Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

From the start, let me say thank you in advance for any help, knowledge, and experience you can offer with this! I'd also like to ask that you don't just go and make the changes/updates yourself, but to please leave any edits to me so I could use this as a learning experience. :)

My Problem
I just became a Goodreads Librarian, and for my first project I decided I'd tackle the Annihilation series by Saxon Andrew. All of the updates I was doing for the first book, Love Conquers All, was going good up until I hit save and it said it already existed with that ASIN... Sure enough, Goodreads had three books, each with one edition: Goodreads Search: Love Conquers All Saxon Andrew.

There should be only two editions of this book that I am aware of: a 2009 Paperback edition with ISBN13 and a 2011 Kindle edition with ASIN. (B&N only shows the Paperback when you look at Saxon Andrew's books, nor does searching by the book title return a B&N ebook version.)

My Questions
#1: Each book has ratings, so I'm loath to delete any of them, but how do you know when to combine or when to merge a book? (Yes, I've read the Librarian Manual about combining and merging, but I don't know if the edition ever actually existed.)

#2: Since B&N, owners of pubit.com, doesn't show the book being offered as an ebook and no ISBN/-13 results came up with the values offered by the listed book, should it be merged with only other ebook (Kindle) edition?

#3: Finally, if I do need to Merge, how do I do that? I see where to Combine books, so do I do that, THEN delete the pubit.com edition so the data merges into the Kindle edition?

Robert wrote: "From the start, let me say thank you in advance for any help, knowledge, and experience you can offer with this! I'd also like to ask that you don't just go and make the changes/updates yourself, b..."

To answer your questions:

1. Since the BN/pubit ebook has quite a number of reviews I would not merge it . I would just combine all three editions. It is possible that it used to be available on BN, and then was pulled later. On a related note, books with an ISBN-13 that start with 294 are nook books. The ISBN-10 for these books is useless, and actually prevents BN from finding the book. It should be deleted from the record.

2. No, see 1 above.

3. If you are merging, yes that is how you would do it. Note though, make sure the books you want to merge are combined only with each other. Therefore, if you are merging two ebooks, they must be separate from the main listing. Deleting a book always merges the reviews with the most popular edition.