zeantsoi/GoogleBooks — Issue #2: Original publication date
Author: krigarr
Created: 2012-02-07 18:32:42+00:00
State: open

First I'd just like to say nice work with this gem. Second is a feature request, although I fear it might be hard to implement.

I'm currently in the process of implementing a search function that returns a list of books from Google Book - courtesy of your gem - and then provide an option of adding that book to our local database, and they can then in turn add it to their profile; much like a big library.

The problem is that we only want one of each book in our database and the top hit from Google Books seem to nearly always be the latest publication, so the publication year we assign each book comes across as fairly strange; The Fellowship of the Ring being saved with a publication date of 2002 and so on. So my question is if it's possible to implement a method that returns the original publication date of a book?

The only solution I've currently come up with is to assign a massive number to the :count variable in the option hash and then go through the entire list, comparing dates and then returning the lowest number.