Request to fix the Amazon Japan "ISBN bug"

Konbanwa mina-san ... good evening everybody!

The question of the Amazon Japan "ISBN bug" is being raised (again) on the Recommend Site Improvements group:

http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?newpost=1&topic=998#lastmsg

As most of you know, this concerns the fact that when you add a book from a search via Amazon Japan, the ISBN isn't added to the ISBN field... and as a consequence, the cover image isn't carried over, either. It is necessarily to manually add each ISBN if you wish to have the cover in your library (or to have the ISBN itself, for that matter).

If you are so moved, please head on over and add your voice to the thread.

As I noted in my own recent posting... we know it's not realistic to expect to be told that the LT staff has our pet fix at the top of their To Do list. BUT, the courtesy of an answer to everyone's (very patient) inquiries on this topic would certainly be appreciated. It would ease everyone's frustration to know that the request has been noted, and to hear at least whether the fix is actually on the list at all.

(There. I can't say it any more nicely than that!)

chamekke, a lonely gadfly who still loves LT

P.S. It might not hurt also to say Thank You for the Unicode fix. I gather it took a huge effort. Sure, the restored data wasn't 100%, but it wasn't for their lack of trying!

Sorry but...

I have to say I'm not that concerned about not having covers displayed in my library. Some of my non-Japanese books don't display covers either even though they have ISBNs.

Are there any other benefits to having the ISBN?

Well if you don't have the ISBN listed it'll just lump it together with a bunch of other books that don't have ISBNs. Then it's hard to tell exactly what people own.

One benefit to having an ISBN is that it's an unambiguous identifier that helps immeasurably in searching - whether on LT itself, Amazon Japan, or elsewhere on the Web.

Let's say you're browsing someone's collection of Japanese books and you read their comments on a book that sounds appealing. "Ooh!" you think, "I'd love to buy a copy of this little gem." You look it up on Amazon Japan, but behold - when you search on the title as inputted in LibraryThing, it doesn't come up with any results. (And this happens quite often.)

If that person included the ISBN, however, all you do is copy and paste it into the Search field. Searching only on ISBN works beautifully on Amazon Japan, since in most cases their books' URLs are ISBN-based.

In short, if you want to identify/locate a book, the ISBN is the best single piece of data for doing that.

Another benefit to having an ISBN is that it's less subject to corruption. If we ever experience Japanese-character corruption again (and who knows, maybe it's still possible), the ISBN is very helpful in re-inputting the information. There have been at least 3 rounds of character corruption over the past year, affecting title and author name both. In each case, the (manually inputted) ISBN information was spared. With this data in hand, it was a relatively easy task - if tedious - to locate each book's listing and re-enter the information.

So is not having an ISBN the reason why when I just added a Ryu Murakami book it attached itself to Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore in traditional Chinese which seems to attract all my Haruki books too)? That did seem a little bizarre. I'd have thought if the authors were clearly defined as separate this wouldn't happen.

Oh, I separated it and everything so you won't be able to see it there now.

Tim, bless him, has just fixed the Amazon Japan ISBN/cover bug.

Those who wish to know more can read about it in this thread:
http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=998#28010

In the meantime, I'm one super-delighted pup! All hail the wonderful LibraryThing team!!!