Adding a book automatically
The point of All My Books is that you type as little as possible. Give it one piece of information — a title, an author or an ISBN — and it fetches the rest from an online source.
Online sources
Six sources are built in:
| Goodreads.com | Large English-language catalog with reader ratings and reviews. |
| Google Books | Very wide coverage in many languages; good fallback when nothing else knows the book. |
| ISBNdb.com | Built around ISBNs. The best source when you are working from barcodes. |
| OpenLibrary.org | Open catalog of the Internet Archive; strong on older and out-of-print editions. |
| Chitai-gorod.ru | Russian bookshop — Russian editions, covers and prices. |
| MyBookList.ru | Russian book database with detailed editions data. |
Plug-ins add more — see Plug-ins. In the source drop-down the built-in sources are above the separator line and plug-in sources below it.
Adding a book
- Click Add on the toolbar, press Ins, or choose . An empty book card opens; the source it will search is shown in the card's title bar.
- Type the title into the top field, Original title,
and press Enter. Typing into Title and
pressing Enter works too on a new card — the text is copied
across and the same search runs.
You can search on other fields instead: put the number into ISBN and press Enter, or type an author and click the search button next to the Author field. - If exactly one book matches, the card fills in immediately. If several match, a window of results opens with covers and years — double-click the edition you own.
- Check what came back, add anything the source did not know, and click OK. Next book saves and opens a fresh card so you can keep going.
What arrives depends on the source, but usually: title, original title, authors, publisher, year, ISBN, rating, synopsis, subjects and the cover image. The address of the page the data came from is saved in the URL field on the Metadata tab.
If the search finds nothing
- Try another source. Right-click the search button (or use the arrow next to it) and pick a different one. Russian books are usually in Chitai-gorod or MyBookList; English ones in Goodreads, Google Books or OpenLibrary.
- Shorten the query. Series numbers, subtitles and edition notes throw off the match. “Dune” works better than “Dune (Dune Chronicles, Book 1) 40th Anniversary Edition”.
- Search by ISBN instead. It is unambiguous where a title is not.
- Nothing online at all? Fill the card in by hand — every field is editable. See Editing a book.
Which sources appear in the drop-down, and which one is used by default, is set in . The same tab holds proxy settings if your network needs one. See Setting up preferences.
Adding many books at once
For a whole shelf, barcodes are far faster than typing. For books that already exist as files on your disk, use the drive scanner. To fill in details for books already in the collection, use Batch updating book details.
Free to try. Catalog up to 100 books at no cost, forever.