Forum

I am very happy you added the possibility to import books. However, I cannot get it to work.

I have tried to add English and American books, one or two at the time, in Firefox and Explorer. And I always get the same error page:

Error! Something's Gone Wrong...

We're Sorry. Your page has not loaded or your search has taken longer to return than is normal.
Please try loading the page again.

If the problem persists, please contact us and we will assist you as soon as we can.

I have also checked, the books have not been added to my bookshelf, or to the EYB library.

Sorry there was a bug when this feature went live which was not there when we were testing it.  Anyway, it is now fixed so it should work if you try it again.  If you are planning on importing your books from your LibraryThing catalog then you should wait until next week when we will have increased the number of cookbooks in the EYB Library to over 100,000 - many more international and out-of-print books than we currently list.

OK then!

Inspired by the message on the Community page, I just spent the whole morning cataloguing all the rest of my (now 50) cookery books into LibraryThing - even those I never use. I also rediscovered quite a few books I'd forgotten about that look as though they ought to be useful. Well when you're wondering what to cook it's too easy to overlook those skinny books that don't have a spine title to attract attention?

Although I can see how easy it is to get the records out of LibraryThing, I'm trying to take the advice to wait until after the BIG LOAD to drop it all into EYB and see what happens to it.

The message said it'd be next week. Oh crikey can I wait that long? And WHEN next week?

We are running tests now on the import - it's a lot of data, over 144,000 different ISBNs with covers, descriptions, etc.  I am hopeful it will be up this weekend but knowing how things can go wrong it's safer to say early next week. 

The data import function works with imports of data from other sources but also you can do the ISBN entry directly into EYB.  So you don't have to enter your books in LT or GR first - if you prefer you can just list the ISBNs in the EYB data import box. 

For anyone who has a lot of cookbooks to enter and doesn't have them listed anywhere, a great investment would be a barcode scanner.  I just bought an Adesso scanner from amazon which was recommended by GoodReads.  It takes seconds to scan each barcode - the only thing that takes time is carrying the books from your bookshelves to the computer and back again.

Thanks Jane,

I understand how these processes can take longer than you'd like. I took the LibraryThing route as I'm sure I have quite a few cookery books that won't be in your new database, in fact I have a couple of obscure Australian publications unknown even to the National Library. I'm hoping that this way the bibliographic records output by LibraryThing will load to EYB if there's no match there, as implied by the term "import"? Is this not the case? 

Anyway it was fun to discover that so many of my cookery books are owned by others in LibraryThing. I should get around to cataloguing all my other books there as well.