Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

1. I have added Mission of Gravity a 1st edition hardcover of this seminal hard SF novel.

It is not associated with the other editions of the book. What did I do wrong? How do I correct this.

2. In all other editions, the First published is given as 1954, this edition, but it was actually 1st published in the pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction between Apr and Jul 1953. For books do we include the pulps when considering when a novel was 1st published?

If so all the other editions need updating.

1. You didn't do anything wrong! Editions are not automatically combined; it's a manual process done by librarians. I've combined them for you. (If you'd like to do this yourself in the future, from the book's page you can click on the sidebar where it says "other editions | combine", or you can go to the author's page and click on "books by {author} | combine editions". But you can always make a request in the librarian's group here if you're not comfortable doing this.)

2. As a general rule, the first published date reflects the first publication in this book form, so 1954 is correct here. Anthologies of short stories, for example, have a first published date for the anthology that is not the first date on which any of the collected stories was first published elsewhere.

(Also, the first published date is, by its nature, attached to the book as a whole, not the individual editions, so it would only need to be changed once if it needed to be changed! Irrelevant here, but fun information.)

Ah! Thank you. I thought combine editions means that 2 entries that were the exactly the same edition had been entered and this was to make them a single entry.

Merging editions (2 entries that were the exactly the same edition had been entered and this was to make them a single entry) does require combining them as a first step, but the second step is deleting the duplicate.