Finding a new home for my bookshelves.
Will it be LibraryThing or my hard-drive? Well, there is a lot to do before I can cross that bridge.
The database itself needs work, lots of work, before I can do anything else and in the process of doing it, I have learned a lot. My reading library is all audiobooks from Audible -- once I buy them, they are mine to keep -- with some "eyes to paper/screen" titles thrown in every now and then. If I could simply export the information from my Audible account, this conversation would be over. So, bring on the violins.
Steps to fixing the DB:
1. Working from my Audible Library, make sure that every title I own is on the database and that the editions are correct. Mark books that are no longer available on Audible and books that are not audio editions (because this is not strictly a catalog of my audio library). This took four days. (About two minutes per title means about 34 hours; four 8-hours days).
2. Proofread the database, record by record, make sure that each record contains title, author, narrator and ASIN. Double check ISBNs. Remove any loaned titles.
3. Last step, sort the DB by title and look for duplicates
Part of what it taking so long is that Audible does not provide ASIN or ISBNs for any title.Thank goodness for a desktop browser with tabs! Each title gets looked up on Amazon and information is cut and pasted into the DB (which is really just a big spreadsheet at this point). Amazon gives ASINs 99% of the time, not ISBNs. This is a really BIG problem when it comes to importing a DB into a cataloging website; if the website doesn't recognize ASINs and you can't get easily get ISBNs for all of the titles you want to import, you are going to have a tough time using the website. BL and GR do not recognize ASINs --and I don't have the wherewithal or the patience to hunt down ISBNs for every title in my DB.
Having already decided that I did not want use GR as my home base, I tried importing the unedited DB into GR just for kicks. I made a CSV file of just the ISBN and ASIN numbers and imported it into GR. It does not need more than the ID numbers to then populate a bookshelf. It can then fill in the rest of the standard data from its own DB and then adds whatever other information from the imported CSV that it can figure out what to do with. I sent a file with something like 900 titles. It was a failure. GR could only recognize 100 titles, of which half were duplicates to books I had already added. It only added titles for which an ISBN was supplied.
BOTTOM-LINE: Whichever catalog website I end up on is going to have to be accept ASINs.