Finding Book Info in Australia

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OzPolly
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Joined: Sat Oct 09, 2010 2:20 pm

Finding Book Info in Australia

Post by OzPolly »

No idea how many Bookpedia users there are in AU. I have had a fair bit of trouble with scanning barcodes. The returns are usually for overseas editions, so I am left either correcting almost everything or doing a total manual entry. Same for a title search. My older books simply fail to appear in Google searches.

I've found the best way around the issues is for me to search images and find the book that way. I also often get a better result for the oddities and the well and truly out of print books by image searching on the author's name, rather than the title. If I can see an image that matches the cover of the edition I have, I can then find the site with info to copy and paste, dodging a lot of typing (and also getting the replacement value).

Despite the laborious entry for AU titles I still like the system because I can see the covers and know the size of a book, making it much easier to find it on the shelf. With some of my oldest books, I have to get really basic and photograph the cover myself.

Hope the Aussie booksellers buy into the system one day, but in the mean time I hope this helps someone.

Cheers,
Polly
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