Goodreads Librarians Group discussion
Policies & Practices
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never for librarian please.I shudder at the potential war-of-preferences between librarians, just like the various and anonymous author name for sacred texts.
Debbie wrote: "But ask and then just go ahead and take care of everything at once. My post said: ...it would be nice to just say "...and should I set this as the primary/default/featured edition for you?" "No, don't like that. What should be a fairly straight forward alternate edition or cover improvement would instead become a conversation even before the change was made. Most authors know what they can or can't do which is why so many of them resort to the devious methods we know so well.
If the author of a book wants to change or delete a cover of their own book, the system should be changed to reject that change irrespective of their librarian status. Period.
rivka wrote: "It doesn't especially matter, since there are no current plans to make the option available to librarians any time soon."Yay!
Lobstergirl wrote: "vicki_girl wrote: "Please do! I am eagerly awaiting the day librarians can do this for all books, though no indication has been made that it will happen (I'm just super"I hope you mean librarians setting it on behalf of authors who have requested it, rather than librarians just doing it randomly according to the librarian's own preference."
If it was ever implemented, I would think that appropriate policies for the manual would be created to go with it. First and foremost, I would think that the #1 rule would be not changing the default unless certain conditions apply, e.g.
-The author requests it
-The default edition is not in English or the original language*
-The default edition does not have a cover, and a search did not turn up a cover for it
Any other circumstances would be evaluated on a case by case basis.
Maybe it would be a super-only function.
However, this is all pointless speculation as there are no plans to implement anytime soon. :)
*ETA: For example, the Harlequin Indonesian editions mentioned earlier. Or some manga I have worked with, where the English title and the Indonesian title are the same and the covers nearly indistinguishable, and the Indonesian becomes most popular. The Japanese edition of Pandora Hearts 1 keeps getting vandalized, because it is the most popular and the Japanese covers have the English title in larger font than the Japanese title.(Note: This is why I have both the English and Japanese title listed in the title field.) However, the covers are slightly different, and I have tried to maintain the description in Japanese.
Well, I tweeted the info on setting a default edition and a bunch of authors who follow me were excited about it.Goodreads should really tweet updates like this. If more was done to reach out to authors, maybe they'd do less weird shit for librarians to undo.
Ridley wrote: "Well, I tweeted the info on setting a default edition and a bunch of authors who follow me were excited about it.Goodreads should really tweet updates like this. If more was done to reach out to ..."
*sigh* I honestly do think there are authors out there who still don't know they can set the default edition (and lots of threads here where librarians obviously haven't caught on to the newish feature because they are still insisting the default edition can only ever be the most popular edition so nothing can be done.)
I'm not sure how to fix the lack of info (other than to keep posting links to the author faq explaining when discussions threads are sayig it cannot be done).
And I absolutely agree librarians should never be allowed to set default editions according to their own preferences. But useful at author request (or for odd issues like vicki_girl mentioned like defaults not being in author's native language)—maybe can be revisited in future if only for superlibrarians.
Ridley wrote: "Well, I tweeted the info on setting a default edition and a bunch of authors who follow me were excited about it."Authors follow you? They should regard librarians with fear and dread and sacrifice the lower mammals to gain approval.
Banjomike wrote: "Ridley wrote: "Well, I tweeted the info on setting a default edition and a bunch of authors who follow me were excited about it."Authors follow you? They should regard librarians with fear and d..."
+1 (lol)
Debbie wrote: " I honestly do think there are authors out there who still don't know they can set the default edition (and lots of threads here where librarians obviously haven't caught on to the newish feature because they are still insisting the default edition can only ever be the most popular edition so nothing can be done.)"Well, I had no idea until a few posts ago in this thread and I'm on this site every day.
Without a dedicated "site update" feed of some sort, it's really easy to miss changes.
This was one of the first threads, I think, that spotted that that the default edition thing had been implemented.http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1...
Message #8 is Patrick telling it is live.
@Banjomike, and message 12 that thread said likely few authors new about, had been live for weeks, and had not been promoted out to authors yet (paraphrasing).@Ridley, in daily visits, just curious, would you notice if the nicely concise set of author FAQs at top of this group's discussions had something new?
(Originally, once Patrick's thread got spotted, Rivka had very quickly updated the FAQs to include the new feature; just not sure how well spotted it was. For myself, anal enough to want any edits or revisions to librarian manual, author guidelines, etc. to have a date implemented showing—just to spot quickly anything new or changed from last time I read and to avoid sounding like I'm an idiot because I did not know something had changed)
Debbie wrote: "message 12 that thread said likely few authors new about, had been live for weeks, and had not been promoted out to authors yet (paraphrasing)."It sounded like the feature had escaped rather than been released. Certainly many librarians (amd I think also Rivka) had been happily telling authors that the default couldn't be changed when some authors knew it could and were actually using it.
Debbie wrote: "@Ridley, in daily visits, just curious, would you notice if the nicely concise set of author FAQs at top of this group's discussions had something new?"It never occurred to me to read the Author FAQ before, to be honest.
Banjomike wrote: "It sounded like the feature had escaped rather than been released."It escaped alright... I noticed the primary edition changes in books by an author that had been trying to update her covers at the request of her publisher (I actually mentioned to her that I wished that there was a way for her to change the primary edition) and mentioned it here http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1... at the Librarians group on Nov 12th. When no one commented on it, I took it over to the Feedback group and then Patrick responded... No official announcement to Librarians or to Authors other than those comments and the FAQ update...
I hope you mean librarians setting it on behalf of authors who have requested it, rather than librarians just doing it randomly according to the librarian's own preference.