New feature: BookCrossing ID
Update: I changed something so you can now use Universal Import to import BookCrossing books more easily. See the BookCrossing forum.
Quite a few LibraryThing users are also users of the innovative and long-running site BookCrossing. As the site puts it:
I've added the BCID to the edit screen (the pencil,
). And you can add the field to your catalog screen (use the "change fields" feature). In your catalog you can click on the BCID to go to the journaling page. Needless to say, it only shows the secret part when you're looking at your own catalog.
So that's what it does now. I'm all ears. I don't use BookCrossing, so I don't know what other features would be helpful. Oh, and does anyone want to post about it there. I feel a little chintzy doing it myself. :)
Note: If you see the BCID you'll also bought, started and read dates. I'm still adding support for this, but feel free to leave comments about how you want it to work or what data should be presented.
Quite a few LibraryThing users are also users of the innovative and long-running site BookCrossing. As the site puts it:"BookCrossing lets you share your books with the world, and track their individual journeys forever more. Our members have registered 2,657,603 books so far, and a good number of these are "in the wild" at any one time."To make the system work, people give their books a "BookCrossing ID" (BCID), composed of three digits, a dash and nine digits. The first digits are secret—available only to people with their hands on the book. You need this part to log where the book has gone and make journal entries for it. The second set are public. Some BookCrossers enter all their books, even if they haven't given them away.
I've added the BCID to the edit screen (the pencil,
). And you can add the field to your catalog screen (use the "change fields" feature). In your catalog you can click on the BCID to go to the journaling page. Needless to say, it only shows the secret part when you're looking at your own catalog.So that's what it does now. I'm all ears. I don't use BookCrossing, so I don't know what other features would be helpful. Oh, and does anyone want to post about it there. I feel a little chintzy doing it myself. :)
Note: If you see the BCID you'll also bought, started and read dates. I'm still adding support for this, but feel free to leave comments about how you want it to work or what data should be presented.
posted by Tim at 10:50 PM
16 Comments:
It seems like the introduction of this new feature added another bug. Every book record I've edited today (not added, and edited using the pencil link) is showing a duplicate record when I look at my library by clicking on my tags.
Oh, and does anyone want to post about it there. I feel a little chintzy doing it myself. :)
All taken care of: Use LibraryThing.com?
Bunnygirl. No, it's not a related bug, it's more of a back-from-the-deal bug. I'm going to go after it again with the big stake.
Dear Tim,
Re: bought, started, finished dates...
I think I love you.
If you add a tickybox for 'bought second-hand' I will love you even more. If that's possible.
Big smooches,
Anonymous because it's embarrassing how genuinely pleased I am about this.
I love the new dates! I fully admit that most of mine will be 'vague', but it's a great thing. It would be nice to have something akin to Flickr's photostream, allowing you to see what books were bought around the same time (ie, what were you interested in the summer of 2004?) Difficult, I suspect :)
I also support the 'bought-second hand' because it's a neat concept. I've been noting it in comments thus far.
I like having the "date bought", but (not that you haven't enough on your plate) how about a field for where a book was bought? Not just a tick for "new" or "used", but where I can type in "O'Gara & Wilson's", "Newberry Library Book Sale", etc.
Can't you just put that in the all-inclusive comment section?
If you add a tickybox for 'bought second-hand' I will love you even more. If that's possible.
Ain't that the truth! It's hard to love Tim more than we already do. Someone should start up a Tim Spalding fan club. Really.
Incidentally, for me, "bought second-hand" would simply be another opportunity to use the superb tagging feature. (Or maybe "bought first-hand" would, actually, since most of my books were bought used to start with ;-)
If it were possible to sort by comments that would be more useful. (If it already is, well, I can't get it to work in any view.)
Sorry about that, Tim. Thanks for staking it. I just committed the fallacy of noticing a new thing at the same time the bug started flying around my head again.
I do like the new date feature, and I especially like the fact that it understands the yyyy-mm-dd format.
Actually, it understands almost any format. You can say Monday, June 23, 1976 if you want. Since it works so well with minimum fuss you can be sure I didn't write it :)
The "duplicates" problem has resurfaced (see comments from your blog post on 12/28 for more info). This time it is my entry for Sebastian De Grazia's Machiavelli in Hell that is having issues, but only under the tag "renaissance." I tried deleting the book and reentering it, but the duplication occured again. Is there something I'm doing weird? FYI, previously "fixed" dupes are still OK.
Thanks. I think I licked it. I fixed them in your catalog and will do it to the others tonight.
Tim
People seem to be wanting separate entry fields for a lot of things that can perfectly well go in the comments or tags.
Tags, perhaps. Comments, no. At least you can search or sort by tags. You can't with comments.
I can add sorting by comments. It seems strange to me, but I'll do it.
I've sometimes thought about having "fields" as well as tags. They would work in a similar way but you could give them a value. Of course they may well be overused - and what would the implications be.
As for the extra fields I badly need (not just want):
*English title
*Native author
*Native title
*Original title
*Romanized title
*Romanized author
*Translator
Currently I put all these in the comments field. Which is sadly not searchable.
As for sorting by tags, I just don't get it. Using power edit used to shuffle all my tags, now it appends, which is good but doesn't really make for any kind of useful tag order. And since most people would have more than one tag per book it's hard to see what sorting by tag means - at least in its current alphabetical manner. Maybe some groovy advanced way is possible that does make sense...
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