What's new in CLZ Books for iOS?
This is the 3rd and last “CLZ Books 9 Feature Hilite”, all about dealing with ISBNs that are not found in CLZ Core.
But first, if you missed an earlier feature hilite, you can still read them on our CLZ Blog here:
- Hilite #1: The new collections tab-bar
- Hilite #2: Add Books screen improvements
About adding books by ISBN
First, a bit of background about ISBN barcodes and adding books to your app by scanning their ISBN barcodes:
At CLZ, we run our own online book database, which on the backend is fed to multiple 3rd party book data sources, like ISBNdb.com, Loc.org, and many regional library sites.
Currently, the system holds and recognizes over 41 million ISBNs. On average, our users are getting a 97% success rate on their ISBN searches.
That is a great score of course, but still.. that missing 3% does mean that some users will, once in a while, scan an ISBN barcode that is not found in our Core (yet). For example, for rare books or recent releases.
Now THAT is where the “ISBN not found” screen comes into play (previously called “Unrecogized ISBN”).
New in v9: a complete re-design of the “ISBN not found” screen
When you scan (or enter) an ISBN that in not found in our CLZ Core online book database (yet), you are presented with the “ISBN not found” screen. This screens serves two purposes:
- It helps you add the book to your database anyway
- And… it instantly adds the ISBN and its book details to Core!
For version 9, we did a complete re-design from scratch of the “ISBN not found” screens, to:
- make it clearer and easier to use
- let you select the correct cover image from a Google Images search!
It is super easy, just find the book in our Core by Title, pick a cover and Confirm then entry.
In any case, properly using this “ISBN not found” screen is essential for improving the ISBN coverage of our Core online book database. So if you run into an ISBN that is not found, please take a bit of time to carefully fill in the Author, Title, Publisher and Year field, and select the correct cover image from the results.
That way, the first fellow user who searches for the same ISBN *will* get a result, with nice details too!