Murder by Death

The whole current situation with Booklikes's search has been simmering at the back of my mind for some time now.  A few months ago, I played around with trying to hack the ShelfIt widget to get it to work with sites other than Amazon UK, but that was a no-go.  But in the process I discovered a way to query Penguin / Random House's database and get a data dump of their front list and scheduled publications.

This weekend, I sat down and learned to write a program.

I can't recommend this as a weekend hobby unless you're a masochist.  Which, apparently, I am.

Long story short, I've written a program that pulls the (cleaned up) data from the PenguinRandomHouse feed and populates the BL Add New Book page. 

It's not perfect.  Drawbacks include:

1.  I have to do this manually and I can't share unless you're a Mac user - I could theoretically launch multiple Add New Book windows and auto-submit, but I'm pretty sure I'd crash booklikes, or be mistaken for someone trying to crash BookLikes.  So I still have to click "Submit" for each page myself.  It's ok, but it means small batches.

2.  Only Penguin Random House at this point and for the foreseeable future - creating a task that will clean up their import is one-time only, but very time-consuming and the will likely take me several hours to do tomorrow (I've been using a 4 record dump I cleaned up myself).  And I don't even know if I can get anyone else's import.

3.  No covers.  I can grab them from Penguin, but I can't upload them to BL - at least not with my newbie skills.

4.  Descriptions seem to be hit or miss.  They work with some records, but not others.  Trying to figure out why almost cost me my sanity and my laptop, so I'm going to accept some uncertainty here.  Also, genres are a no-go because I honestly can't be bothered trying to figure THAT mess out.

I've gotten far enough in this to share this with you without embarrassing myself later, but I'm still not sure how practical overall it will be.  It's not going to fix things on a grand scale, but it might soften the irritation a little bit.

So, my question to y'all is this:  are the lack of covers going to piss everyone off? Because I doubt I'll be able to go back and catch all the imports I manage to do and add the covers.  I can't stand not having covers, but I have to recognise my limitations - especially with my current RL workload.  

Thoughts?