will do the same thing. Tried it again - new source 3 and error. Manual entry (though enticing) gives the same error.

Help?

On the first book, I corrected the source to Amazon.com and it came up. With Amazon's usual wonky data, of course.

This is a minor issue, but the change in the "green + to add" has removed my last ditch method of combining books. Here's how it goes-

Let's say I find a orphaned copy of a book with no author and no isbn, but by the title I'm certain its the same as a book I have. Usually there would be no way to combine this copy into the main work. But with the old green + I could do the following:

1)Add the orphaned book to my library with the green +
2)Choose an isbn from the main work and in the edit page give that isbn to the book I just added.
3)Use the isbn combine feature to combine the orphaned book into the main work
4)Delete the extra book from my catalog
(if no copies of the work had an isbn, I could even create a temporary fake isbn, add it to both book records, combine and then delete the fake data)

I understand that this was an unusual use of the old feature, and would probably not be sufficient cause to resurrect it. However, there are now some books that can never be combined.

74

Yes, the add books thing is often erratic - I think if there is punctuation in the title like commas or colons it can mess it up, but someone it does just through up that error source message even when the title seems ok.

75>

Ah, so I was not the only one using that trick.

#70, #72
Yes, another "me too" objecting to the new functionality. I picked up a Work record from another LT user (an LT author, as it happens), which isn't cataloged by Amazon or any big library, being semi-privately published. When the green Add symbol took me to Amazon, the work could not be found, which didn't surprise me as I had started there before going into Author Search. Today's problem is with the Adventures in the Liaden Universe chapbook series by LT user = Rolanni.

I hadn't noticed the problem with Compleat Anachronist as well but am not surprised.

75, 77: I did that as well. It also was helpful in cross-author combinations for works without ISBNs (such as DVDs).

Just add my unhappiness too. Just about the only way of adding JW (Jehovah's Witness) books was by finding someone else's version and copying it. Now we can't do that. There have been lots of good changes recently, but I'm afraid this wasn't one of them.

I wonder if this is the cause of the widely reported breakage of the Amazon bookmarklet? (As well as a similar bookmarklet I made for BN.com)? Sigh...I love the bookmarklet.

If I change the default bookmarklet to use the URL parameter "search=" instead of "isbn=", and remove the bm=1, I can get something, but can't get addbooks.php to recognize the pt= to add tags....

> 79

I have discovered that most popular DVDs can be found in the catalogs of public libraries (of which I have discovered two for adding books: MINERVA (Maine), and ILCSO (Illinois Libraries) ). I have been able to add half a dozen or so with this method.

I also would like the "old" functionality maintained where I can consciously copy a specific book from someones catalogue to avoid a lot of manual entry. Would it be possible to have a feature that is something like "copy work to your library" which would work exactly like the old one and not take you to the library search window. There are a lot of older books that are simply not listed in Amazon. I have titles that don't have ISBN numbers.

As I have to catalog some 7,000 books that have no ISBN and cannot be found through the sources (Amazon, LC etc.), I very strongly agree with people on this thread who asked for the restoration of the old functionality.
Of course, it would be a very good idea to maintain the new functionality too.
If it concerns books without ISBN, LCC, Dewey, etc., where is the problem with bad data transfer?

Haven't you noticed, how recently, LT is swinging towards increasing market share at the expense of features that are of interest to true book lovers.

LT wants to become big, and attract more nitwits with huge collections of cartoons, or minimal collections of, say, 30 to 80 books, consisting of Harry Potter, the Bible, 1984 and a few miscelleanous.

These people cannot handle too many fields, and or features such as an "Add to my Library" Function, where they have to edit the ISBN field.

I think what LT is trying to do is get real breadth in its member's libraries. And in doing so it gets a lot of libraries that don't seem worthwhile.

It is my impression that main core of LT members have some sort of literary interest in their reading. There is a lot more fiction than non-fiction. In public and university libraries, there is probably more non-fiction.

