[Starson17]

The Merge function does not merge ISBN numbers. This was intentional, but it's recently been reported as a bug. Despite my (slight) desire to respond "Feature, not bug!" I'm inclined to change it to add ISBN into the merge function.

When I wrote Merge, I was in the middle of hundreds of merges and general metadata cleanup. When a record has an ISBN number, it overrides the author/title during single or bulk metadata fetch operations. You only get one record back during a fetch.

As a practical matter, here's what I was seeing:

1) If I was not doing a metadata fetch, I had no use for the ISBN. It didn't tell me anything.

2) If I was doing a metadata fetch, it was because the other metadata was bad and the ISBN prevented me from fetching multiple results and choosing the best. I was only able to fetch the single result corresponding to the ISBN.

I was constantly having to delete the ISBN (usually obtained as a result of a previous bulk metadata fetch) in order to get several results and find the best match of metadata.

When merging, I often had multiple single format records (created before the autosorting option was available) and one or two of them would have a bad ISBN from a previous bulk metadata fetch where the author or title was wrong. As a result, I preferred not to merge the ISBN.

All of this boils down to the fact that my ISBN numbers never came directly from the book. I always used the option to get metadata only from the filename, and the filename never had the ISBN in it.

That's the "Why" for this bug/feature. However, while I'm glad it did not merge ISBNs for me ... looking back on it, I suspect that this "feature" for me is more likely to be a "bug" for others. I'm inclined to fix it.

Before I do, I'm interested in any comments anyone wants to make. (It's not the sort of thing I think is likely to be worth an option checkbox.)

Any comments?

Thanks!