Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

I am sure that on occasion some scammers claim to have a "rare book" for sale that does not actually exist. To lend credibility to their enterprise they create a book entry in GoodReads that they can point to in order to buttress their claim. When we librarians come across one of these, as far as I know we can't simply delete the book. This is probably a good thing as it's possible for a librarian to be mistaken about a book's nonexistence. Still, there should be a way to get such an entry checked and weeded out of GoodReads rather than allow GoodReads to be a participant in the fraud. Can you say what procedure librarians should follow in events like these?

I'll give you a concrete example. https://www.goodreads.com/book/edit/1... is an entry for a book that can't exist produced by Serbian scammers. Creep, Shadow was a novel published for the first time serially in a magazine titled The Argosy starting with their September 8, 1934 issue, and continuing on a biweekly basis after that. The novel has been reprinted twice as an entirity, both times in periodical magazines: 1) Famous Fantastic Mysteries, August 1942, and 2) A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, December 1949. To the best of my knowledge, it has never been published as a stand-alone hardback or paperback novel, despite the fact it would make an excellent one.

Mainly my question is one of procedure for librarians when confronting an issue like this.

Hi Dan,

You can delete records like that, or mark them invalid. (It's basically the same thing now.)

Unfortunately, recent, poorly-thought-out programming changes have brought in every secondhand sales record from Amazon.

You can usually recognise them by two things:

1. Physical book with ASIN.

2. Notes about condition, especially in the title.

One problem was that I could not figure out how to delete the record, or mark it invalid. I am a GoodReads librarian. I have just contacted the support desk about the issue. Thanks.

Go into the edit page and change the status in the drop-down at the top. It's a relatively new field.

Got it. Thanks.