I'm evaluating Bookpedia and attempting to import our library records. I have a CSV file (generated from our old software), but I can't seem to find a specification for what format Bookpedia expects.
Specifically:
How should authors be specified? "First Last" or "Last, First"? How about multiple authors for a book?
How should newlines (e.g. inside book descriptions) or double-quotes be specified inside fields? For newlines I've tried \n, an actual newline character, and &newline;. None seem to work.
The author listing in Bookpedia is up to you really but almost all the search sites (especially Amazon) will return the author as 'First Last'. Keep in mind that with this setting you can still sort the authors by last name in Bookpedia. Just hold down the option key while sorting the author column.
Multiple authors can be separated pretty much by whatever you want (comma, slash, etc.) But if you want to use the option sorting trick to sort the column by last name I'd suggest using a comma.
Regarding newlines - you could replace all newlines with \r (carriage return) but leave the entry separator \n (newline). However since that's kind of complicated and you suggested it, we have added "\n" (not the newline character but the actual backslash and N) as an alternative. Download Bookpedia again and "\n" will be converted into newline characters.
Example:
title comments summary
First book comments\nsecond line\nthird line summary\nline\nline
Second book comments without lines summary with\nlines in it
You shouldn't have any trouble with double-quotes because Bookpedia actually looks for "," to separate entries (or a tab).
Example:
"title","comments","summary"
"title","comments and " two " quotes","summary with a " in it plus "mary""
"title","comments said "hello"","summary with\nlines in it\nhello there"
I forgot to mention, one of the crucial steps in there is converting ", " to "," , because the original export had spaces after its commas, despite the fact that most CSV readers don't recognize that.