Although I have a modest literary interest (I did the group read of Balzac and the little Chinese Seamstress, I work in transportation, and have helped in the creation of some historical public transport books in Southeast Michigan (Detroit area). Now there are lot of public transport books in LT of which I am the only owner, or one of two or three. My collection only skims the surface. My guess is that well over a 1,000 books have been published in the last quarter century in the U.S. and similarly in Great Britain, possibly also in Germany.

My reason for saying this is that I think LT has to cast a wide net and allow lots of seemingly trivial stuff, so that it can bring in the wide type of books that will allow its (our) LT collection to stand up against the great libraries that exist.

Here's me sticking up for LT once again (you think I'd get tired of doing this, lol). I definitely don't think LT is selling out for "market share" or anything like that, not in the least. Since I've been here, Tim and others have said multiple times that that is exactly what they don't want. However, opening up LT to more markets/businesses/people can and will benefit regular users in certain ways, I'm sure of that.

That said, I really do want this "add book" thing back the way it should be!

> Obviously, I have no objections to letting in the crowds... they are in no way in my way.

Except, if I see that features and functionality are reduced because, as Tim says, there are

"Users who sometimes add a book and edit it rather haphazardly. For example, people will see a particular manga book and add it ten times. Then they go in and say "vol 1," "vol 2" etc. That's what they want, and beause of that they make no effort to change the ISBN, the DDC, LCC or etc. I've even seen people add a book a bunch of times beause they want the author, and then they change the titles—"Hard Times," "David Copperfield," etc. etc.

When you do this you create a sort of monster, with data that crosses editions in uncomfortable ways. While we always allow users to do what they want, data does have global consequences, so we want to avoid things that make it easy to create monsters.

Convinced?"

Well, to be honest, no.

And just to disregard the fact that eg Amazon.com is probably the largest source of garbled and incorrect data.

Why not disable Amazon.com ?

Convinced?

I don't think it's any of those motives so much - I think it's mainly that Tim has a strong trend to Nannyism.

There's quite a list of features that LT doesn't have for the sole reason (as far as I can make out) that Tim is afraid we poor users might hurt ourselves with them.

Mind you, that's the same Tim who proclaims that it is wrong to think of users as idiots.

That line is probably too fine for me to see.

I would like to see the system always take you to the edit page for the book details after you add the book to your library, no matter how you add it. I suspect that some people don't even know they can edit the information that they get from Amazon.

#90: Maybe ... I find I often go to the edit page after adding a book. However, most often, it is to upload a cover. And in any case, going back to the add page - preferrably with tags still pre-entered - is a hassle. Even more if you want the manual add page.

So I'd like some UI optimizations there.

Second most often I want what's currently on the Debris page, or the author's combine works page, which no longer has a direct link AT ALL!

Pretty much the only reason I really want the edit page is when entering pre-ISDN books after a lookup somewhere - they need fixes in 90% of the cases because the edition found is not usually the one I have.

Maybe after I have most of my books in this will change. Today, fixing suboptimal Amazon data for each book just takes too much time - the process is already slow because of the many pre-ISDN books and scanning covers whenever the right one isn't there. I want to be able to believe that I'll get through my books before I get to pension age!

I have to agree here, I sometimes search for a book (often Irish) that doesn't appear easily in a search so after a while I would look for it on LT and then try to add it and it would go back to the search screen that wouldn't work again, causing severe frustration and me having to enter the work manually.

I suppose a option to add - no changes and add-edit choices would help.

Deirdre

How about carrying over, not just the title, but also the author names and ISBN?

We would be free to remove the ISBN if we want to search on multiple editions. Otherwise, its inclusion should cut down on the number of irrelevant search results.

I'm with the others - I don't like this change as is - but I could get to like it if a little more information was carried over to the search field.

It might be a good idea to re-start this topic as a Site-Improvement.

