Django excel save_book_to_database() broken in latest version using Django 1.8

Question

I've been going through the django excel documentation using Django 1.8, but haven't been able to get save_book_to_database(...) to work.

It either fails silently or gives the following error:

'tuple' object has no attribute '_meta'

I have followed the syntax from the docs, but I have no idea why it keeps breaking or failing silently: http://django-excel.readthedocs.io/en/latest/