[tallis]

Hey there. I've got a few questions, as a new user, and some of these might be addressed elsewhere, but a quick search turned up little, so I'll go ahead and ask.

I am loving DL2, but as an academic who would ideally like to use it not only as a library viewer, but as a bibliographic database, I would love to have searchable tags for books, just like iTunes allows you to sort by grouping, comment, etc. If I have three books about deconstruction, or if I made a note in the synopsis that a book deals with Chomsky, then I really wish that I could, in the search bar at the screen bottom, type in "deconstruction" or "Chomsky," then I'd like those books to pop up. Is that too much to ask? These parameters might also be columns that you could display in the list view mode, just like you can choose in iTunes what criteria to show by pressing command-J.

Also, as I scan in books, I am frequently faced with the choice of selecting from Amazon's database either a recent edition, whose information includes reviews and editorial summaries, or the actual edition I possess, which is usually the same text through-and-through, but whose download information comes with none of the bells and whistles of a text printed in the last ten years. Short of hand-altering the publication info line-by-line for any such book, is there a way to consolidate these things easily, such that my computer knows that I have a 1971 Heinlein printing, but that I am not punished for having older books by being denied Amazon's informational niceties? I suspect that any fix to this problem lies more with Amazon than with the DL2 folks, but I figured I would mention that this is an issue; I am sure I'm not the only one.

Finally, I'm getting about a 60% success rate with scanning in books. A chunk of the time, no matter how patient I am or how many angles I hold my book at, the code won't read, and another chunk of the time — particularly with children's books — the program just tells me that I have scanned a completely different piece of media than I am holding (usually a video of Anne of Green Gables or an audiobook of a Marilyn Monroe biography). Is there anything that can be done to make the scanning more reliable? I love the feature — it's bloody brilliant — but I am entering a lot of books in by hand....

[CaptainHaddock]

Originally Posted by tallis 

Also, as I scan in books, I am frequently faced with the choice of selecting from Amazon's database either a recent edition, whose information includes reviews and editorial summaries, or the actual edition I possess, which is usually the same text through-and-through, but whose download information comes with none of the bells and whistles of a text printed in the last ten years. Short of hand-altering the publication info line-by-line for any such book, is there a way to consolidate these things easily, such that my computer knows that I have a 1971 Heinlein printing, but that I am not punished for having older books by being denied Amazon's informational niceties? I suspect that any fix to this problem lies more with Amazon than with the DL2 folks, but I figured I would mention that this is an issue; I am sure I'm not the only one.

I've had this problem too. In addition, the same edition of the same book often has different information on different Amazon sites; it would be nice to have some kind of option to merge several Amazon listings into one book.

Finally, I'm getting about a 60% success rate with scanning in books.

Me too.