Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Is it okay that the default description for Colleen McCullough's is "Our Review" by Beth Amos (from Simon & Schuster according to the Librarian Change Log)?

(Looks like lots of spoilers, too.)

I think that is fine and appropriate, except for the spoilers. A lot of readers would want those edited out.

I thought that the description should be the synopsis of the book, not a review of the book?

It should be a generic summary and should NOT include reviews or personal feelings... The summary should also NOT contain any important spoilers
—Librarian Manual

I replaced it with the official description from the publisher's website.

I think it's perfectly fine for the description to come directly off of the book jacket. Which is to say, from the publisher. This copy is not going to be completely objective, it's going to find ways to say the book is delightful and wonderful and should be read by everyone....people can tune those out if they like, just as you can tune them out when you read the book jacket.

I wouldn't say it should be a synopsis, because a synopsis often includes spoilers.

I usually go with what the librarian manual tell us.

A review of the book is marginally acceptable if it's not overly personal and there's no other book description available, but if there's a non-review publisher's description that's definitely much better. If the current book description is a review credited directly to a professional reviewer (as this one was) and there's a more generic blurb available from the publisher or the book jacket, it's better to replace the review with the blurb.

Thanks everyone!

This was definitely not a blurb from the book jacket.

It was titled "Our Review" which at first made me wonder if that meant some kind of "official" Goodreads review. It looked like about a thousand words that went plot point by plot point through the whole book.

I'm glad the decision was to replace it with a more standard description.

pjreads ♫ wrote: "It was titled "Our Review" which at first made me wonder if that meant some kind of "official" Goodreads review."

No, there's no such thing on GR! The "our" probably referred to whatever source the record was imported from.