No more snapshots on Google Books?

huskeyy
edited November 22, 2017
Hello,

I just discovered that I can not use zotero integrated into firefox anymore. So I just installed the standalone version on my windows computer at work and after 5 minutes with the standalone version, I discovered a major problem:

I just found a book I'd like to save: https://books.google.de/books?hl=en&lr=&id=ojwlDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=armenia+urban+politics&ots=aLjdbVoU7M&sig=m1I-QcG4_wfSTkPFyULEe7viZIc#v=onepage&q&f=false

The Connector item in FF offers me to save the "web page with snapshot", if I click on it, nothing happens. On other pages (for instance in this forum) it works fine.
So I tried to save it manually via the plus symbol in zotero. However, this way I can only include the URL and I have to make all the entries manually, definitely not an alternative to the snapshot function.

If zotero standalone works so badly with snapshots, I'm going to look for an alternative database.

Any help on this?
Thanks!


  • bwiernik
    For me, saving a snapshot works, but it only includes the basic frame from the page, not the entire book. Google Books is too complex a site for Firefox's simple Web Page Archive function (which the Zotero Connector uses) to be able to capture the entire embedded book. Your better option would be to use an alternative tool to extract the Google Books content, such as https://googlebookdownloader.codeplex.com/ or to download PDF versions of the books from other sources.

    In general, I don't think that any web page archiving tool would work very well with Google Books (typically these would at most capture the parts of the book that have already loaded). I would imagine if you opened snapshots for Google Books pages that you have previously saved that you would find that they do not include the entire book/don't work correctly.

    (Zotero 4 -> Zotero 5 changed from using a very old third-party tool for dumping web pages that was no longer maintained by its developer and which created very large snapshot files and frequently did not work in various ways. This was the reason for the switch to the Firefox function.)
  • pasok
    it worked before but now i am not able to add any books from google books to zotero automatically, such a shame ?
  • adamsmith
    If you're haveing problems importing from google books in general, start a new thread and provide details following https://www.zotero.org/support/troubleshooting_translator_issues

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