Questions about Goodreads e-book policies

[Drace]

While browsing my library's ebook program and looking books up on Goodreads, I ended up with some questions regarding how Goodreads handles e-books:

1. How does Goodreads handle changes to an e-book's cover? Sometimes a publisher will change an e-book's cover to promote a TV/movie adaptation or just change the art to something less dated, and I was wondering what the Goodreads policy is for when something like this happens. Is the art supposed to be changed on the e-book edition page, or is a new edition supposed to be created and treated like an Alternate Cover Edition?

2. I noticed that a few books have multiple e-book editions listed, but the ISBNs for some of these alternate e-book editions don't seem to exist. They don't show up on the publisher page, and Googling them either yields no results or results from obscure websites that definitely don't qualify as trusted Goodreads sources. Outside of those rather shady websites, the only place I can find these ISBNs listed is Goodreads. How should these particular editions be handled? Do they get deleted from the site, or something else entirely?

Thanks in advance to anyone who can answer my questions.

[Emily]

1. They are alternate cover editions like any other book. Generally the most recent edition should be given the older ISBN. Sometimes someone has created a blank edition with the new cover without specifying it is an ACE, so the ISBN can be manually moved to it and notes made.

2. Sometimes ISBNs have been entered incorrectly or are otherwise invalid, but it would be best to ask about specific examples if you are not sure. If they are indeed invalid (and are not Kobo or Nook IDs) then they would likely be merged with a valid edition.

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Emily wrote: "1. They are alternate cover editions like any other book. Generally the most recent edition should be given the older ISBN. Sometimes someone has created a blank edition with the new cover without ..."

Thanks for the information. I can confirm that the e-book edition ISBNs that don't seem to exist aren't Kobo/Nook IDs - they're definitely in the format of ISBN numbers, searching them on the Kobo and Nook websites doesn't bring up any results, and the ISBN that is valid is used across every non-Kindle e-book platform.

I'll be making a thread to request corrections to the e-books in question shortly.

[Renske]

For question 2, it is always good to check in the changelog the source of the number to know if it was added by an user or an automatic import.
There are some ebooks around that look strange and it is impossible to find data for but as they come from the sources used for automatic imports they seem to be valid.

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Renske wrote: "For question 2, it is always good to check in the changelog the source of the number to know if it was added by an user or an automatic import.
There are some ebooks around that look strange and it..."

I'm not a librarian so I don't think I have access to those changelogs, but thank you anyways.

[Drace]

Created the thread to ask for these corrections. If either librarian in here is interested in tackling it, you can find it here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Thanks again for providing answers to my questions. They were a huge help.

[Sonia Cristina]

Hi. I hope I can put my question here:

I created a new edition, the Kobo edition, for The Stiff in the Study, by author Shéa MacLeod:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6...

I used the ISBN that appears in the Kobo page: 1230000981880 but Goodreads says it's invalid.
https://www.kobo.com/pt/pt/ebook/the-...

To make do, I left the ISBN part in blank and put the number in italic in the synopsys.

What's the correct thing to do?

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Kobo cannot be used as a source of book data. Please see: https://help.goodreads.com/s/article/...