Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

I'm a new librarian, and I'm still a little confused as to when I should combine editions of books.

If I'm looking at a book, and on the side it says "other editions", are these already combined?
If they're not, should they be combined?

If the same book is reprinted with a different cover, and someone adds the book with the different cover, should they be combined? Because if you do, that would seem to defeat the purpose of having it twice, but with different covers.

Finally, if books are combined, can you see the different editions that have been made one books?

If that could be cleared up, that would be great.

Sarana's Brother,

Yes, if you're at a book's page and it says other editions, that means they're all combined with the edition you're viewing.

Yes, editions with different covers should be combined, but they don't combine automatically; librarians have to combine them.

I'm not sure what you mean by your last question. If you click on the link that says "other editions" all the editions of that book (that are combined) will be shown in list form. You can view them all. Or, are you asking a different question? Thanks.

SB, combine is NOT the same as merging. Combining links editions together (so you'll see them in the "other editions" and similarly linked), but it keeps each one as an individual edition.

Merging (combining two editions and then deleting one, which moves all reviews/ratings to the remaining edition) is done VERY rarely, and indeed should not be done with alternate-cover editions.

Something that helped me when I was trying to learn the ins and outs of combining books was to look up a book with many editions. Example : Little Women
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19...

This book currently has 459 editions on GR. If you look in the box next to the picture of the book the first information is "BOOK DATA". You will see at the end of that section are the words "MORE DATA". When you click on that you get combined information AND information for the specific edition you are bringing up.

Under "published" you will see "FIRST PUBLISHED IN .... This will help you decide if you should combine also.

My personal little ditty is "The Author(s) WRITE the Book(s) and the publisher(s) create the editions."

I hope this helps you out when you question if you should combine editions.

Thanks a ton! It makes sense now.

Toni, you should combine editions which contain the same collection of stories. If one edition contains several stories and another edition contains only one of those stories, they should not be combined. Each stands alone.

You should never merge editions at all unless one of the records needs to be deleted, which is very rare (usually a user has made an error when manually relisting an edition which was already listed) -- if you think that you've found a record which needs to be deleted, you can post it here and ask another librarian to double check it. Under certain circumstances, you'll see librarians have merged short stories into collections. This is only done when the short story has never been published as a stand-alone edition but a user has listed it as one anyway; the librarian needs to be very sure that no published edition exists before deleting the record for it. (Sometimes short stories are released as chapbooks, ebooks, or audiobooks for promotions, so it needs investigation!) In that case, the librarian is assuming that the users who reviewed the short story did so after reading it in the collection in which it was published, and so the editions are merged in order to transfer the reviews onto the collection.

If a collection contains stories by multiple authors and there is an editor of the collection, the editor should be listed as the main author (with a role of "editor"). If a collection contains stories all by a single author, that author should be listed as the main author. If there are two editors listed, put them both as authors; the main author should be the editor listed first on the book cover (or, if you can't determine that, whichever one is first alphabetically).

ETA: Ah, I just saw your edit. Those are the same collection, so they should be combined. In order to combine them, they need to have the same primary author: in this case, it looks like that should be Cecelia Tan. You should shift Cecelia Tan up into the primary author spot on the Kindle edition, and then you will be able to combine them.

Toni wrote: "YAY! (clapping hands excitedly) I did my first combining. I feel so authoritative! Just kinding, but thanks for the help and clarity. I'll be back if I have any other questions."

*grin* Congratulations!

I hope this wasn't already answered in this discussion (I quickly skimmed through the comments).
I was wondering, if there are 3 book that have been published, and then 1 volume is published that contains those three books, should they be combined? I thought it made sense to combine them, but I'm not sure if I'm allowed to...
Does what I asked even make sense?

Jasmine, that's a sensible question, but the answer for right now is "no, don't combine them". Eventually we're going to have a way to indicate that one book collects several others, but for now they're considered separate books because they don't contain the same content.

Okay, thanks Cait.

So, I have a question. I looked up Fahrenheit 451, and I saw several editions. When I looked at each of them, I saw that they'd all been combined with each other, along with 150 other editions. Why were those three the only ones to show up? Were they the most popular? I thought that if books were combined, only one edition was shown on the list, with a link to the other editions. So, if someone could explain that, that would be awesome.

I've also been noticing lately that when I do as search sometimes multiple editions of the same book, already combined, are showing up. It doesn't always happen, but I saw it occur a few times over the last week.

This is not supposed to happen (or at least, it wasn't supposed to happen in the past), so I'm not sure if this is a new bug, an odd caching issue (in many cases I do not believe the books were recently combined and therefore cached as separately), or some sort of deliberate change.

Hi guys,
sorry if you've answered this question before (which you undoubtedly have!), but should we combine books that have been split into volumes with their original edition eg. combining 'Bleak House volume 1' and 'Bleak House volume 2' with 'Bleak House'?

Heather, No.

Thanks!

Hi, this would seem to be the thread to ask my question. I recently added a book to Goodreads--an Advance Reader's Copy that I wanted to add to the bookswap. Thankfully, it has a separate ISBN number than the other editions, and since it was not previously listed, I added it. (After all, I'd hate to have someone request the ARE and be disappointed that it was not the final version of the book!)

Now the book is listed as one more title among the many by this author. In order to list it as one more edition of a previously listed book, do I click on the "combine" link where it says "other editions"?

I'd like to do this properly, so if someone can confirm this for me, it'd be very helpful. I'd also like to do it myself so that if I run into this situation again, I'll know how to do it properly. The book I added is here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10...

Nan wrote: "Now the book is listed as one more title among the many by this author. In order to list it as one more edition of a previously listed book, do I click on the "combine" link where it says "other editions"?"

Yes, that's right. It'll open a new page which lists all of the titles, so then just select the ARC and the other editions and click on the button to combine them.

Thank you, Cait! Now it's listed as one more edition of that book, and I'm quite happy.