Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

I found a book added under Mark Haddon titled "X 24 Curious Incident of the Dog at Night Dumpbin (Paperback)"

...eh, what? It appears that it was imported from Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0099...)
Is it safe to assume that this is just a copy of "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime" and change it accordingly? Anyone else know what might be up with this weird title?

It's not really a book.

It's not a copy; it's 24 copies.

Hm...so what do we do with it? I guess we can't delete it because Amazon will just add it back. Just leave it as it is? Should it stay assigned to the author?

I blame the Amazon marketplace. It's making a mess of Amazon, and then the mess gets thrown over here. Grr.

One thing some people have been doing is marking items which clearly do not belong (dumpbins, posters, etc.) but which cannot be deleted due to ISBN's and Amazon is to add "NOT A BOOK" to the beginning of the title. These generally should not be combined with the books of the same title.

Something else that I just thought of that might be nice would be to change the author as well. The author is usually that of the book, but it is of course a piece of advertising and not something by the author. What about having a generic "Not a book" author in GoodReads? In addition to adding this info to the title, we could change the author to this, allowing all of these items to be gathered in an out of the way spot. It would help clean up the book lists for actual authors, but by retaining the info with the ISBN (what idiot gives ISBN's to these things?) it wouldn't allow Amazon to keep adding them back.

Thoughts?

It seems to me that it shouldn't stay assigned to the author, but that's just my opinion, which doesn't count for much. I'm happy to stick with whatever method is decided on.

What if we continue to put NOT A BOOK in front of the title

and start putting NO AUTHOR in the author field?

My only concern is that someone might mix up NO AUTHOR with anonymous, when we're trying to indicate something else. Otherwise that would be fine with me.

Whatever we choose, the most important part is being consistent.

Michael, I agree. As long as we go with something. I guess we could also put NOT A BOOK in both fields?

Edit: Because that would make it easy to do many edits. Just continually copy & paste.

Sounds good to me. :)

VERY IMPORTANT!!!

Before editing the "not a book" you must SEPARATE it from any editions of actual books that it has been combined with!

Rivka, I've been trying to do the separation, but why is it important? If you change the author shouldn't it separate automatically? Or is there some other problem we need to be aware of?

It does NOT separate automatically. It will still show up as an edition of whatever it was combined with.

(And I said something because I just found a whole bunch, which I separated.)

How very strange. Since you can only combine things with the same first author you would think combinations will fall apart if the author changes.

Some of those might be my fault; will have to check more carefully.

Since you can only combine things with the same first author you would think combinations will fall apart if the author changes.

Except it's a sorting issue, not a "sticking" issue.

Interesting. This leads to a largely unrelated question, but one I've noticed off and on, but is really obvious when working on this issue.

When you do a search, sometimes the number of books per page of results is rather random. For example, search for "dumpbin". Out of 46 pages of results (hmmm...it was 45 a few hours ago), the first page has only 2 books (1-2 of 918), the second page has 3 (21-23 of 918), the third page has 12 (41-52 of 918), eventually working up to full pages of 20. Any idea why the numbers are so odd?

I imagine it's related to this:

* Note: Amazon searches sometimes have funny page numbers because they return results that are not real books.

Because most of our data comes from Amazon, and they will list anything with an ISBN -- which includes postcards, dumpbins, posters, and the occasional deck of cards. ;)

No, that's definitely not it. The comment above refers to the number of pages assigned to the book in the book page, not the number of results shown per page in a search within GoodReads.

Sounds like maybe we need a 'not a book' flag for books?

Pretty please! :) If it could hide it in some way, maybe make it searchable only by ISBN?

Yes, that would be awesome. But there should be some sort of disclaimer next to it that explains that you should NOT check the box for audiobooks. We don't want people saying "well, it's technically a CD so...not a book!"

Good point!