Bookrastinating update: I imported my completed books from 2021 onward, 269 books. Of those, 35 items failed to import, and a few more are missing cover images. 12 of the 35 which failed have ISBNs, so those failures were somewhat surprising, although most of them are either very old (first published in the 1920s), or clearly Amazon-only (the entire Hollywood Alphabet series by M.Z. Kelly makes up 20 of the 35).
For all of the faults of GoodReads, I’m not sure I’ve ever tried to add a book to my library that it didn’t already know about, other than the book I wrote myself.
It is in the nature of open platforms not owned by corporate behemoth’s to require a bit of effort, so I’ll add cover images for the books missing them. I’ll also poke around this weekend to figure out how to add the 35 books it apparently doesn’t know about, which I note includes a book by Erle Stanley Gardner, author of the Perry Mason series of books. It’s not a Perry Mason book, though, it’s another series of his.
@pwinn Unfortunately this comes down to where the data is coming from. The #bookwyrm project can't afford to pay (and might not want to if it could) for closed data held by publishers and ISBN agencies. There is no complete open dataset of ISBN codes. If your #BookWyrm instance doesn't know about a book it searches other instances and external databases like #OpenLibrary. It does the best it can from the data available. I've also read that GoodReads exports may sometimes contain errors.
So many errors! I’ve posted a few times about how badly GoodReads has mangled my library.
In any case, I’ll manually add and edit the “missing” books, after which they won’t be missing for anyone else.
@pwinn yes, by adding them, or improving data for existing books, you are contributing back to the project!