Finding and saving the publication dates for my edition AND the first edition

[cbedgar]

While configuring the "Metadata download" preferences, I noticed the option to "Use publication date of first edition (from worldcat.org)". Nice! But I want to save both that date and the date of my edition. Hmm.

So I created a custom column with heading "First Published" and lookup name "first_pubdate". My intent was to get the date for the first edition, by loading metadata with the checkmark set. Then copy the date from {pubdate} to {#first_pubdate}, and finally, get the real pubdate for my edition.

The problem is that I can not just download metadata for the pubdate. Either I get all the metadata, or nothing. Also, worldcat.org is not even a "source", so I can not configure it in any way. I could click on the ISBN or OCLC tag in the Details view, and manually look up the date of earliest edition on worldcat.org, but that is too tedious. And lame.

Any suggestions? Tools, scripts, plugins? Some hidden setting? Or some minor mod of the python code? (I know perl, C, and bash, well sort of bash, but not python. Maybe I could figure it out, but...) Please help.

[cbedgar]

After writing this, I found this thread: Correct publication dates or at least an "edition" option. It seems this is harder than I thought. Still the other thread is five years old, so maybe things have changed...

[theducks]

Originally Posted by cbedgar

After writing this, I found this thread: Correct publication dates or at least an "edition" option. It seems this is harder than I thought. Still the other thread is five years old, so maybe things have changed...

ISBN links to a specific edition.
Opening the book, and looking at the Copyright page is probably one of the best ways. Copyright date usually applies to the story. Publication date to the edition Reprints of an edition are usually indicated by the remaining digits
near the bottom 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9