bookwyrm
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Add ability to create books from import failures
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. There's not a clear path forward if an import fails, and I don't think there's a way to recover reading dates if we can't find a match
Describe the solution you'd like It'd be nice to have a way to create a book using the information from the import (title, author, ISBN, etc) and then once added, adds it to the correct shelf with the reading dates and such. I'm imagining a "create book" button on the failure notice?
Describe alternatives you've considered I think currently you can manually add the book and then retry the failed books to match them to the newly-added book and recover your reading data - this is a reasonable flow, I think, and would be improved by being able to add a book from the import data.
Additional context If this already exists my apologies! I haven't done an import in a while, but my existing imports don't seem to have anything like it, and I didn't see any issues about it in a quick search.
This would be straightforward to add and really helpful when items don't import
#1973 is a first step for adding this
Another feature that can be useful for failed imports would be to resolve them via adding book IDs. The ones in the URL: bookwyrm.social/book/<Book ID>/s/<slug>
. Sometimes the import fails because of mismatching editions and this feature would be useful in case the specific edition is not significant to the user. Let me know if you need me to open a new issue.
I think the ability to resolve all types of failed imports would be useful too - I have just done a GoodReads import and about 15% failed (which I'd expect, as it's very unlikely to be a perfect match for everything, even with ISBNs). They fall into 3 categories as far as I can tell:
- No match, and the book is not in the database. I can't fix the import - I have to create the book and then copy across all the metadata (dates read, review text etc.).
- No match, but the book is in the database (e.g. import is paperback, database has hardback). I can't fix the import - I have to find the other edition and then copy everything across.
- Partial match, my options are to either approve or decline. I can't fix the import - I have to either create the book or find a match in the database, and copy everything across.
There are also some partial matches which are so different that I can't work out how Bookwyrm has made the match (e.g. Patrick Troughton: The Biography gets matched to The Fellowship of the Ring).