Linking your books

Linking is important to get the latest data on each book entry in your online Connect database. Linking is good, you should link!

How to link your books to the Collectorz.com Book Database

Linking can be started by clicking
"Connect > Link Books".
Or by clicking "Yes" after you selected to synchronize your books with Connect.

A screen will open. This is the Link screen.

With the Link screen open, you will see all your unlinked books. This screen looks a lot like the Add Automatically screen, and almost works the same. Here's a step by step:

1. Your first book is already being searched.
2. Check the results and if you're happy, click UPDATE (it's the button beneath the results)
3. The next unlinked book will be searched.
4. Repeat from step 2.

Alternatively you can click on Search All. Especially if you have ISBNs for all your books, this can be very helpfull. Just wait until all unlinked books have been searched and hit Update All.

The "Search All" option will not find your edition if you don't have an ISBN filled in your book details. If you don't have the ISBN, it will find the title for your book, but not the exact edition you own.

I keep getting the same books back as unlinked

If that's the case, those books may not yet be in our database. If you'd like you can submit those books to us by selecting them in your database, and then click:

"Edit > Submit Books to Collectorz.com Book Database"

Now within a few days our Book content managers will process your submission, and you can finally link that movie with our database! And the fun thing is that now all other users can also link that version. Because of your input.

Why should I link my books with your database?

Basically you should link your books to get the latest data on your book entries in your Connect account. The big story:

1. Book Collector Connect is built around the Collectorz.com online book database..
   ll book information (author, title, publisher, plot, etc...) and edition details (Format, Nr of Pages, Cover etc..) are directly retrieved from that central, shared database.

   The same happens when you upload an existing collection from Book Collector: your entries will be linked to our online database (most entries will already be linked or can be auto-linked by barcode, ISBN, or CDID for CDs).

2. Connect lets you add personal information to your entries,
   A book entry in your Connect collection only consists of your personal data (like Index, Genres, Purchase info and personal notes), plus a link to the shared book entry in our central book database. This is also the only data that gets uploaded when you Sync your data UP to Connect from Book Collector. It does *not* upload your publisher, dates, plot, or your cover images (that's why uploading is so fast).

3. If you own a book that is not in our central database, you can still add it to your list (or upload it from Movie Collector), using Author, Title, ISBN and Date. Plus your personal data of course. And you can even link to a cover image that is available somewhere on the internet using the Cover Link field.

   So you will still have a basic entry in your collection lists. The tip here is to include the ISBN, This way, our central database system can automatically spot the missing ISBNs.

This setup has many advantages, both for you and for us:

1. Auto-Updates: When our system updates the book information, you will immediately see those changes in your collection. No "Update Automatically" necessary, everyone always sees the latest and greatest version of the data.

2. It's FAST: The central shared book data is the same for everyone, so its retrieval can be optimized.

3. It's efficient: Shared data is only stored once. Thousands of Book Collector users own The Da Vinci Code, it's no use storing that books cover thousands of times. This helps keeping performance up, disk usage down and enables us to guarantee the daily backups of your collection.

As you can now probably see Linking is Very important to make Connect work for you!