What is the best way to reconcile my library?

[POD-io]

I have a ton of unmatched items that I'm trying to get reconciled with Bindery, but hitting dead ends on every path.

In many cases, the parsed author is just a mess and not the actual author. I manually added a book via ISBN and it fails to see the already downloaded item. Another case, an ISBN returned the exact book but it greyed out the 'Add' button because the author name was missing on the result.

I can 'grab' an item, it gets moved where it needs to go, and then Bindery is unable to match it. There also doesn't appear to be any way to manually tell Bindery that X book is X folder/file. That would help a ton, being able to manually reconcile.

What is recommended? The grab process is so smooth, but linking metadata in Bindery feels like 10x's the effort, and I've been unsuccessful.

[vavallee]

Both halves of this have answers, and one of them was a bug you found.

Binding a file to a book you already have. That exists, it is just not obvious. Manual Import at /import in the sidebar. Point it at a folder and it enumerates what it finds, and anything it cannot match on its own gets a search box so you can pick the catalogue book yourself. That is the "tell Bindery that this file is this book" flow you were after. It also does whole folders at once, so it works as a bulk reconcile rather than one path at a time.

The greyed out Add button on an ISBN result. That is a real bug and you are the first to report it. Two things stacked up. When OpenLibrary's edition record has no link to a work, the lookup builds the result from the title and cover and quietly drops the author, even though the author is sitting right there in the same response. Then the Add dialog disables the button when there is no author name, which was blocking a request the backend would actually have accepted, because it can resolve the author from the book id on its own.

Filed as #2187, fix is in #2189. After that the author comes through, and in the rare case where the provider genuinely has none you get a message telling you to add the author by name first instead of a button that does nothing.

Thanks for writing it up precisely enough to find, that saved a lot of guessing.