Once you have correctly formatted
your listings file, you can send it to Used Book Central.
top
What
is a delimited file?
A delimited text file is simply a
type of file that contains your individual book entries.
A "delimited" upload file to be
sent to Used Book Central is one in which each book entry, or
"record," is separated into parts by a character, such as comma
(,). The computer can then distinguish between the author, title,
description and price of each of your books. The separate parts
of each record are known as "fields." Each record must also be
separated by a line separator. The valid line separators are:
carriage-return (CR), line-feed (LF), and the standard DOS/Windows
character sequence CRLF (both).
Here is an example of a single record
as it appears to a Used Book Central shopper:
Joyce, James. ULYSSES; Paris: Shakespeare & Co., 1927. VG in dj.
Offered for sale by Your Bookstore at US$200.00
This record contains fields for the
book's author, title, descriptions (including publisher information
and quality) and price. You do not need to include a bookseller
field because it is entered into each record automatically by
Used Book Central.
top
What
are the elements of a delimited text file?
It is important that you include the necessary fields in each
record and that those fields appear in the proper order.
The fields (in order) are:
Author (0 to 254 characters)
Title (1-254 chars -- must be present in book listings)
Description (16KB max)
Price
The Author and Title fields are limited to no more than 254 characters
each.
The Description of your book could
be just one long field or can include up to 18 fields, allowing
you to display information on the book's publisher, binding, quality,
inscription, etc. It's completely up to you to determine what
appears in each book's description and how many fields you use.
The Price field is the final element
of each record. Please do not include the currency symbol (the
symbol for the currency you selected when you entered your subscription
form is added automatically to the price field of every record
you send into Used Book Central).
top
How
do I delimit a book record?
Delimiters are symbols you use to separate the fields of a book
record. There are three types of delimiters:
tab
(visible only in word-processing programs when commanded
to show non-printing characters) Note that tab-delimited files
sent to Used Book Central should not contain text qualifiers (quotes),
because they are treated as part of the field. Excel's tab-delimited
export is not a good choice for this reason (use comma-delimited
from Excel).
tilde ( ~ ) - this is functionally
the same as the tab-delimited format, but may be easier to type
comma - this is the only format
in which text qualifiers are used. Double quote characters must
be used around fields containing commas.
To continue with the example above,
a delimited record should look like this (using the comma format):
"Joyce, James",ULYSSES,"Paris: Shakespeare & Co., 1927. VG in
dj.",200.00
Each record should appear on a single
line, and records should be separated by one of the appropriate
sequences, CR, LF, or CRLF (see above). Please be sure that the
lines of records are single-spaced. Blank lines are treated as
errors.
top
What
is a text file?
A file is created as "text" when you save the file in a text (.txt)
format. Click "File" on the toolbar, then select "Save as...".
At the bottom of the dialog box there is a "Save as type:" list-box.
Click on that box, select the Text Only (.txt) option, then click
"Save." Be sure to save in the Windows character set. This is
important if your listings contain foreign (non-English) characters.
top