For all I can see is that Tim & Co are ignoring this threat.

94: I do not see any point in starting a new thread on this topic, because that would lack the context of the existing discussion. 59 and 69 did say that changes were going to be made, so the thread is not being ignored.

As far as I can tell, there are always changes that need to be made. It's not as if the dev's to-do list ever gets much shorter.

I think that I will add myself to the list of people who think that the feature was bes the way it was before.

Tim, any idea when this will be changed back? I can see from glancing at Bug Collectors that there are other, more important, issues right now, but any idea at all? A week? Two weeks? A month? I admit I'm doing fine they way it is now, but that's only because I've stopped adding books that way because it frustrated me so much.

Heather

Hi. There's no chance it will be changed back, but fixing it is on my list. I'm sorry I can't be more specific than that now. I understand people liked it the way it was before, but it was a total data hash. We need a better solution, not a return to a really unsatisfactory one.

Well, it's just as well that I stopped looking at this thread after message five, for fear of getting even more depressed about the state of LT. All I can say is: pity the poor sods who haven't got most of their library already entered.

We need a better solution, not a return to a really unsatisfactory one.

I think you need to have the better solution available before getting rid of the previous method, though.

As usual, I agree with Zoe. What was there before may have been bad for all sorts of reasons that people like me don't quite understand (but are willing to accept nonetheless), but what is there now is worse.

Any advancement on this?

I have a library and my father has another one, and we have many books in common, so the green button saved us a lot of time since we input most books manually.

If the problem was that the edition added was the "top" edition, would the problem not be solved by adding the exact same edition as the person on whose book you are clicking has?

No progress on this yet. We are working on search and on scaling.

a lot of books I own can't be found in the on line
databases but have already been entered by other people manually. Not being able to use that effort is
a complete waste of time for a lot people. The fact that
a lot of people enter their books manually shares the burden, the whole point of LT is being able to share
and profit from each others work. Plus if a lot of people
are entering the same books manually you end up
with an even bigger mess of books that should be combined as the same work.

How did I missed this thread till now?

For me, this was a bad change. My standard has been to find a good library record, preferably LOC, and then use +Add as the second shot.

The new +Add has instead forced me to many manually entries, because I can manually enter much faster than combing through the guessed titles.

Try adding http://www.librarything.com/work/1259873/book/25371420

And when LT cannot access LOC even when I have another screen open with the LOC record ....

I support #104 and #105. As I have been trying to argue earlier, you don't improve the quality of input by making it harder for people to copy data that they consider mostly correct. Better to let us see more easily more of what other LTers have entered for obscure works and easily copy what we most approve.

you don't improve the quality of input by making it harder for people to copy data that they consider mostly correct

That's correct but Tim's argument was that most people here are not going for most correct, but first correct is good enough, in which case bad data is likely spreading more. ( though I am glad I got my collection completed before this was removed)

But forcing people to manually enter the same data
once more is much more error prone then let them
copy already entered data which may contain errors
but might get corrected by the person doing the copying.

Best option would be to let the button do the following:
copy the data to my library AND open the edit page
on the copied content. Making it very convenient to
check the data and correct if necessary.

In a more perfect world, if I do change the data, the owner from whose library I copied the book, would get a message stating that "I" have changed my copied entry. Which might induce a further correction.

I suppose my issue belongs to this discussion. I bought my lifetime subscription some time ago, decided I didn't want my husband's books mixed up with mine, and thinking collections might still be a long way off, I started a separate catalog for his books. Then his account started approaching the 200 free limit, and I couldn't afford to buy another at the time, so in order to keep a-going, I continued entering his books, but into my catalog. Now, I recently broke down and bought his lifetime membership, then tried to add his books from my library into his where they belong, but receive an error message. I also have many entries in MyGiftCloset that, since they have been distributed, now need to be moved to the respective persons' accounts.

