Combining editions wrongfully separated

[Matthew]

I've noticed a few redundancies on the website. Separate books that should be combined as separate editions, such as:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
and
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...

Where does this issue fall? Where should I post these redundancies for amendment? Under "Adding New Books" or... where?

I apologize if this issue has already been raised. I couldn't find the answer.

[Matthew]

Okay, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet was a bad example. I see that one of the books includes illustrations while the other is clearly longer and includes a selection of the author's other poems.

But there are other redundancies, such as:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
and
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...

[Krazykiwi]

Books to combine in general, post them right here. As in make a thread called "Books to combine" and post the links.

The specific problem with short story anthologies is that they tend to vary in content, sometimes by quite a lot. Illustrated vs not illustrated, we'd combine btw, that's not an issue, it's the actual "which stories are in this book" content that matters.

You'd be amazed how often an anthology titled "Selected Stories" has been published in five countries, with 7 different content listings between them. And then republished a decade later, with a half dozen stories added and some removed. Or three entirely different publishers have over the course of several decades, published completely unrelated books titled "The Best of...."

Because different publishers may own the rights to different parts of the authors back-list, or because the works are in the public domain and the idea of "best of..." changes over time or depending which country you're in. And it definitely isn't safe to assume that just because a title in German is a direct translation of a collection title in English, that it has the same content - and multiply by all the languages.

Which is to say, just because they have the same title, doesn't mean they have the same content. I can see at least one edition of the second link matches at least one edition of the first, so in this case the chances are good they are probably the same, but having been bitten by such assumptions before, I'm personally not going to combine anthologies without actually researching them myself.

[lethe]

Krazykiwi wrote: "Books to combine in general, post them right here. As in make a thread called "Books to combine" and post the links."

Better to post them in the Book Issues folder, IMO. Policies & Practices is more for clarification of how certain issues are handled.

[Krazykiwi]

Oops, was reading from the "all unread" feed, didn't notice the folder. Lethe is correct, that's a much better place.