Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

So, I'm trying to delete a book. "Only super librarians can delete books with more than five reviews", it says.

Problem is, it seems only super librarians can delete ANY book. There's a book with no details at all except an original title. Nobody has reviewed it. One person has rated it (book 6596528). So why can't I delete it?

Only superlibrarians can delete the last edition of a book so that the book is removed completely from the database. This doesn't happen very often, so no one's bothered to put it in the error message. What book are you trying to delete, and why?

That book is waiting to be rescued, either by the still-ongoing imports or the user who has it shelved. Why would you delete it?

Why delete? Because the only one piece of information about the book is an original title - which identifies it as a book already on the database with complete information. There's no title, no author, no ISBN.

There's another book that comes up under "freak brothers" search (Unknown Book 7903892) with no information of any kind.

There is an ISBN if you check the librarian log it was removed - doing a search on the ISBN shows it to be appropriate to the title. The ISBN is not assigned to any other book in GR either.

(Unknown Book 7903892) has reviews against it so it should stay. Some one / import may rescue

Please Patrick - make rescuing books your priority.

Deleting is risky - you might remove something that does mean something to someone, especially if they've shelved it. Those mystery books aren't doing anybody any harm.

Seems pointless to keep these stubs here. It just clutters the site up. I find it hard enough to find the right edition what with all the foreign versions and scrappy entries that would probably be identified as duplicates if we even knew anything about them. If there's not even a title, it's hard to claim that it means anything to anyone.

They are not pointless - prior to the amazon issues they meant something to the people who added them and reviewed them. It may take a while but they will be sorted out.

So they do not get deleted