[Tellico-users] The ISBN field is suddenly populating with the ISBN-10 instead of the ISBN-13

[Dave Jury]

Hi Robby,

Thanks for a great piece of software!

I think you are correct... it's Amazon who have made the change, but I
certainly do appreciate your tips on how to deal with it!

I am very grateful for your quick response.

Regards,

Dave Jury

-----Original Message-----
From: Robby Stephenson <robby at periapsis.org>
To: tellico-users at kde.org
Cc: Dave Jury <djury at hcbell.com>
Subject: Re: The ISBN field is suddenly populating with the ISBN-10
instead of the ISBN-13
Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2011 06:57:35 -0800


Hi Dave,

On Saturday 03 December 2011, Dave Jury wrote:
> I have just noticed that sometime since 8 November Tellico is now
> populating the ISBN-10 in the ISBN field, whereas previously it had
> put in the ISBN-13.

You don't mention it in this email, but your bug report references Amazon UK 
and ISBNdB. For both of those sources, Tellico just uses whatever value they 
report, without changing it. Amazon, in particular, can be apt to be a bit 
wonky and randomly change some values. I think that's probably what's going 
on.

For Tellico 2.3.4, Tellico was updated to use a newer Amazon API version. 
Amazon also returns different data, sometimes, depending on which API version 
is used. It's even possible that isbn13 is returned for some books and 
isbn10 for others.

I'll poke at it some to see if I did something inadvertent to change the 
behavior, but at first glance, it's a data source issue.

> Is there any way I could add a new field and get both numbers? I
> suppose I could calculate the ISBN-13 from the ISBN-10 but I'm not
> sure how to go about it.

Neither Amazon nor ISBNdB return both numbers, but given one, it's straight-
forward to calculate the other. Tellico will even do it for you. To get from 
isbn13 to isbn10, highlight the 978- in front and delete it. Tellico 
automatically updates the final character, the checksum. To go from isbn10 to 
isbn13, it's a bit more. Either paste "978" at once in front (and the final 
checksum is updated), or cut the last several digits in the isbn, add the 
978 to the front and then paste what you cut.

As for having fields for both, you can certainly have both fields. Getting the 
data sources to populate both would take a little work.

> By the way, I'm using an older version as I can't get 2.3.4 to install
> on Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric. I would dearly love to upgrade so I could
> access Google Book Search - do you know if it's possible?

I don't really follow Ubuntu releases. I usually link to DOminik Stadler's 
PPA, but it doesn't look like he has anything for 11.10 yet.
https://launchpad.net/~dominik-stadler

Robby
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