Do-it-yourself ISBN updates
I just added another round of bug fixes and upgrades to my book events page. First, I fixed another round of University Books format weirdness, where some phrases (“STANDING ROOM ONLY”) were interpreted as the author’s name. Second, I fixed some similar problems with Third Place books. Third, and most importantly, I added a way for users to enter the ISBN numbers of books that don’t currently have ISBNs. I have a script that tries to match up author name/title pairs with ISBNs via Amazon’s web services, but sometimes it doesn’t work. Like, when Third Place Books mis-spells the author’s name, just to pick on one bookstore. So, I have been manually entering these via a command-line tool. Now, everyone can play along–whenever an event without an ISBN is displayed, an ISBN entry box will appear. Just enter the ISBN number there, and the web service code will kick off, filling out the correct (according to Amazon) title and author, along with a few other fields. It’s still wrong sometimes, but it’s better then anything else I can come up with, short of the bookstores getting their data right in the first place :-).
I just wanted to applaud your book events page for Seattle. I am the manager of Queen Anne Books, and I’m at home working on our web page today. We are planning a grand re-opening event for February 7 and 8 (we are moving our store one block north this weekend– a little overwhelming but VERY exciting) with some author signings, so I thought I’d give you a head’s up about our web site. I’d love to see our store’s listings show up on your site, too. We are going to have Tom Douglas (“Tom’s Big Dinners”) and Timothy Egan (“The Winemaker’s Daughter”)on Saturday afternoon, then a reception on Sunday night with Jonathan Raban (“Waxwings”). Hooray to you for encouraging folks to support their local book stores and for giving them the resources to do it! We at Queen Anne Books are grateful.
I don’t make it up Queen Anne very often, so I’m not familiar with your store, but I’ll try to stop by next time I find myself on that side of town. It looks like you’re using the same web provider as Third Place (Booksense?), so it only took 6 extra lines of code to add your events to the list. Oh that everything was that simple :-).
While I was at it, I fixed a bug that was hitting Third Place’s listings (and would have hit yours)–for some weird reason, events were being matched with the previous event’s date. I’m not sure if it was a bug in Ruby’s XPath engine or in my understanding of XPath. Either way, it’s fixed now.
Of course, this would be a lot easier if bookstores provided an XML version of their events list, or even a reasonably-formatted HTML version. Booksense’s HTML is pretty nasty and this makes extracting information from it unavoidably error-prone.
Now, for a couple small points about Queen Anne’s upcoming events–I’ve been trying to only list author readings and not scheduled book club or children’s story time events. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to tell your re-opening events from your book club events, so I’ll list them all for now. In the future, it’d be easier for me if author events listed an author and a title on the main listing page; that way Queen Anne’s listings will match everyone else’s and I won’t have to hand-tweak things as much.
Hey, great job. Now all you need to do is add the Hugo House events.
http://www.hugohouse.org/events/