URL instead of Google Books Link

sanovich

When I grab a book from Google Books to Zotero Standalone 4.0, it creates a parent entry with book information and a child entry with "Google Books Link". Is it possible to make it work like with journal articles: one entry with no child entries, but with url in the URL field of the main entry?

adamsmith

not easily, no - the reason is that for books that URL would appear in every citation, which very few people would want.
It's obviously possible to customize your version of the translator to do that and if you're a little comfortable with tech stuff we can tell you what to do, but there is no user-friendly solution, no.

sanovich

Well, I am advanced lay person, let's put it like that. I would appreciate if you tell me what to do. If I fail to understand, I guess there would be other people, who would be interested and more advanced than me.

adamsmith

sure. Each translator is a little javascript file, in a folder called "translators" in your Zotero data directory:
http://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data
Find the file called "Google Books.js" and open it with a text editor like Notepad or TextEdit.

Find what is currently line 141:
https://github.com/zotero/translators/blob/master/Google Books.js#L141
newItem.attachments = [{title:"Google Books Link", snapshot:false, mimeType:"text/html", url:url}];
delete it and replace it with:
newItem.url = url;
save the file. This should do what you want.
This change will occasionally be overwritten on updates - since it's such a small change, I strongly recommend you just deal with that and re-do it.

There is absolutely no risk involved in trying to do this: In the unlikely event that you _do_ break something, you can always reset translators to their default in the advanced tab of the Zotero preferences.

sanovich

Works perfectly, thank you very much!

elsayed.elsehamy

Hi @adamsmith,

I followed the stepts and it worked fine. The pending question is, if there is a way of automatically transfereing the existing 'google books links' into URL, not only the future ones?