Poor First Edition Choice

[Kent]

An edition has been set as the Primary that is neither commonly available, nor a good cover. It is a library binding with plain green cloth from teh Gregg Press series of special hardcover printings. A much better choice would be the actual first edition paperback at https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...

[Abcdarian]

Unless a default is set by the author, the primary edition is the one that has been shelved/rated by readers most often, so not something librarians have any control over.

[Kent]

I was hoping a super-librarian might be able to do something. Either directly, or possibly by combining the edition into a better one, then recreating it later.

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Librarians, including supers, do not have the ability to set defaults.

And deliberately merging and recreating valid editions to manipulate the default would an abuse of librarian powers, and not something any of our supers would do. Not to mention unfair to those users who might have deliberately chosen that particular edition.

[Kent]

I'm not suggesting anyone do anything they shouldn't. I've only been active on Goodreads for a short time, and was simply making a suggestion (in the suggestions sub-forum)

If the author were active on goodreads he could select any edition he wanted, so I didn't think it was a stretch that such a thing might be well within the norm. It seemed to me that it might be perfectly standard to make such a choice, for an edition that better represents the book, instead of a plain green square (that I had to hover over when it came up in my suggestion list to be able to identify at all). I think it's likely that the vast majority of people who rated the book did so because it was the first one that came up, not because they proactively chose an edition that only sold a few hundred copies to libraries in the 70s.

I may well be wrong, and now that I've been chastised, will not ask again.