Recalculating book details from an ISBN

Hello,

I managed to get a list of all the books I borrowed from the library the past 10 years. This list contained only authors and titles (no ISBN).
I had no problem importing everything into LT, and most of the books were properly matched to existing works.
However, all the interesting book details (languages, physical description incl. number of pages, etc.) are empty — and I understand why!

But even if I fill the proper ISBNs now, the details remain empty.
Is there a way to recalculate (re-fetch?) all the book details from the ISBN I entered?
What is the best way to "move" a book from an unknown ISBN to a specific one?

Regards,

--
TheReadingReindeer

At this time, there is no way to gather in the proper details if you didn't get them in the outset. You'd need to manually edit each book to add them.
The only way to "move" a book to the proper ISBN is to enter it. It won't change works.

>2 gilroy: Thanks for your reply.

So I guess the only way to get the correct books details now would be to:
1. Export all my collections (as Excel, for example)
2. Delete all books from all collections in LT
3. Import the books again (from the Excel file)

Would this work?

>3 TheReadingReindeer: Yes and no. If you find the proper ISBN and put that in the import file, it will then only bring in details from the source and won't acknowledge any other details you've made. That being said, you would still have to modify the import file to match the LT import requirements EXACTLY. So you'd lose any reviews, tags, and edits you've already done.

You could import those isbn items and then look at your duplicates to move reviews, etc. to the copy you want to keep and then delete the generic copy.

The CSV import (there is no excel import) will not import physical descriptions or page numbers directly.

It's not the lack of an ISBN that caused you not to get those book details because those details come from the source no matter what you used to search for that book within that source. If your source was Amazon then you will never get those details whether you searched using an ISBN or not.

>5 2wonderY: Yes, I was thinking about something like that.

>6 lorax: Do you mean that even if I create a CSV file with only ISBN, RATING, TAGS and DATE READ, the universal importer would not try to import the book properties from the ISBN (even it a match exist in one of the import sources)?
I tried now with the LT sample CSV file, and it seemed to fill all the physical details from the ISBN during import.

>7 jjwilson61: I originally imported all my books using the universal importer. The only that was in the CSV file at this point was TITLE, AUTHOR and DATE READ. I was not surprised that no physical details were imported, since I reasoned the system could not "guess" which physical edition I had without the ISBN.
I was hoping that importing again with the ISBN in the CSV file would work.

I would suggest trying a small number of books first to see what happens.

The results will also depend on the source you chose.

>8 TheReadingReindeer: LT only imports books. If you import from the Add Book page and there are multiple books that match you can choose one, but if you use the importer it will just pick one.

TheReadingReindeer (#8):

Do you mean that even if I create a CSV file with only ISBN, RATING, TAGS and DATE READ, the universal importer would not try to import the book properties from the ISBN (even it a match exist in one of the import sources).

No, sorry, I meant that it will do exactly that - attempt to import the physical from the source, based on the ISBN. It will not import them from the CSV itself.

Thanks for the help and suggestions, everyone.
I re-imported all my books and everything went as expected.

In case somebody else wants to try it, here is the recipe I used:
- Exported all my "library" books from LT as Excel; The Excel file contained everything I had i LT (ISBNs, ratings, dates read and much more)
- Downloaded the Sample Import file (LibraryThingSample.csv) from the LT Import page
- Copied only the "ISBNs", "ratings" and "dates read" from the Excel (exported) file, and pasted them into the sample csv file
- Had to tweak the CSV a bit: removed the \\ around the ISBNs and inserted "" around the dates
- Did a few tests from the "Add books" page with some random ISBNs, to see which sources were better for my books
- Imported the CSV into a new collection from the LT import page. I chose "Import duplicates again" (since they were all duplicates), and used the sources tested in the previous step
- Had to wait some time for the import.
- All the imported books were in the new collection
- Had to manually fix some titles and add privates notes
- Deleted all the books in the "original" library collection

The result: around 300 of my original library books had no "physical descriptions" (number of pages, etc.), and were missing the language property.
After the import, 250 of those had both the physical descriptions and the language set properly. Less than 50 were still missing number of pages or language. I fixed those manually.

It took some time, but I'm happy with my collection now!