On the DVD site I have no problem searching for a DVD via Amazon's ASIN. But here it's a problem. Some books (print books) only show an ASIN and apparently the PBS data base does recognize ASINs. So is there another place where I can search for the book by author and/or title that will yield an ISBN?

The latest dud search was for Trisha Ashley's The Little Teashop of Lost and Found which Amazon shows as a Bantam hardcover to be published in March 2017. From the way Amazon shows the date it's likely a British edition, the author lives in Wales. The Book Depository has an ISBN paperback edition listed but PBS doesn't recognize the number either. PBS has most of her other books in their database although her books are not often traded on PBS.

Thanks, I was hoping for an ISBN that PBS would recognize so that I can add the book to my WL.

Marya, I've been attempting to add that book for the last 6 weeks or more with no luck!

Oh dear.....

ETA Sally, I sent PBS a request to add the the book to the database along with all the pertinent info including ISBN. We'll see how they answer.

PBS's unhelpful reply:

Thanks for writing in. We don't add books to the database manually (this is done routinely and automatically by our database provider).  But if it is possible to add a listing, members can do this themselves with a simple ISBN search - please see the Help doc "How do I add a book that is not in the database to my Wish List?" for a discussion of this:

http://www.paperbackswap.com/help/help_item.php?id=52

So: To try to add the listing to our database, just do an ISBN search on our site for the book. 

If searching for the ISBN (*without hyphens*) does not add the listing, then the listing cannot be added at that time.

You can find the Help Center by clicking Help in the toolbar at the top of any page on the site, and use the Help docs Search to find information there.

Have a great day and happy reading,

Books can only be listed by ISBN. It wouldn't help you to be able to enter an ASIN because no member can post books by ASIN since they aren't printed on the book itself. (Usually the ASIN and ISBN are the same for books, but occasionally they are different when a book is not yet available in the US.)

For PBS, books can only be added by search after they appear at Amazon.com (not amazon.co.uk) with an actual ISBN on the page. The copies of this book that you're seeing at amazon.com right now are being sold by 3rd-party sellers. These sellers have manually listed their UK editions on amazon.com without an ISBN, so there's no way for PBS to grab that data and import it. When there's an actual US publisher's listing on amazon.com, then you'll be able to import the data here by searching for the ISBN.

There is another way, but you're really not supposed to do it because it has the potential to create a lot of bad data in the PBS database. You can put your account on hold, then post the book using the UK ISBN. This will prompt you to enter all the information about the book, including page count, dimensions, etc, which you can find at amazon.co.uk. Once you've done that, you can delete it off your bookshelf and add it to your wish list. This will allow any PBS member who happens to get a copy of the UK edition to post it to you. You would still have to keep looking for information on a US edition and add that to the PBS database via search once it exists.

Oh my. Long process to do something simple. But I guess others have done so as I have received several books published int he UK with a different ISBN than on Amazon.