Batch of ingram additions with impossible ISBN

[Alex]

Hey everyone,

So, I looked into this weird ISBN earlier today 9785558805048.

It's a perfectly valid ISBN, but what's weird about it is the book it's connected to: Rosy Is Rose. The reason this is weird is because the region code in this ISBN (first digit after 978) is 5 (indicating former USSR), instead of 1 or 0. What was even weirder was that ingram was the one to add it to GR.

No information turns up for this ISBN from a google search, or Worldcat search, or direct amazon search.

Following a hunch, I then checked the ISBNs preceding and following this, and hit jackpot:

9785558804980
9785558804997
9785558805000
9785558805017
9785558805024
9785558805031
9785558805055
9785558805062
9785558805079
9785558805086
9785558805093
9785558805100

All of these books:
- were imported in the same batch from ingram (June 6 2012, 09:40 PM GMT+2)
- were imported without publication dates or covers (where these exist they have been added by a librarian)
- have not been improved upon by other bots or ingram since creation.

How these ISBNs are not like normal ISBNs:
- Group 5 publisher code for what seem to be English editions
- Despite crediting various publishers, these hypothetical group-5 books would all have the same publisher code.
- There would have then had to be some sort of arrangement amongst all these publishers sharing this publisher code so that they would not use the same product code and create ISBN conflicts.

All-in-all, I think this is impossible. This must be a messed up import, or else these aren't really ISBNs, but some other identifier that GR accepts and that I'm not aware of.

I was hoping to hear people's thoughts about this before I put in a request to see if this can be sorted out by staff. These can't really be valid, right?

[Lobstergirl]

I can't say whether they are "real" isbns or not, but there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of these 555-beginning isbns on GR. A lot of them are ebooks imported without covers. They've been importing for years.

Given that they exist, I'm not sure if this is a "problem" or if it is, what the "solution" might be. I mean seriously, what would a solution be? NAB them all? You might be in search of a solution which has no matching problem.

[Krazykiwi]

There was a busted ingram batch recently, there is a post about it in feedback. I cant dig it out for you because i am on the app right now but if you search for ingram in the topic titles it should be easy to find. Probably worth posting this there in as additional data in case it is from the same batch.

ETA; NVM, I just realised this is an import from 2012. Probably still worth reporting in Feedback, they may be able to just clean them all up.

[Emy]

I have a suspicion that I've found a few of those FSU weird-ISBN ebooks listed on platforms like VitalSource (not that one specifically, but similar ones). BUT I can't remember which, when or anything else really :) Since they're old, I'd leave them alone as we can't prove they never existed with that ISBN.

[Alex]

Lobstergirl: The solution would be to NAB them all, I think, if they were indisputably not real identifiers for books. As for whether it's a problem... maybe not? But I wouldn't spend my leisure time on Goodreads if I didn't want to try to fix these kinds of things. Plus, if they can get rid of hundreds of thousands of invalid entries, that would certainly be a load off the database.

Krazykiwi: Well, it can't hurt to report it, all the better if they can do something about it.

Emy: I followed up on your suggestion to look into VitalSource, and I came up with this record:

https://www.vitalsource.com/products/...

eText ISBN: 9785WDTE00056

This is certainly not a valid ISBN. The valid ISBN is noted on the page though as: 9780470060674.

It seems perhaps that these group-5 ISBNs are actually faux-ISBN identifiers used internally by ingram?