Books and Bookshelves
Introduction
Books
Create a new book
Manage a book
Book metadata
Bookshelves
Managing books and bookshelves
When you log into Bookalope then the first page you see is this overview page, your “home page” if you will. It shows all your Books listed in a table, as well as a list of your personal Bookshelves. And no matter what page you’re on when using our web application, you can always click the My Book link in the upper-right corner to return to this page anytime.
In order to convert your document with Bookalope, you need to create a Book. Click the Create a new book button; this takes you to a page where you enter the name for your new Book and the name for the first Bookflow, the actual conversion run for your uploaded manuscript. We’ll tend to the other book data (title, author, publisher, and more details) in a separate step. You can also go with the default names that Bookalope uses, and change them later. If you’d like to sort this new book into one of your bookshelves then you can select one from the list of available shelves, too.
Click the Create new book and Bookflow button to move on to the next step and start your conversion, or follow the Back to My Books link to abort and return to the home page.
Once you’ve created a book, Bookalope lists it on your home page:
You can click on the name of the book to navigate to all of your book’s Bookflows—of which there is currently only one—and you can work with this book using one of the two “action icons” to the right:
- You can Edit the information about this book (see below), and
- You can Delete this book and all of its Bookflows.
If you click on the Edit action icon, the second icon from the right in a Book row, then Bookalope takes you to the Book’s metadata page where you can change the name of your book:
On this page you can also upload extensive book metadata in ONIX3 format (we’re currently also considering MARC, but we haven’t started on an actual implementation just yet—let us know if MARC is an important format for you). Please note, though, that the ONIX3 file must have only one single product description and it must use descriptive tags. Uploading a valid ONIX3 file cascades the book’s metadata to all of its Bookflows.
Click the Update Book button to commit the changes to the server, or follow the Back to My Books link to abort changing the book’s metadata.
If you work with many books from different people and different publishers, then it quickly becomes challenging to organize all these books. That’s where Bookshelves are very helpful: just like real ones, Bookshelves group your books onto shelves.
So, on your home page click the Create a new bookshelf button at the bottom of the page to navigate to the New Bookshelf page where you enter the details for your new shelf:
Enter a name for the bookshelf and a brief, optional description of what this shelf is for, and then click the Create bookshelf button. If you’d rather not create a bookshelf then just click the Back to My Books link.
Back on your home page, you can now see the newly created book and bookshelf. Every book has a “handle” to the left of its name: use that to drag and drop the book between bookshelves and the general book area.
Both books and bookshelves have “action icons” on the right side of their respective rows. For example, you can use the Trashcan icon to delete a book and all of its associated data (see above), and likewise you can delete an entire bookshelf including all of its books and their data.
