Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

I think it's supposed to be an edition of The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, but I've never seen this cover nor am I able to find it online.
The information is all wonky too. Title, author, and ASIN is "B0BSVF2S31" but cannot be found anywhere.
I could be wrong, but I don't think this is a real entry edition.

Elizabeth (Alaska) wrote: "Not sure why you're so focused on this title. This was imported by Amazon so was for sale there at one time."

Shouldn't the title be "The Name of the Wind" instead of "GREAT RELEASE THE NAME OF THE WIND (New Ebook) and the author be "Patrick Rothfuss" instead of "THE FAMOUS PATRICK ROTHFUSS"? This way, the edition is separate from the other editions of the book and the authors profile.
Plus the published date of this edition is January 22, 2023. You'd think if this was a real edition, it wouldn't be gone after 6 months. The ASIN doesn't work and this edition isn't available anymore if it was real.

Name and title corrected. If you have questions about its validity, contact support. Librarians cannot delete editions with an ASIN (if Kindle) or ISBN.

I, too, have gotten focused on cleaning up a particular title in the GR database. Sometimes, it just bugs me that I can't see the valid editions for the junk, even though I've never read the book and don't plan to.

I took a look at the GR entry for ASIN B0BSVF2S31.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8...

This kind of entry is typical of the GR bots — they import a record from a garbled Amazon listing, with bad info for the title and author (and other fields, usually). The edit log shows that the amazon_kcw bot created this item back in January. Because the ASIN no longer exists on Amazon, I suspect that someone reported the listing as invalid, and Amazon deleted it.

My suggestion: Mark this edition as Invalid (or even Deleted) instead of correcting the title and author. It would be helpful to add a note in the change comment (or as a librarian note) to explain that the ASIN is not available on Amazon.

I wouldn’t bother to combine this item with the valid editions of this book (anyway, the author name would need to be fixed in order to do that).

Mesembryanthemum wrote: "I, too, have gotten focused on cleaning up a particular title in the GR database. Sometimes, it just bugs me that I can't see the valid editions for the junk, even though I've never read the book a..."

Thank you, this was the most helpful response!

I noticed Liralen's comment in another of your (the OP's) threads:

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

"Books that are self-published on Amazon are often unfindable online when they are no longer available for purchase. It doesn't mean it's not valid ..., but there might not be a record available elsewhere."

I haven't noticed this about Amazon (book listings seem to stick around FOREVER, even though they're not available), but it could be a reason to leave this item as Public, not Invalid or Deleted.

(I'm still a newbie and am learning more and more every day.)

Physical books stick around forever but Kindles disappear as soon as someone decides to take it out of print. Self-published books in particular are often "here today, gone tomorrow."

Scott wrote: "Physical books stick around forever but Kindles disappear as soon as someone decides to take it out of print. Self-published books in particular are often "here today, gone tomorrow.""

I see. I don't know much about self-published books on Amazon. Thank you!

I was just instructed on another thread by an experienced librarian that just because I can no longer find the ASIN on Amazon doesn't make it invalid, rather it is treated like "out of Print" and therefore eft public. He said that if the changelog showed that if it was a bot import it was a valid edition. In that case there were ratings and reviews so out of print makes sense. but does that mean,that even if there are zero shelvings and its out of print it still stayson the system? How do we identify an invalid ASIN?

Julie wrote: "How do we identify an invalid ASIN?."

We don't, because we don't have the resources available to Staff. ASIN stands for Amazon Standard Identification Number; Staff would need to contact Amazon to verify the validity of the number.

Due to the MadBot issue, just because a record has an ASIN doesn't make it a valid record. If the record is for a Kindle with an ASIN, it's almost certainly a valid record. If it's on anything else, we'd have to do some research to see if it's valid; it might be a NAB (invalid record), for example. We're seeing tons of hardcover and paperback records being imported incorrectly with a vendor's ASIN instead of an ISBN.

There's more information about the bot problem in the "Amazon destroyed the author's database" thread, here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Thanks.