If this is a purity-of-data issue on LT's part, I'd like you to also consider that, without collections, LT-ers who use that green-plus-sign in other ways are also being hurt. I add my voice to the lobby of "I liked it how it was".

eta: countrylife.key family countrylife.key add books green plus sign

I agree with all that think that the previous feature was valuable and that it should be restored in some form. We liked it and it was a huge time-saver.
Respectfully, Tim, if we think that is the decision how we would like the feature to work or in a similar manner, then LT should find a technical solution that doesn't cause a disaster in the database. That's just MHO. I appreciate that there are lots of changes on the list, but I also think that those that affect core cataloging functionality are priority. We are probably in violent agreement, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

109 !!
Just moved about 70 titles from one belonging to my wife. They were there because I hit the 200 celing and expected that the moving would be easy. It wasn't.

As you say I always got "error 192" except a couple of "error 196's" for some reason. My work around was just to click on Amazon and then search. Worked every time. Just an extra click for each entry. Worked with ISBN and also Title, Author when there was no ISBN in the entry. I think Tim said it would not work on hand entry but seemed to do it on mine. If the books had not been boxed for moving, I'm sure it would have been quicker just to re-enter as before.

For Tim: I run Win Me on both files and Internet Exploder on both computers.

Message 108 said:

"But forcing people to manually enter the same data
once more is much more error prone then let them
copy already entered data which may contain errors
but might get corrected by the person doing the copying."

I hadn't thought of this, but it makes sense to me.

Ditto 108 and 112. I just went through this dance, on a rare book (that only few people have since it is a book about a family member). My brother added it manually, and then I had to add it manually, too. I went through all sorts of contortions to get the two to combine, and I cannot think that having potentially 400,000 people add stuff manually doesn't create just as much potential for junk and multiple copies of junk in the database that someone will have to reconcile at some point.

Add my voice to the chorus of boos and hisses. I only ever added books from someone else's library when I couldn't find them in LT's source libraries -- so the "improvement" has defeated the entire purpose of the feature for me!

Amen, 114!

And, 111: I tried your suggestion. But, the items I want to move are periodicals - the History of the Second World War (Cavendish) in 96 parts. The LOC does not have them listed. When I tried to find them from Amazon, the titles were not entered there in like fashion from one to another. I'm OCD enough to want all the titles to flow the same way. So, if I did bring them in from Amazon, I'd have to fix most every one of the 96 titles, then copy & paste from the summary, comments & tag fields for each of those entries. That's just too much of a headache for me to contemplate right now.

If I'd known this was ahead, LT would have received my 2nd lifetime membership much sooner, so I could have avoided hitting this wall.

I have a suggestion that might solve this simply. Why not add Librarything to the source where we can add books?

That is apparently exactly what Tim doesn't want to do.

Why not ask the following question when someone wants to use the plus sign to add books?

"Do you want to add a specific edition of this book? Yes/No"

No would just add the most common edition.
Yes would allow people to examine all the editions and then choose the one they like best.

#118 - this seems to make sense.

I've just read the whole thread from start to finish. One thing I didn't see mentioned is that what really happens when you add a book is not described anywhere. (Or maybe I have just missed it somehow. If so, please enlighten me.) Let me explain with an example: I want to add an encyclopedia to my library. I search for it and finds it in some source say bibliotek.dk. I add it but finds out that this record is the whole encyclopedia and
I want the individual volumes listed in my library, so I use the browsers back function to go back to
the search result and adds it again. Repeat say 5 times for a 6-volume encyclopedia. I then uses the
Pencil-Edit on the addbooks page to edit the 6 volumes one by one and put in ISBN numbers for each volume and edit the title to reflect the volumes content. When I press Save for the last time, I believe that I have entered the volumes exactly as I want them to be.
Reading the thread above makes me think that I might have created one of Tim's monster records instead ?
Also as #88 says, much of the garbage in titles and authors and whatnot comes from Amazon. I have a hunch that when I add a book for the first time in LT, i.e. it is not in LT before, it becomes the work record and so any silliness in the author or title fields is recorded in the works and causes weirdnesses later on ?
Maybe some of this has been fixed, since my author cloud looks much better these days than a month or two ago ?

