Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

The Mouse & Dragon hardcover (ISBN 1439133816 (ISBN13: 9781439133811)) is listed as being 416 pages. The copy I have in my hand is 359 pages, and the story ends on page 354.

I've noticed that a number of books that I've read lately have inaccurate page numbers on GoodReads. Is this a big issue? Are the publishers pushing out bad data, or is it coming from somewhere else?

Verified by worldcat & fixed.

It's a pretty constant irritation...but it keeps us occupied and off the streets. :) The info comes from Barnes & Noble, and Amazon...both of which are notorious (Amazon, seemingly more so) for incorrect page numbers, sometimes missing or incomplete authors.

Publishers often do it too.

Keeps us in a job (too bad its unpaid). LOL

Sandra wrote: "Publishers often do it too.

Keeps us in a job (too bad its unpaid). LOL"


Yeah, but it's great for the OCD in all of us.

OCD... we don't have any OCD. How could anyone think that. Hey is does that book have some wrong info... someone should probably check... you know... just in case. Oh never mind, my fellow OCD librarian already fixed it.

I think sometimes publishers count all the extra pages in a book towards the page count. Including unnumbered blank pages, titles pages, copyright pages and the like.

So it's not that it's incorrect, just that it's a pretty useless stat for readers to track their reading progress. ;)

Actually, there are some "standard" sizes, and publishers often distribute those numbers early on. Amazon rarely bothers to update them.

That's why you'll see lots of books with somewhere between 350 and 450 pages marked as 400, etc.

Thanks for the answers! It may be that the page counts ARE right, but for a different edition. I'll keep an eye out for similar things in the future.

Doc

Doc wrote: "It may be that the page counts ARE right, but for a different edition."

That is actually less common, as most sites (including GR, Amazon, and all publishers that I can think of) code these things by ISBN, not title.