Bulk import books by ISBN

Paste up to 1,000 ISBNs at once. Shelfwise looks up each book in Google Books (and falls back to Open Library) to auto-fill title, author, cover, description, publisher, year, and page count.

Where

Catalog → Bulk ISBN Import

Format

One ISBN per line. Hyphens are stripped automatically. Both ISBN-10 and ISBN-13 work. Comments after a "#" are ignored.

Example:

• 9780310496267
• 978-0-310-49626-7
• 0310496268 (paste your own)

What happens

• Click Preview. We fetch metadata for every ISBN and show you the results.
• Review the preview — flag any that didn't match correctly.
• For each match, add a copy (barcode, condition, shelf location).
• Click Import. Books and copies are created.

Coverage

Google Books and Open Library together cover most English-language books published since ~2000. Older books, self-published books, and obscure titles may not match. For those, add them manually (see "Add a single book").

Speed

• 100 ISBNs takes about 30 seconds
• 1,000 ISBNs takes 5-7 minutes

You can leave the page during the import — it keeps going in the background.

Editing after import

All fields are editable after import. Common follow-ups:

• Add genre and topics (the lookup APIs don't classify books)
• Add any internal doctrinal or editorial notes
• Add age ranges for kids' books
• Replace covers if the auto-fetched one is low quality

Errors

• "ISBN not found" — Neither API has the book. Add manually.
• "Already in catalogue" — You already have this ISBN. Edit the existing entry instead.
• "Invalid ISBN" — The format is wrong (not 10 or 13 digits, bad checksum). Double-check.