Hmm, I don't know if any of this made sense. I'd like to see an explanation of what really goes on when one of us finds a book from any source and press Add. Ideally I'd like to get the basic record from say amazon into an edit page and when I was satisfied with the result after a bit of editing I'd press ReallyAdd and only then should any of this be merged into the works. I think what happens now is that the Amazon garbage goes into the works database immediately when we press Add. Tim ? Could you point me to the FAQ or TFM or clearify some of this ?

Tim, I've done those bad things you mentioned - sorry. Like choosing any old title to get the author and changing the title later. I'm just intuitive that way. I will stop it forthwith. Love this place to much to mess it up. huni

I've said this before: I think it would be great if it took you to the Edit page immediately after adding a book.
Now I'll add: It would be even better if it didn't actually add the book until you clicked Save on the edit page.

#120: "I'd like to see an explanation of what really goes on ..."

I think that Tim will take the view that he gives us some pedals and a steering wheel, but what goes on under the bonnet shouldn't concern us. Certainly he has the right to completely change the database design and programming, provided it goes on looking much the same to us users.

Against this is the fact that when we interact with LT, we build in our heads models of how it seems to work - that's just the way people are. The better our models are, the more we will gain from LT and the less harm we are likely to do.

Also some of the changes are good in the sense that they describe the books better but bad from a workflow point of view. For almost all of my books I want the summary to reflect other authors too. Say The Ganymede Takeover by Philip K. Dick, Ray Nelson (1980) . For the "old" books I can enter this as Ray Nelson in the Other Authors field and copy/paste it into summary. For the "new" books I'll have to enter this as Nelson, Ray and press and select the Role of author for him and will probably type in the Ray part of his name into summary and copy/paste Nelson. Books with more authors than two are quite a pain. I'm impressed that someone ran into the 64-author limit. Anyway all this is just cumbersome, but for the "new" books the roles don't show up in the tab export and this makes me worry that they may be forgotten elsewhere too.

>122 r.orrison: That would drive me mad. I enter my books in one batch, then go back and fix - if I have more than 10 books or so to enter (more than one page on the Add Books page) I usually tag the ones that are obviously wrong 'fix'. I can also work through them with a reverse sort on Date Entered (and do). But if _every_single_book_ I had to deal with the Edit page as well it would slow my entering by half at least. Too many extra clicks!

I agree with 125.

Plus I would imagine that a huge number of books (particularly by new users) are added via the batch import facility.

I do it the other way... If I have lots to enter, I put a pile at one side of me, add one, edit it while I've got the book in front of me, scan and upload the cover if necessary, then put it on a pile on the other side when it's correct (sometimes I skip the cover bit and tag that). Lather, rinse, repeat.

Going directly to the edit page would make it a bit easier for me, but what I really want is to get the people that apparently never go to the edit page, and possibly don't even know it exists. How can a person intentionally enter a book like this: A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells: Being an Illustrated Account of a Study and Exploration of the Mountains in the? That's one of a series of seven guide books, only the title was truncated before the bit that says which book it is, and the person that entered it either didn't notice or didn't know that they could edit the title (or just didn't care, which I find too sad to consider).

Perhaps an option on the profile for power users, to not edit books after adding?

Never mind, I don't think it's going to happen anyway.

It would be nice if LT didn't truncate the title or at least indicated that the title couldn't be longer than 120 characters. In the old days before the new add page the title field had a max length enforced but now it lets you enter a long title and then silently throws away whatever i. decided was too long. Not a charming feature, IMHO.

So I think LT is to blame for the truncated title.

