Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

So, the following error has happened thanks to the Goodreads bot.

1. A Kindle book is published.

2. An ACE of the Kindle book is published, and as is Goodreads policy, the ASIN is moved from the older edition to the new ACE. The older edition is left blank.

3. The Goodreads bot, because it is a piece of junk, swoops in and assigns the ASIN-less older edition a junk ASIN that does not correspond to any valid Amazon listing and that it should not have. Also, it changes the older edition's format from Kindle to Ebook for some reason I can't fathom.

Is there any way to get rid of the invalid ASIN without completely invalidating the book and deleting the 48,000 shelvings that it has? Or is this just a completely lost cause?

Drace wrote: ".. and assigns the ASIN-less older edition a junk ASIN that does not correspond to any valid Amazon listing and that it should not have. "

Unfortunately the assigning of the fake ASIN is functioning as intended. All editions of all books on GR get an ASIN now, regardless of format.

Drace wrote: "Also, it changes the older edition's format from Kindle to Ebook for some reason I can't fathom."

They know. I reported this behavior last year. See my comment from April 2024. That's why I commented on your request for a merge in the super folder not long ago. Valid ACE's are getting wiped out left and right due to bot edits leaving them hard to distinguish.

Drace wrote: "Is there any way to get rid of the invalid ASIN without completely invalidating the book and deleting the 48,000 shelvings that it has?"

There is no invalid ASIN, there are only ASIN's that exist/existed on one of the Amazon marketplace websites somewhere past or present and "non-marketplace" ASIN's that GR now assigns just to populate the field.

Drace wrote: "Or is this just a completely lost cause?"

In the larger scheme of things, with bots running the site, it's a lost cause. The war is lost but people still fighting small battles here and there can eek out short term victories.

In the specific case of this edition, you didn't link so I can't look to see what exists, the general response would be to revert the bot's format change back to Kindle and document the heck out of the edition in both the description and librarian notes that it's a valid ACE, linking to the cover where the Amazon marketplace ASIN was moved to.

ETA: Btw, adding a valid ISBN 10 to the ASIN field of non-Amazon ebooks and audiobooks doesn't necessarily prevent GR from assigning the random ASIN to those editions. I've reported multiple instances of bots stripping the ISBN 10 out of the ASIN field of ebook (reported last year) or audiobook (reported last month) editions and replacing it with a random ASIN.

Hi Drace. Please feel welcome to contact Support with links to the books if you'd like us to look into this.