Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

There are 3 related questions here, because I find some of the entries in the database confusing. I will ask the questions followed by a couple examples.

1. What exactly is meant by published and first published?

There is clearly confusion here--e.g. the entry for "Master and Commander (Book 1)" lists the publication date as 1990 with a firsts published date of 1998.

[By the way this entry is wrong-I read this from a local library edition which was a republication in 1994 by Norton (consistent with the LOC info)

It would seem that the "first published" date would have to be first.

2. What is meant by first published, i.e., is it the 1st publication of the edition or the original publication of the book?

So for the Master and Commander volume listed above, I show the original publication (1st edition) date as 1970 in my personal database.

3. What should be used as the publication date if none is shown in the book.

For example my copy of George F. Kennan's American Diplomacy has no ISBN and has only the following information:
Copyright 1951
1st printing: 1952
15th printing May, 1962

Jan,

First published does mean original publication date. Unfortunately, most of these have to be manually entered as the default is usually incorrect. For books entered where a publication date isn't specified it seems to default to the current year, and then with others, it goes to the year for the edition in the Amazon to GR database.

Re your #3: The original publication date is 1951 (or 1952?) and the year published (for that edition) is 1962.

I agree with your comments. Doesthat mean that we should be correcting wrong dates?

Re: American Diplomacy - My opinion would be that the original publication date is 1952. Books are typically copyrighted before actual publication so that in new books that list a publication date, it is often the year after the copyright year.

Doesthat mean that we should be correcting wrong dates?

Yes!

Lisa, actually the year published for the edition you comment above may be 1952 and not 1962. If that book had an ISBN, they would not have given it a new number for every printing (a new printing is different than a new edition), so one would probably have to go with when the edition was first published, right?

Well, then I've been doing it wrong. Because to me, the year published is the last date that appears in that book and the original publication date is the year it was originally published.

That's what I've done in my manually added books. But, you're right, a new printing is not a new edition.

The good news is that the only dates I've ever changed with books not mine are original publication dates, so it would be just my manually added books (mostly pre-ISBN, even though they've mysteriously acquired ISBNs since I've entered them) where I've made this mistake, if it is a mistake. Hmm.

Actually I was wrong earlier it was printed in May 1964--Stated as 15th printing-nothing about second edition. Some of the other entries are probably the same book entered wrongly (see earlier post)

I have corrected the publication date to 1952.

So here is my understanding: If there is a 2nd edition to a book, it's publication date is the date the 2nd ed is 1st published and the first publication date is the date that the 1st ed was first published.

Correct?

I'll let Michael take this. But that's what seems to be correct.

(I need to go back and edit several old books if that is so!)

That is my interpretation. If you went by the printing date, every printing could conceivably have a different year, even though they all have the same ISBN. Since the (presumed) point of the dual date fields is to distinguish when a specific edition was first published (not when it was first printed), I would assume the date should be the first printing of the edition.

The "first published" date is clearly meant to be the very first time the book was published which will usually be close to the time of the original copyright (unless it's old enough to predate copyrighting). Thus, Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species..." should have a "first published" year of 1859, even though almost any copy you are likely to have in your hands (unless you are a collector) will have a "published" date of much later than that.

If you went by the printing date, every printing could conceivably have a different year, even though they all have the same ISBN.

Michael, You must be right. Drat! Well, that means I have a "first edition" of A Wrinkle in Time then (I think) even though it had a printing two years after the original publication. (At least I screwed up only my own manually added books.)

Technically that is true, but book collectors use "first edition" to also mean first printing.

Hmmmm, there's actually an interesting Wikipedia entry on this subject.

For the purposes of GoodReads, we are acting as bibliographers and should use that definition of an edition rather than a book collector's definition.

So does that mean that the first published date for the Iliad would be 850 BCE?

Just thought I'd ask.

I think a first printing of the Iliad would be pretty valuable indeed :-)

Jan, Yep. At least I got that end (original publication year) right, and so I'll just have to go back to change the "year published" dates for a fraction of my manually added old pre-ISBN books...

Thanks Michael for that link. It was helpful.

Michael, I appreciated the link also. Interesting article. I want to that both of you for your guidance.

Jan, Anytime, although I'm glad Michael was here since I was giving you partially incorrect information.