Goodreads Librarians Group discussion
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Accidentally added book twice
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Sandi, I deleted the duplicate book but I can't find any information about the ISBNs. Do you have either book in hand to look at?
I put them back in my to-read drawer. The ISBN is also a barcode and all the information is identical. I bought the books at the LA Times Festival of Books. I wouldn't be surprised if the author self-published.
Sandi wrote: The manual add wouldn't allow me to put in the same ISBN number for both books.ISBN's are considered 'unique' for purposes of the GR database. Therefore, they can only be entered once. For books that share ISBN's, you can put the ISBN in the description field and note that it is a duplicate.
uhh....since I'm a librarian, could I add books.
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wat?I'm unclear about what you do not understand. What Rivka is saying is that anyone can manually add books but most books are already in the Goodreads database. At the top right of the page is a search box to find books by title, author, or ISBN. Except for some very old or unusual books, most books and all their editions are already at Goodreads. We can add them to our own shelves (and our groups' shelves) by clicking add to my books box.
Or, am I totally misunderstanding what you're asking?
I don't even know anymore. just pretend I didn't say anything. *slaps self for being an idiot*
There actually are a fair number of older books that aren't in the Goodreads database; but normally, if a book IS in the database, it will show up in a title/ author search, and if it doesn't and you go to add it manually, the computer will bring up a list of similar or identical titles already here on Goodreads so that you can double-check. However, I've just discovered that some time ago, when I manually added Famous Ghost Stories, edited by Bennett Cerf, although neither of those things happened, it was already in the database. So, we now have two records for the same book. The ISBN is 0394701402 (there's also a 13-digit one, which we can ignore here); it's not on the book, and so isn't in my duplicate record, but it is on the original record. The correct publication dates are 1944 for the original and 1974 for the reprint; the original record incorrectly gave a single date of 1956. At first, I thought this might be a different edition; but checking the ISBN in OCLC's World Catalog confirmed that it is in fact my 1944/74 version.I corrected the date on the original record without a problem; but when I tried to add the ISBN to my record (hoping that would combine the two), the program wouldn't let me do it. Since the only "reviews" on that record are mine and a to-read listing by one of my friends, I thought I'd just delete the record. But even though it has less than five reviews, the computer still tells me that only a super-librarian can delete it. Sorry to have created so much confusion! What should I do in this case?
I took a look and found the problem (I think). The two editions of the book were not combined. I think that you need a super to delete books with more than five reviews or if there are no other editions (i.e., it's not combined with any other books).So I fixed the editor's name, and combined. You had put (editor) in the author name box. What you need to do is use the 'add role' link instead that comes right after the box. So I changed the author names to match exactly, combined the books, then deleted your duplicate. Now, your review has been automatically changed to the correct edition.
Wonderful! Thanks a bunch, Vicki Girl. I'll go in and properly add the contributor's names ASAP.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/64...
Also, this book has the same ISBN number as the same author's When Gods Bleed. The manual add wouldn't allow me to put in the same ISBN number for both books. (Why do I suspect these are self-published?)
Thanks!