New member bookshelf

[Julie Ditton]

I am a new member and I recently imported my GoodReads bookshelves. I have a few questions.

I have decided that I don't want all my old books to show as having just been read as of a couple years ago. So I considered the idea that I add an approximate year read to those books on my Goodreads file, and then upload everything again. If I do this, will it overwrite my info and update my shelves properly or create hundreds of duplicates?

In that same area, can I occasionally somehow upload bulk information to update shelves here to reflect additions to the other site? Or do I need to add new books individually?

Only a small fraction of my books showed up with covers and genre information. Is there a way to do a bulk edit and put all my books from a specific author in the appropriate genre in one fell swoop? Or does each genre and cover need to be entered individually?

Thank you in advance for your help.

[Gravy]

My first thought was that it would create duplicates, but I'm not sure. I will tag @"Scott" for you.

There is a way to change the date read from the books page, but that would surely take some time

He'll be able to answer the rest as well

As for covers and genre info, genre can be added en masse (via the genre link at the top of your shelves), but covers have to be added individually.

[Scott]

If the only item you change in the import file is the year read, then it won't create duplicate.

Books are stored by the title (included subtitle if one) and author name. So as long as the title and author name are identical, the book is treated as the one in the same.

Cover images should often be automatically imported if the ISBN is included. Otherwise, I'm not sure how you could seek to bulk import the covers since each cover would be different.

As @Gravy said, there is a way to change the genres of many books at once. Hopefully, that is sufficient.

[Julie Ditton]

Thanks for clearing that up.

-- 08 Jan 2017, 10:09 --

Sugestion: Using the genre link, I still need to choose a button for each book. With 500 books that imported as unspecified that's a daunting task. I am wondering if it might be a possibility to add a way to sort for an author and then move all of his/ her books to a specific genre. Then someone could move any number of books at once. (For example, search for Robb and move 51 "In Death " books to mystery in one batch). If that prolific writer writes in more then 1 genre, the member could then go in and edit genre on those few books.