Information About Authors

Booknizer will collect and sort information about books from your library, including paper, electronic and audio books. Necessary information can be retrieved directly from files or downloaded from the internet. Later you will be able to sort and select necessary books easily, without looking for paper books on your shelves or for files of electronic and audio books.

However, after reading something interesting we often want to learn more about the author: how he or she started to write books, what else the author does, what other books of the authors are available. Booknizer collects information not only about books, but about authors as well. The book organizer will download bibliography, photos, interesting facts, biography of the author from the internet.

You can download information about an author in two ways: add a new author or download information about an existing author.

It is necessary to use the first method if you have not added any book of the author to your database yet. Click the "Add author" button on the toolbar:

The "Add author" wizard will be shown:

Enter the name of the author that you want to download information about. You can add several authors at once, just enter one name per line.

There are two options in the lower part of the window. "Download information about the author from the internet" will allow the program searching for the author on the internet and downloading the author's biography, photos, bibliography. If you want to add information about the author manually (this may be necessary for the authors that cannot be found on the internet), just disable this option. In this case, the edit info dialog for the author will be shown after you click the "Next" button.

The second option, "Automatically select the first author from the search results", will skip the search results page (see below), downloading information about the first result automatically. As a rule, search results are sorted by relevance, which means that the first result is typically the best one for your query. This option is useful if you add a list of authors at once, it can process the entire list without asking you to select the correct result for this or that name.

Click the "Next" button in the lower part of the window. If you did not disable the "Download information about the author from the internet" option, Booknizer will perform a search for the entered name and display a list of authors:

If only one result was found, the program will automatically download information about the author without showing you any list. This would happen had we entered "Vernor Vinge" instead of "Vinge", as shown above.

If no results were found, or if the desired result is not available in the list, you can change the name of the author and send a new query without restarting the process. Just click the "Change author's name and send a new query" hyperlink under the list and make necessary adjustments in the new window:

A typing error will often bring no results, so you can simply correct the name in this window. If everything is correct, but the list of results is still empty, try using a shorter query. For example, use only the last name of the author instead of his or her full name. You can also try downloading information from another source.

After making necessary adjustments click "OK". The window will be closed, and the program will perform a new search, showing its results in the list.

Select the correct result from the list by clicking it with your mouse and hit the "Next" button, to download information about the selected author. After downloading the information the program will show its edit info window, where you can verify or correct the downloaded information before saving it to your database.