Add Books results are incomplete, never match existing books

When adding books today the search (using Amazon or any other provider) never returns good answers. If you are lucky you get an alternate language, but you then always have to manually merge with the real work.

Huh. I've tried repeating a few of the searches (dr stone, jujutsu kaisen, gwenpool) at Amazon itself and the results there are also pretty poor. Feel free to close, looks like Amazon search is messed up in general.

Or I've discovered an entire set of books that Amazon isn't aware of, which seems pretty unlikely.

Not all publishers work with Amazon. (Amazon often demands big price reductions.) Nor is Amazon really interested in carrying all books from around the world. They are interested in making money.

If you enter an edition that isn't already in the work, you will have to combine it. There is no way around that. Often popular works that are several months old will already have a lot of variants combined in, but if you are adding books that aren't popular, combining is what you have to do.

If you use Amazon you also have to be prepared to correct badly entered titles and authors.

>4 MarthaJeanne: If you use Amazon you also have to be prepared to correct badly entered titles and authors.

That's true for all sources in my experience.

>1 damnnicks: LT's site search has been tweaked quite a bit in this last week. Maybe that's created a problem with the search for adding books. I'm going to try adding a batch soon.

Are there any sources that return consistently better results than Amazon? I'd switch in a heartbeat for a better experience...

(I just remembered that you could add more source options to the list!)

It really depends what you are entering. I like to start with Overcat, because the library source data tends to be better than Amazon and results will usually match existing works. However, brand new books are usually in Amazon before libraries.

For non-English works, matching your source to the place of publication is likely to give better results than English language sources.

For whatever this info is worth-- out of nine of my books just now, seven were found in an LT Add Books search of Amazon.com without any unusual problems, one ebook that is available on the Kindle Store showed up in the LT results only as an audiobook, and one new ebook doesn't appear to be on Amazon.com. All results were in English. My editions automatically merged with existing works.

In my experience, trying to add by searching a book by ISBN generally works better than trying by title. Of course not all books have an ISBN though. Amazon is useful for very recent publications, but mostly useless for books that are no longer in print (barring the occasional third party selling through Amazon). So, it really also depends on what you're trying to catalogue.

ETA: If you do try by ISBN skip the dashes. (Those tend to throw search off).

The third party data tends to be really bad.

>10 MarthaJeanne: As a general "rule", I agree. I usually enter books that are out of print, and that I can't find through Overcat, manually. It's faster than searching every possible source.

If it's not on Amazon or in a reliable source near the publisher, then manual entry is faster than picking through Overcat for a decent record that doesn't need too many edits (additions, corrections, or write-overs). I don't understand the confidence in the quality of public library records, because in my observation, it's unwarranted. That's been for out-of-print and new-but-not-very-popular works. I guess Overcat is a better source when the user's tastes in books are more similar to what many public libraries keep on hand (ensuring someone has entered a clean record).

>12 aspirit: I usually have to clean up any imported entry anyway. So, yeah, fair enough.

>12 aspirit: Where do you think the Overcat records came from?

Overcat ... includes records from over 700 library systems worldwide. The records have been obtained from public archives and from Z39.50 searches done by LibraryThing members.
https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/Overcat

Again some of this is age. Many public and school libraries don't catalogue themselves, but buy in the information. They have been doing this for decades. This won't be the case for preISBN copies.

For books over 50 years old, searching for a source is probably more work than manual entry. (Which isn't really that much work. I've done it over a thousand times. Mostly because we didn't used to have Austrian sources.)

>14 lesmel: Your quote seems to be confirming that Overcat pulls from public libraries, which we all knew. Didn't we? Where did you think the records come from?

edit: corrected the message touchstone

aspirit (#16):

Overcat pulls from all successful library searches. This includes academic and national library systems, not just public libraries. This is important in context because, say, the LoC has much better data than, say, Smalltown Public Library.

>17 lorax: Again, I disagree. The LOC often has worse data unless its catalog matches what you have and you'd prefer to edit a record to correct errors than to do a manual entry.

We also seem to have a different range to our definition of "public library", by the way.

Well, any source will only have good data if it matches what you have, but I find that the LoC when it matches is far more complete than Smalltown Public Library when it matches.

Anywhere I've lived, a "public library" is one where anyone residing in the geographical area can, free of charge, obtain a library card which will allow one to check out books and other materials. Academic libraries where I have lived, or the LOC here, do not have those characteristics. This is only in the US.

If you want us to comment, I need some examples of what's not found.

On the topic of LT search, add books does not use LibraryThing's site search functionality. It uses Amazon, library searches and OverCat, which is a LibraryThing index of library data, but one that is separate from site search.