CLZ Books 9 Feature Hilite: better “ISBN not found” handling

Books CLZ Books Mobile
1

This is the 3rd and last “CLZ Books 9 Feature Hilite”, all about dealing with ISBNs that are not found in CLZ Core.

But first, if you missed an earlier feature hilite, you can still read them here on Club CLZ:

About adding books by ISBN

First, a bit of background about ISBN barcodes and adding books to your app by scanning their ISBN barcodes:

At CLZ, we run our own online book database, which on the backend is fed to multiple 3rd party book data sources, like ISBNdb.com, Loc.org, and many regional library sites. Currently, the system holds and recognizes over 41 million ISBNs. On average, our users are getting a 97% success rate on their ISBN searches.

That is a great score of course, but still… that missing 3% does mean that some users will, once in a while, scan an ISBN barcode that is not found in our Core (yet). For example, for rare books or recent releases.

Now THAT is where the “ISBN not found” screen comes into play (previously called “Unrecogized ISBN”).

New in v9: a complete re-design of the “ISBN not found” screen

When you scan (or enter) an ISBN that in not found in our CLZ Core online book database (yet), you are presented with the “ISBN not found” screen. This screens serves two purposes:

  1. It helps you add the book to your database anyway
  2. And… it instantly adds the ISBN and its book details to Core!

For version 9, we did a complete re-design from scratch of the “ISBN not found” screens, to:

  • make it clearer and easier to use
  • let you select the correct cover image from a Google Images search!

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In any case, properly using this “ISBN not found” screen is essential for improving the ISBN coverage of our Core online book database. So if you run into an ISBN that is not found, please take a bit of time to carefully fill in the Author, Title, Publisher and Year field, and select the correct cover image from the results.

That way, the first fellow user who searches for the same ISBN will get a result, with nice details too!

2

Are there any plans to add an option to search by ASIN? This would be very helpful when buying books from Amazon, especially for Kindle.

3

We would love to offer that, but Amazon is quite strict in not allowing apps like ours to use their API. :frowning:

We got bitten by that in the past, in a quite dramatic way, so I am hesitant to try again.

4

I was just curious because Library Thing has that feature. It’s about the only thing it has on CLZ Books, and I have no desire to switch, so I thought I’d ask. :slight_smile:

5

Great improvement, thanks for providing this.
Just a comment in the line above the screenshot I think it should refer to book and not game.

6

fixed! :slight_smile: