Linking your books for syncing with CLZ Cloud
Before uploading your books to CLZ Cloud from the Windows or Mac software, you can “link your books”.
Book Collector, CLZ Cloud and Linking
Book Collector is built around our central online database: Core for Books. For the online user databases in CLZ Cloud, all factual book details (author, title, cover images, publisher, subject, ) and cover images are used and shown directly from Core for Books.
This factual book data is not stored per user. Instead, it is stored only once, inside Core for Books then linked to for every CLZ Cloud user that owns that book.
This factual data is not uploaded to CLZ Cloud when you sync your data from Book Collector. It only uploads your personal data fields like Collection Status, Purchase information, Notes, Rating, etc…), plus the link to the corresponding book entry in Core for Books (basically just the CLZ Book ID of the entry inside Core for Books).
How to link your books
If you have been using the Add Books Automatically screen to catalog your books, selecting and downloading the data from Core for Books, then most of your books will already be linked.
You will only need to link the books that you added manually.
To link your books, click menu CLZ Core > Batch Link Books and let the program search for your books in the Core for Books. Link whatever you can (no problem if you can’t link a couple).
You can search all of them at once, or check the results and focus on each single book before linking it.
The advantages of the Linking with Core for Books and central shared data in Core for Books
*Automatic Updates: * When our content managers or other users update the book information in Core for Books (e.g. to add a better cover image, to improve data, or to fix a typo), you will immediately see those changes in CLZ Cloud.
No need to “Update Books Automatically”. Your collection in CLZ Cloud always automatically shows the latest version of the data and cover art.
It’s fast: Sharing the factual book data means that its retrieval can be optimized (e.g. by caching), resulting in a smooth experience when browsing your CLZ Cloud book collection. Also, syncing up from your desktop/mobile app v is very fast, because only your personal data and a single ID value needs to be uploaded to your CLZ Cloud.
It’s efficient: Shared factual book data is only stored once, which means our servers are not clogged by duplicate copies of data and images (that are all the same for every user). This also makes it possible for our systems to make daily backups of your book collection data.
What if a book is not in Core for Books?
This shouldn’t happen too often, but here’s what you can do to handle this situation and at the same time help us improve Core for Books:
Good to know: You can upload and keep unlinked books in your CLZ Cloud. Unlinked items will show up online with just some basic information and will include your personal data, including the cover image that you may have added yourself to the unlinked book.
TIP: For books not available in our central database, make sure to include the ISBN in your unlinked entry, so that our Content Team can spot popular “un-linked” books and add them to the central database. As soon as they do, your entry will automatically become a full entry with all book information.
Also, if you do have full information for that book you can right click it in your collection and report it to Core to add/make correction in Core for Books.
Need more help with this?
Don’t hesitate to contact us here.