1. A while back I noticed that goodreads.com has a really cool feature in their search ... it allows to search for asins (amazon ids) and isbn's too. It's very accurate, and best of all it's an ajax/json response type deal.
2. Because most of the books I own come from amazon, I have an amazon identifier for them.
Putting 1 and 2 together, I thought I could make the goodreads plugin that much more accurate by having it use amazon_ids to get the equivalent id for goodreads.
If anyone is interested in this version of the goodreads source plugin, it is available here:
https://github.com/botmtl/GoodreadsSourcePlugin. The order by which the plugin considers identifiers to make a goodreads match is controlled in the preferences. By default, it's ['goodreads', 'isbn', 'amazon'], meaning that books with a goodreads_id will use that first to update the metadata, and if they don't have one, will try isbn and then amazon (asins). For myself, because I want to match the books over amazon ids if at all possible, I changed this setting to ['amazon', 'goodreads', 'isbn'], giving amazon_ids priority over any other ids.
If the author for this plugin is interested in integrating those changes in the plugin, you are welcomed to do so. The diff between the versions can be seen here:
Diff.