Annoyance with Google Books Import: not importing half the title!

raskolnikov · May 14, 2010

Hello,

Whenever I import an item from Google Books, the system will only copy the first part of the title before any colon (:). Thus, when I went to import the title "Towards the final solution : a history of European racism", only the "Towards the final solution" showed up.

This annoyance, though minor, is causing me an excruciating waste of time, as I have to edit all of the titles of the books I run across.

Does anybody know of any solutions?

fbennett · May 14, 2010

It's a flaw in the translator. I've uploaded a patch to zotero-dev, along with a fixed-up version of the translator file. If you visit the link, and then click on the Files link, you'll find the translator as Google+Books2.js. Grab a copy of the file, and then in Zotero go to gear menu, Preferences, Advanced, Show Data Directory, and open the "translators" directory. Replace the file Google Books.js with the Google+Books2.js file (changing its name to Google Books.js). You should then be able to refresh any Google Books page you're looking at and enjoy the full title.

It's a bit of extra effort, but you're probably best off going through those steps to fetch the translator directly from zotero-dev, rather than waiting for it to appear in Zotero officially; the developers seem to have something going on in the lab (work on standalone Zotero ... ?) that has slowed the pace of patch review and merging.

Good luck, please post back to let us all know whether it works.