ISBN lookup failed

cmcconnochie
A Complete Solution Guide to Real and Complex Analysis by Yu ISBN: 978-988-78797-8-7 (eBook) gave the message "Lookup Failed" when I entered the ISBN search. The ISBN is recorded on Amazon Kindle and in the book itself.

Is there a standard reference ISBN database that Zotero, Amazon, etc. reference?
  • aborel
    There is no universal database for ISBNs (unfortunately). Your ISBN is not present in Worldcat, probably the largest used by Zotero https://www.zotero.org/support/adding_items_to_zotero#add_item_by_identifier and it is probably not in the other ones such as the Library of Congress catalog.

    You can add the record from Amazon using the web browser connector.
  • dstillman
    edited July 24, 2024
    (A good rule of thumb is that if you do a Google search for an ISBN and only see a few results (e.g., Amazon and a couple other sketchy sites distributing illegal copies of the book, as is the case here), it's probably just not registered anywhere.)
  • cmcconnochie
    OK Good to know. Thanks
  • babak
    This is also a problem with international titles. Using ISBN for Norwegian titles never returns anything. But we are used to an English-centered world by now :-)
  • aborel
    edited 3 days ago
    In my view, the problem with ISBN lookups is when people expect them to be either universal, or centered at all (even English documents will fail sometimes) :-D Users will be disappointed on both accounts, because both expectations are unfortunately impossible.

    So the best practice remains to use the browser connector to import metadata from one of the supported platforms. Don't assume the magic wand will be magical ;-)
  • adamsmith
    We currently have robust support for English (esp. US-based), French, German, Brazilian, and Polish ISBNs. It's not universal -- as per the above, it still relies on items being in libraries -- but coverage should be good in general.
    We'd like to further internationalize this, but the availability of APIs for ISBN lookup is pretty thin -- Norway, Netherlands, Sweden, Japan, and Portugal are the only other ones that I'm aware of (Italy has an API but requires authentication).

    I'd suspect Norway may be somewhat unique in that group in that they provide very robust API services but have relatively little coverage in Worldcat (they may have good reasons for that; the libraries in Norway have done some very innovative stuff around metadata and OCLC, which runs Worldcat, has... many issues both practical and ethical)
  • aborel
    I don't often wish that the Zotero forum had a "like" button, but this is one of those times.
    Excellent points, thank you!
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