Abraquest Integration with Google Books

Later this week, Abraquest will link with the Google and Amazon book systems, to help save more time when adding new books into the Abraquest system. Users don't need to do anything they should immediately get better results when adding new books to Abraquest.

Abraquest has a book database of over 3 million books, which originated from the CD that our chartered librarian used to bring with her when she was at a school cataloguing books for Abraquest. These days this information is online and available to the Abraquest system, and more books are being added daily.

In the case that a book is not found, Abraquest goes to a third party service to try to find at the very least the title and author of the book.

I have discovered recently the newest books (and some older ones as well) aren't on the service we are using, so this results in extra typing for the user adding the book, and therefore more time needed overall.

So from this week, we will integrate with Google and Amazon in order to increase the chances of finding books and reducing typing required by the Abraquest user when adding a new book to Abraquest.

Tests so far have shown that only a small number of books are not on one or both of the services so this should mean that when adding a book, you scan the ISBN, scan the school barcode, check the details (amending any if necessary) and press Save. Much faster!

(Please note: the Abraquest Online system is not fully available to the trial system so if you are adding books on the trial you will get a much bigger percentage of missed books).

If anybody has any feedback or comments, please comment on this blog post or contact us via the usual means - contact us web page or the support email.

About the author

Philip Johnson

Philip Johnson has been a software developer since 1983 and has been involved with Abraquest since 2004. He is the director of Spherical Software Limited (www.sphericalsoftware.com), the company that owns Abraquest.