Book Dimensions

I'm American, so LibraryThing thinks I want to use inches and pounds. Having studied engineering, I HATE inches and pounds. Is there a way to change ALL my dimensions to centimeters and kilograms? I've figured out how to do it book by book, but with 2,500 books...that's just ridiculous.

Seconded.

Yes, please. I'm European and I also urgently need that facility. If it existed I would start entering data. But not if it has to be done for each book separately.

Oh yes please

Yes, I've also ignored this feature because of this. Inches and pounds mean nothing to me.

Perhaps you should put this in the Recommended Site Improvements group. I'm not sure how many people follow this group.

I've found that the inches/metric depends on from where I've imported the book. Personally, I change it all to inches/pounds, so it's something I notice. And I have to change it often. So it's probably not LT, it's probably your sources.

Coming from the country that gave the US feet and inches and pounds weight and gallons, when the UK decimalised and metricised in the 70s it was assumed that old people would have real difficulties making the adjustment.

But four decades on I (as one who is in his sixties) get irritated by people my age unable to (a) mostly think metric or even (b) work out the equivalent. Even though we still (just) drink pints in pubs, all our volumes and product weights and recipes are metric, and even though we still drive miles down our roads most lengths are metric. (But, yes, I see that British publishers still routinely use inches in their dimensions.)

Surely those who use 'imperial' (as Brits used to call it) are in a global minority? Why can't LT give us readers the option at least of switching? (I don't care if they're spelled millimeters or millimetres, by the way.)

ed.pendragon
Please copy/paste your comment over in http://www.librarything.com/topic/130892 where the fight is ensuing. I just said the same thing you did, but some others said that it's a useless feature.

There's no fight. Everyone on the thread agrees the option should be there.

Fight as in the fight for the idea, not people fighting each other. Although post 11 did sound like they thought the idea was dumb.

And I bet Tim agrees in principle. It's only a matter of deciding that it's worth the resources to make the change.

And if you're wondering why you haven't heard from Tim, I haven't seen his presence on the forums for most of the week. He must be wrapped up in something else.

I don't think I've ever expected to hear from Tim, himself.
I just originally posted to ask how to do it (assuming, since that's fairly standard on many sites, that it would be something that already exists) and then you told me to put it on recommendations since it doesn't exist yet and I didn't see it on the list of things to do (http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/User:Zoe/RSI_data_ranking).

And I can't imagine it would take too much resources since it already exists (kind of/sort of) on a book by book basis. It they got rid of the dimension field in the individual books that says "convert to..." and made that a profile or library option of some kind you could reassign the resources. I can't imagine anyone would want SOME of their books metric, and SOME of their books imperial.

I have no idea how much work it would actually take to do it but having it on a book basis does not mean it's easy to do it on a user basis. You're talking about fields in totally different data structures.

Please, can we make kilos and centimeters an optional setting? Being from Europe, that would make everything so much easier...

And please enable saving the file size of electronic media in MBytes / KBytes.

>14 PatZRH: That option has always existed since I've been on LT.
When you're editing your book, there's a very clear option of "Convert all physical measurements to kg/cm or pounds/inches" in that box, just click the one you want. I always convert mine and input the right measures.

>16 ScarletBea: I understand that >1 benuathanasia: would like to have a global user preference for which units to show by default.

>17 .mau.:. Agreed. Also agree that this is a small pain each time I add a book. (I imagine the AI taking care of the user interface: Hmm, he has selected cm/kg about 3500 times so far. Let's detault to inches/pounds yet again). At least it is not ounces as my kitchen weight chooses once in a while when it is low on batteries. (Ah, maybe that's the cause: LT is low on batteries?).