ISBN Data Enrichment not working all the time

[gladsonsam]

This feature is great, except that it only worked for a few of my books when I imported as a CSV.

I have to now go into each book and copy the ISBN to the Import from ISBN field and then it auto fills. Not sure why it didn't work during import as the number didn't change.

Either way, is there an automated way of auto filling the books with their ISBN info. I have imported around 200 books and around 100 have ISBN but no imported data (covers and description are the main ones). Hope this makes sense

[fabiodalez-dev]

Thanks for reporting this. The CSV import does support automatic ISBN enrichment (covers, descriptions, etc.), but it only triggers when all three conditions are met:

1. The "Enable scraping" checkbox is ticked during import
2. The book has an ISBN-13 value (ISBN-10 or EAN alone don't trigger it currently)
3. The scraping API is reachable and doesn't hit rate limits

A few things that could explain why it only worked for some books:

• Rate limiting — the scraper waits 1 second between books, but external APIs (Google Books, Open Library) may throttle after many consecutive requests, causing silent failures for later books in the batch
• ISBN-10 only — if some books in your CSV only had ISBN-10 without a corresponding ISBN-13, the scraper would skip them
• API availability — some ISBNs simply aren't found in the external databases

Regarding bulk re-enrichment: you're right that there's currently no way to re-trigger scraping in bulk for books that already have an ISBN but are missing cover/description. This is a valid feature request — I'll look into adding a "Bulk enrich" action that would:

• Find all books with ISBN but no cover or no description
• Run the scraper on each one with proper rate limiting
• Report results (enriched / not found / errors)

In the meantime, would you be able to share a sample of your CSV (with a few working and a few non-working ISBNs) so I can investigate the root cause?

[gladsonsam]

I think it was a bad CSV file "Numero colonne non valido (attese: 8, trovate: 7)." Should be able to fix it

Bulk re-enchrichment would be nice, but no worries if you can't

[fabiodalez-dev]

Thanks for the details. Could you share a few example ISBNs — some that were enriched correctly and some that weren't? That way I can check the scraping logs and reproduce the issue.

Also, could you share the header row of your CSV? The column name matters — the importer recognizes isbn13, isbn, and a few aliases, but an unexpected header might cause the scraper to miss the ISBN entirely.

A "Bulk re-enrich" feature (to re-scrape all books that have an ISBN but are missing cover/description) is on the roadmap — that should solve this for existing imports.