Regarding the Lakeland Fells series, I think the Worldcat entry for these volumes are considerably confusing. As you burrow down, you find that there are truncations there, as well as seemingly giving the same ISBN to multiple voulmes in the series. The rest of the title inlcudes the words "Lake District" and then which of the Fells the volume cover (i.e. Northern Fells). So even 130-140 characters wouldn't be enough. Perhaps putting tags in would help identify the volume. One could add all the volumes to ones library and get the work closer to reality even if one doesn't actually own it. I did this sort of thing with a John Steinbeck book that had four novels in it -- I put in tags with the names of the four novels included.

So has Add Books changed again? I've tried the green plus a couple times tonight and gone to the Add Books search page with a search for the title - but then it automatically picks something. Once it worked - correct edition - twice it failed (once because amazon.com didn't have the edition, once because it had three editions and the top one was wrong). If I have to do a search, the ISBN is a lot better way to do it! (and all three of the books had ISBNs - the successful one just came out and had only one edition). It's more work to go in and change the data - particularly, change the ISBN when I don't have the book handy so don't know what the correct one is. (and that's when I'm most likely to use the green plus - when I don't have the book physically here.)

If it's doing a title search, I'd rather it listed what was available and let me click the right one (what happens when I enter a title manually on that page).

I've read the thread from start to finish - let's put another slant on this - what I call a usability common sense slant. I collect folio - I look for

A Short History of Time
by Leofranc Holford-Strevens

I find it - someone else has got it - its obviously the book I want - look - theres a folio cover!- and on the screen there's a big green button that says 'Add to your library'. Except that isn't what it does at all - it sends me on a useless search of libraries that can't find it.

Now if I'm on my banking site and I see a big green button that says 'show me my balance' and instead it does something completely different wouldn't that be a bit strange ?- and yes I know all the arguments above about the complex data and all that - but when I see a big green button that says something I want the big green button to do it rather than something else.

Read message 114 for another bit of common sense

Im off to the pub.

I know it is a little late, but like everyone else here I simply wanted to state my profound dislike of the way 'Add to your library' has been changed.

I can no longer copy what others have in their library without starting over with Search.

Yes, I know why. I still hate it. All the button does is plug the title into a search box, like a fancy cut-and-paste.

If I click the 'Add to your library' button, it is because I see the exact edition I want to add. If I wanted to search for my exact copy, I'd use Search immediately.

It is so frustrating to see the precise edition I want to add staring me in the face, but have no way to add it without a mountain of work, particularly since it use to take only a single click.

The "feature" is useless now.

I must add my voice to those who want a functional 'Add to your library' button.

I can't say I want it put back 'the way it was before', because - certainly the last time I tried - that didn't work either. Which is to say, I had a particular edition I couldn't find on any of the sources, but found someone on LT who had already manually entered it. So I tried to copy their entry by clicking 'Add to my library' but all it did was give me to top entry from all the combined works instead.

So I throw myself behind all those who want simply to be able to 'copy' a manually entered book without having to do it themselves.

The argument that people shouldn't be allowed to do so because it can put bad data into the system is nonsense to me. If that's the case, why is everyone allowed to combine/separate and edit the common knowledge?

If Tim is that worried about books added in that way having their details mangled, perhaps a solution would be to make the important fields (title/author/ISBN) not editable? Those who want that particular edition won't be bothered by that, and it would dissuade those who would break things.

Nicely put HoldenCarver: message 133 quote....

'The argument that people shouldn't be allowed to do so because it can put bad data into the system is nonsense to me. If that's the case, why is everyone allowed to combine/separate and edit the common knowledge?'

Another common sense point - who fancies starting a group to get some sanity back to this one? Tim please think again as Im worried that this is putting newbies off LT......

133:
If Tim is that worried about books added in that way having their details mangled, perhaps a solution would be to make the important fields (title/author/ISBN) not editable? Those who want that particular edition won't be bothered by that, and it would dissuade those who would break things.


