Coming up soon, yet another huge update for your CLZ Books app! This is something we have been working on for many months. And now we are finally so close to release that I can disclose what is coming up:
New in CLZ Book 10.2: Automatic book values and retail prices!
With this new update, our CLZ Core online book database will provide book value/pricing information for used books, plus retail prices.
In more details, this is what will be new in version 10.2:
Get values for your books, based on average selling prices of the books on various online used book stores.
The old “Current Value” field will be renamed to “My Value” and will let you either OVERRIDE the automatically provided value, or just fill in a value for books that did not get an automatic value.
Get automatic retail prices in the Retail Price field (previously named “Cover Price”).
Use the new Update Values screen to regularly update your book entries with up-to-date Value and Retail Price information.
Optionally use the Retail Price as a “fallback value”, when an automatic Value is not available.
See Value statistics and totals in the Statistics screen
With close to 40 million books in our CLZ Core database, we will not be able to provide a value for all books in your collection. In particular, books without ISBN will not get values, as our value system is purely based on ISBN lookups.
Currently, our Core and Cloud statistics show that CLZ Books users will get a value for around 83% of their books, on average. Your mileage may vary, for example, if you own mostly mainstream US books with ISBN, your percentage may be closer to 90%. If you own mostly antique books, or only books in the Polish language, your coverage will probably be much lower.
The coverage of books with a value may slightly improve over time, as we are still gathering value information for less popular books.
Automatic values will be a premium feature, available for subscribers only
The “Automatic Values” feature will be the first “premium” online feature for CLZ Books. This means that it will only be available for users with an active paid subscription.
In particular, this means that this feature will not be available for users who are still using the app in “grandfathered” mode (as they purchased the app before it became a subscription app). Of course, grandfathered users who DO want access to this feature are welcome to get a paid CLZ Books subscription)
ETA ??
Coming up within a few weeks. I will send out a Sneak Preview email with more screenshots once we are closer to the final user interface.
VERY cool! We have an extra insurance rider for our book library (two academics in the home, and we are both bibliophiles). Having this tool will make our insurance agent very happy! Plus, it is both exciting and disheartening to see what we likely paid for all the books retail (wow!), what they are worth now (dang it!), and the total we spent (what were we thinking?!?).
The “Cover Price” field has been renamed to “Retail Price” and can be found in your Edit Book screen under the VALUE tab.
(and of course in your details screen of a book as well, indicated with a little “price tag” icon).
Looking at the value for small presses like Subterranean press or others it doesn’t seem to have much basis in reality. Where is the info coming from?
Sure
Example without an ISBN is Subterranean Press’ edition of the way home by peter s beagle. It’s a signed limited edition of 400 copies that retailed for $195 but value is loading as $22.75
An example with an ISBN is 9781596069671 which is “edited by” by Ellen Datlow, signed limited edition of 250 copies and a retail of $125 value shows as $6.99. Even if you allow for them not using a different isbn for the limited vs the trade which is true in some cases it still looks off. But the ones without isbns which are only limiteds are way off even the lowest sale price. Another example of that is their edition of Master of Djinn by P. Djeli Clark which shows a value of $12.15 retailed for $175 and still stays pretty close to that
Strangely, the cover price is on the cover and can be decades old. The book can have several cover prices, as there are different issues. The retail price is what it costs to purchase “Today” and can vary depending on where it is purchased. These are two completely different animals. So, in reality there is no cover price anymore. The “My Value” field is just an arbitrary guess at what it is worth to the owner and has no basis in the cover, retail, or any other reality.
Is the “My Value” the price at which you would part with the book?
Does the price sold automatically take the book out of the “In Collection” field?
What is the grayed-out “Value” field?
thank you in advance
It’s just a field which allows you to overwrite whatever value you get from Core with whatever you like. You decide what you fill in there.
No, you have to change the collection status to sold to mark the book as sold. It will then show that sold price in statistics for instance.
In the Edit Screen, that is where you can see the value you got from Core. You can not change this field, but you can overwrite it by typing in something in the My Value field - which will then be used as Value.
What is the insurance company asking for? a file or just your database if necessary? Let me know how it goes. I know how it is with 11,000+ and not enough wall space. Those dollar numbers add up.
Hey Berne444, sorry for being away for a few weeks. When our insurance agent asked about any particular items of value or collections in our home, we talked about several. Of those, three rose to the surface of being worthy of adding a few extra dollars (I think in total it’s less than $100/year). Our books, our music, and our wine. There is a line item for jewelry, but not a separate rider. We were with MetLife/Farmers for many years but just transitioned to Hanover. The extra coverage just offers a bit of mind peace. We’ve never had to file a claim and never hope to, of course.
Regarding an accounting or listing of each title or bottle, that has not been necessary. When I told the agent we’ve got all of our wine in an online database and that we’re slowly working to get our books and music into CLZ, he was very pleased, however.
I am loving this feature.
Is there any particular info I can add to pre-13digitISBN book records to make it trigger this new valuation feature? For example I have this book recorded:
Title: Checkmate: Universe
Author: Kurt Mahr
SBN (which I have entered in the ISBN field): 441-66058
I understand there is an algorithm to convert the 8 digit SBN to a 13 digit ISBN, in many cases, if enough information is known, and in fact there is a copy of that same book in your core with a 13-digit ISBN, however it’s not the same ISBN as what I get by trying out the algorithm.
I’m afraid not, you need an ISBN-10 (which converts to 13 automatically), or ISBN13 to get the system to find a value. If you can get a regular ISBN for that book then a value can possibly be retrieved.
Otherwise you can always just edit a book and type in a value in the My Value field for it (if you can find an estimate for it online, or just make a guess yourself
Hello Alwin, It’s weekend, so time time for my book database
Just started the new BoC app on my iPad (OS 18.4.1). It converts/optimized the database. So far so good. Then I changed the settings of Region one and two to Germany and USA. Then I changed the setting of the currency to EUR. Well, it was EUR in the past…
The app asked, if the retail-price should be converted too. I missinterpreted the retail-price as the price you would have to pay for a used book from or I would get, if I would sell the book. But the cover price is the price of the cover. I entered them for years… Well, my fault.
Nevertheless: There seems to be a bug while changing the prices of my database (from USD to EUR). Message: “Error: Booknode is nil”
rem: “nil” is an atom in Lisp. I don’t know, if it is used in the App.
My main data is in desktop program. If something went wrong, I will upload the data again.
Sorry AJ, being late. Well, after this weekend, I had a look at the iPad and the Error popup vanished. Since there is no download sync to my desktop, I’m eased a little bit.
But I don’t know, if there are any changes on the iPad. How can I verify, what the database changes have been done?
Groeten
