Tips & Tricks for Adding and Importing entries

You can update information for manually added entries as well. All the information the program needs to update an entry is the title (in some cases the author will be taken into account as well). Remember that using the gear button in the edit window to update information will give you the option to review the data before adding it while using the 'Update from >' menu command found under the Book menu will automatically download the information for the first result returned.


Bookpedia is part of the Services menu (found under the main menu of most applications) with a search option which means you can highlight text in a program, go into the program's main menu to choose Services > Search Selection with Bookpedia and start a search with your selected text in Bookpedia.


Bookpedia will accept any highlit text dragged over its dock icon to start a search, much like the Services menu option described above. (For example, you're reading an article online which mentions a book you want to add to your wish list. Select the title, drag it over the Bookpedia icon in the dock and the search will start automatically.)


To make your search more successful, use the 'Limit To' drop down menu in the search window when available. (Not all search sites provide this option.) When set to "Title", for example, the search returns only results that match the title entered into the search field.


By default every search on Doghouse is an 'AND' search. If you want to modify this, use the following options:

OR = | , e.g. hello | world (search for 'hello' or 'world')
NOT = !, e.g. !world (search for hello without world)
FULL PHRASE = "", e.g. "hello world" (search for that exact phrase 'hello world')
FIELD START = ^, e.g. ^hello (find entries that start with 'hello')
FIELD END = $, e.g. world$ (find entries that end in 'world')


To add more than one result from the same search, go into the Bookpedia menu > Preferences and under the General tab uncheck the option to 'Return to search window automatically after add'. This will keep the add window open until you close it.


Since searches by UPC/EAN (barcode) are much more accurate than searches by keyword, you can choose to have the program automatically add the first search result to the database, without reviewing it. To do that, go into the Bookpedia menu > Preferences and check the option "Add first search result automatically". This combined with the preference to "Return to search window automatically after add" speeds up your scanner/iSight searches greatly.

If at some point you want to disable the preference to add the first result temporarily (i.e. only for one search) hold down the Option key when you press the 'Search' button in the search window. This will override the 'first result' preference and give you the option to choose the result to add.


By default, Bookpedia checks for duplicates during scanning so that you don't accidentally add the same entry twice. However if you want to add more than one copy of an entry via scanning (for example, for a lending library), open the application Terminal found in Applications/Utilities and type in the line below, followed by a return:

defaults write com.bruji.bookpedia "Scan Duplicates" -bool YES


If you'd rather not get any audible feedback from the scanner when an entry has been found in the background (that little 'ding' sound) you can turn this off by opening the application Terminal found in Applications/Utilities and typing in the line below, followed by a return:

defaults write com.bruji.bookpedia "NoBeepOnAdd" -bool YES


If you have a built-in iSight but would prefer to use an external camera for scanning, plug in your camera and then press the 'iSight' button in the search window. This will bring up a dialogue where you can choose which camera to use for the future. If you want to change this setting at some point, hold down the Ctrl key and then press the 'iSight' button to bring up the dialogue again.


If you don't have much personal data to import from another program then a quick way to move your data into Bookpedia is to simply export the UPC/EAN or ASIN field as a tab or comma delimited file and paste that list into the 'Add multiple' feature in Bookpedia. This can also be done with only the Title field but the UPC or EANs will get you more accurate results when you search for advanced information.


Instead of choosing a site from the magnifying glass in the search window or the gear button in the Edit window, you can also use the keyboard shortcut Command-Control-[digit] to choose the site. The digit depends on the order of your sites in the Preferences > Sites.

For example, if your sites are ordered like this in the Preferences:

• Doghouse
• LoC
• AbeBooks
• ...

Then a search in Doghouse would correspond to the keyboard shortcut Command-Control-1, a search on the LoC would correspond to Command-Control-2, a search on AbeBooks would correspond to Command-Control-3, etc.