Gah no!! I would totally be bothered by that, since I can often find the right edition only on Amazon but want to change the title to sentence case, fix typos, fix problems with the author name, etc etc. If I couldn't edit all the fields that would totally turn us into Shelfari or something.

So far as I can see in this thread, all of two users approve of this change, the rest dislike it, usually very much.

135:
Sorry if I wasn't entirely clear, but in the text you quote I was speaking exclusively about books that are added from pressing the 'Add to your library' button when you want to add *that specific work* to your library, for when you can't find the book on Amazon or any other sources and want to copy someone else's manual entry.

137: Oh okay. The thing about this is that Tim's concern as I understand it is that the data you would be copying is itself bad, because other users have so much "monster" data that they have created from editing their own entries. That is, the problem is not so much with copying actual manual entries but with copying previously edited non-manual entries. E.g.: User X adds five copies of the same book A from some source, and then edits four of the copies so that a single import record becomes five different books A, B, C, D, and E. You want to add X's copy of D, because you can't find it in any source. But you end up importing a record that has the vestiges of A in the underlying data but appears to be D.

138: Yes, but the same problem exists with Amazon data accuracy (or lack thereof...) So I don't see how this is any different. :)

139: I'm not saying I think it's a problem, just that the solution in 133 isn't a solution to the problem that Tim is concerned about. As far as I can tell, much more radical changes to the site would be required to actually avoid all bad data--like, say, not allowing anyone to enter any data whatsoever. ;)

140: Sounds like a good April Fool's joke. ;)

I don't seem to be doing the best job of explaining myself. I'll try again. Third time lucky?

What I was thinking of was something like this:

1. User finds a book someone else has and clicks on the 'Add to library button'.

2. If the book has been manually added, it adds exactly the same entry to their catalogue, and makes it so that the user can't edit the fields Tim is worried about.

3. If the book was added through an external source (Amazon, etc.) it does whatever Tim thinks best, which at the moment would appear to be search for it on external sources and present the user with a list of results.

I'm not, at this point, too fussed at all about what Tim chooses to do in the latter event. My main - only, really - concern is that I, and others, who have books which we'd like to add to our libraries without having to reinvent the wheel every time have a way of doing so, so that's what I was addressing. I'm sorry if I wasn't entirely clear in that.

The longer this goes on, the more it bothers me. I've never even used the "add to your catalogue" button, but the whole concept of disabling a feature because users are too incompetent to be trusted with it is disturbing.

The "solution" seems like extreme overkill. It's one thing to say that the work pages don't always have good data (blame amazon, not the users) and so change the way the button functions on the work page. But why disable it in the catalogue too? There it's just a matter of two users, not of some mess of aggregate data, and claiming that user data is too terrible to be used at all is pretty insulting.

Also, making an irritating change and then saying that you're too busy to deal with it anymore seems like bad policy. As I said two weeks ago, you shouldn't introduce an unsatisfactory "solution" unless you're prepared to keep working on it until it's satisfactory.

Finally, I'd like to reiterate that I don't even use this feature. I can't imagine what the people who do are feeling.

142: In response to your (2): in that situation, however, there is no danger even if you can edit the fields. If a book was originally manual entry, it's not associated with a MARC record or any data you can't immediately see in the edit fields, therefore re-editing the data wouldn't muck things up.

143: the whole concept of disabling a feature because users are too incompetent to be trusted with it is disturbing.

Not only that, but if we are going to go along those lines there are a lot of other features that should be disabled. All forms of combining at the top of that list. Posting new messages to Recommended Site Improvements next in line.

claiming that user data is too terrible to be used at all is pretty insulting.

On the other hand, a huge amount of user data really is terrible. I've always been a fan of the idea some people have of segregating crap data in some bin on author pages so the user's catalogue won't be affected but their junk won't screw up the rest of the site. If we could do this we could potentially even use LT as a real add books source.