Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

I've recently learned about selecting different editions of books in my library, such as audio books. I get my audio books from Audible so I presume I'd select the MP3 version, although I have been selecting Audio CD sometimes when there isn't an MP3 edition listed. My question is about the titles I have been seeing for some audio editions. For books with series information, such as: Judgment in Death (In Death Series, Book #11) by J.D. Robb, for the MP3 version the title is listed as: Judgment In Death (Mp3)Lib (Unabr.) losing the series information. I personally would like to see the series info more than the specific edition info in the title, so I've been holding off picking the correct edition for books in this case so I don't lose the series info when I'm looking through my books. Why not show both? I'm wondering if there is a reason why it couldn't be listed as: Judgment in Death (In Death Series, Book #11) (Mp3)Lib (Unabr.). instead?! Is there a limit to the number of characters that prevents all of the info from being displayed in the title?

Kerry, it's probably listed that way because someone was selling it under that title on Amazon; Goodreads automatically imports a lot of titles from there. That's one of the reasons for having volunteer librarians: to fix things like this! When you find books that are missing the series information from the edition you'd like to shelve, as in this case, what you can do is make a post here with the ISBN of your edition and the information about its series and a librarian will update the book title for you. (Or you can apply to be a librarian yourself, if this is something which interests you!)

Information like "Mp3" usually goes in the format field, not the title field -- that edition already had "MP3 CD" in the format field, which I left alone -- and I tend to assume that "unabridged" is the default state which doesn't need to be indicated (is that useful information for you?). There is a limit to the number of characters allowed in a title, but this is nowhere near it!

Does this look correct now?

Yes - that is much better :)! Thank you! Audio books do come in "unabridged" and "abridged", so I presume that would be helpful information as well. I just checked the Audible site where I get my audio books and they said Audible Audio books do not have an ISBN. I thought that was strange. I don't mind selecting an audio book that does have one, I just thought that was interesting. I guess there'd be no way to select "Audible Audio" as an edition in here - but don't really see that as being necessary.

There's been some discussion about how to work with publishers like Audible which don't provide ISBNs, but I haven't seen a good solution yet. :( You may be able to identify your edition by narrator, where narrator information is supplied....

Ok - I'll look for the narrator and try to match that up when selecting the version. Thanks again!