book has pages on web, none in API

[Ricardo]

The book "Plain Words," Kindle Edition, 21189746, appears to have 320 pages on the web, but the API does not report any page count. (This kind of problem seems pretty common.)

[Michael]

This is likely because of licensing terms. We are under contract to not syndicate that "num pages" data out for that book. Sorry.

[Ricardo]

Thanks. I thought this sort of thing was user-curated by the librarians. If the issue is with some subset of books that are pre-loaded by a publisher, could the data be subsequently provided by readers/librarians as an independent and unencumbered source?

It is frustrating to find that the "big shared book database" is actually not able to provide a uniform set of data across all its access methods.

[Michael]

I agree it is frustrating. Goodreads user submitted data is available via our public api, but we decided it is better to have data some of the time than no data at all.

[Ricardo]

So can you confirm that when I encounter this, I can ask the librarians to add the page count as provided by me, the user, which will then become visible via the API?

[Michael]

If the librarians actually have access to a legitimate copyright safe place to get the data from, then yes, i believe that by updating the data it will become visible to api consumers.