In case you haven't heard, the Books category is undergoing a merger with the Shopping.com catalog.

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This will be beneficial in the long run but will cause some problems that will hopefully be resolved soon.

In anticipation of these problems I have been holding off on doing SAPs. I didn't want to risk doing SAPs and then having to redo them if there were "mapping" problems. After SAP comes back online on the 23rd I'll begin adding books to the catalog again.

This means that you'll have a longer wait for SAPs than the already long wait you normally endure. Also, it may mean that after the migration some of the SAP requests that have already been made will now appear in the new catalog, and we'll reply to your request to that effect.

Thanks for being patient. Let's keep our fingers crossed that the migration goes well.

-Andy

Question - will the delay in the big media move, what about SAPs in the meantime? Are we still on hold?

Since they haven't rescheduled the migration I guess we'll go ahead with SAPs now. Ariane has already done some. But it will take a while for us to get caught up. And whenever they do reschedule the migration I think we'll hold off on SAPs again.

-Andy

You've probably noticed we still aren't doing SAPs. In addition to migrating the category they deployed a new tool for us to use in doing SAPs. This added to the wait.

And unfortunately this new tool has some problems. For instance, it doesn't have the correct fiction and non-fiction subcategories, nor does it include fields for date, publisher or number of pages.

Because of this we've been holding off. The fixes should come soon, and then we'll be in business (with a huge backlog to wade through).

-Andy

None of the fixes have happened yet, but we've decided to begin processing SAPs again. The listings we're creating are lacking in subject, date, format, and some other fields. But we figure most members would rather have flawed listings for their SAPs than no listings.

So go ahead and make your requests.

-Andy

Just out of curiosity, the other two categories I write in, Travel and Movies, have a great little form to fill out when Epinionators make a request. It really does simplify the process and ensures you get all the info you need. Have the book CLs ever considered doing anything similar? I suspect you'd probably have to have one form for fiction and another for non-fiction.

I don't want to sound critical, but I suppose that is what Epinions is about.

Hope we see some results on this soon. My biggest backlog is in travel right now, but I do have scads of book reviews I want to write and some don't have product pages yet.

Adrienne

As one who has been immensely frustrated about the problems with getting titles added to the database, I have to say it really does work. You may have to be persistent and submit things a couple of times, but it does work.

Andy and Patsy have added numerous titles for me in the last month and I really appreciate it.

I don't spend much time here on the message boards. However, after seeing this posting today, I had to chime in to say thank you!

Kevin