Merging books where one has no ISBN

[Rick]

I decided to go through the Time Life WWII series and do some cleanup including adding the missing 25 volumes to the series. The first book I started with was Across the Rhine which has presented me with a new challenge: someone added what appears to be a database entry with no ISBN which I thought was not possible. Here's the book in question:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4...

If you do a search on "across the rhine" the first result looks like the correct book, in fact the problematic book has the author's last name incorrect. My thought was to change the author's name on the book listed here to Franklin M. Davis Jr. first, then merge the problem book with the correct one (since two people have already reviewed the incorrect version of the book).

Is that the correct procedure for this particular issue? I have not done a merge before and want to make sure I have everything clear before I take any action.

The correct book is here:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6...

[Scott]

Yes, the comma should be taken out and then you can merge them.

A lot of books don't have an ISBN; they didn't come into standard use until around 1970.

[Rick]

This book was published in 1980 so I will fix the author names (the correct version has the comma as well for some reason) and then do the merge. Thanks for the reminder about ISBN, I was thinking that since it was a newer book it should have had one and forgot that it isn't a required field.

[Rick]

Now that I've got the author names correct I combined the two entries via the author page (it took me a bit to figure out that's where it can be done). The numbers look correct, the two reviews from the bogus entry were added to the 12 on the correct edition which now shows 14 reviews.

It looks like I don't need to use the tip from the Combine versus merge section of the manual since the ISBN-less edition seems to have been folded into the primary edition already.

[Rick]

Wow I really got myself in deep with this WWII series, a tiny part of me is regretting it. There are only 39 books in the series but after adding all the different entries created by users to the series I have 64 listed. Lots of clean-up to do, more than I expected.

https://www.goodreads.com/series/1061...

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Rick wrote: "It looks like I don't need to use the tip from the Combine versus merge section of the manual since the ISBN-less edition seems to have been folded into the primary edition already."

It was combined, but not merged. I took care of that.

[Scott]

I tend to use combine and merge interchangeably; I forgot they were different actions.

[Rick]

I tried to figure out whether it needed a merge or not and didn't think that it was required. I am running into the same thing on many other books in the series, for example Battle of the Bulge has five distinct entries (some with Time-Life as the author) that I am wading my way through. I will take another shot at reading about the merge function in case I need it for one of the other titles. Thanks for the heads-up/