Goodreads Librarians Group discussion
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Questions (not edit requests)
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Amazon destroyed the author's database.
All authors need, that's the thing, all comic issues have tons of variants, and they have now been added to the database, along with foreign editions and a ton of clutter like promos, previews, comic sets, toy sets, etc.The amount of work needed now is just insane, I don't mind going through my favorite series and fix some of this mess, but if the bots start undoing the work, I'm out.
btw... good luck cleaning up Stan Lee's database.
Just a heads up to all comic librarians, please stop removing the series' date from the singles, finding these comics now are a lot more difficult without it.Just keep the titles like this: https://www.goodreads.com/series/274129
Bad combines (not only are they not the same title, they are combined with a title by an entirely different author):https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
Elizabeth (Alaska) wrote: "Bad combines (not only are they not the same title, they are combined with a title by an entirely different author)"This would be funny if it wasn't so depressing. GR's bot developers have many sins to answer for.
This book has both ISBNs and an ASIN. The ASIN appears to be for a Kindle book, the ISBNs are probably for an ebook. I'll leave as is.https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7...
I'm not sure if this was reported before, but 270 junk editions with ISBN 9999999999, added and combined as recently as May 6.https://www.goodreads.com/work/editio...
David wrote: "I'm not sure if this was reported before, but 250 junk editions with ISBN 9999999999, added as recently as May 6.https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8......"
Plus they are all different French titles with various French author names added to an English-title comic book, and the French titles had their edition language changed from French to English.
And still the bots march on...
Renske wrote: "The whole 'second-hand books with only an ASIN' situation is a repeat of years ago. At that time it was quite soon decided it wasn't a good idea to flood the database with those."The "bot overwrites librarian edits" is also a repeat of some years ago - was also stopped soon because it was just messing up too much. (was stopped way faster than now)
Guess that happens when you have too many of the older staff leaving.
The bot needs to stop making new 2-space profiles. We've always been told that the import will come to the 1-space profile. Librarians can move if necessary. I honestly don't understand why it would make new profiles.
The bot is adding Cover Art as secondary author for existing editions, e.g.:https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...
...which is funny, as we don't credit cover artists as authors.
I removed it from a few of those editions but at 2k+ entries (and more being added), I just don't see the point of doing it anymore.
Javier wrote: "The bot is adding Cover Art as secondary author for existing editions, e.g.:https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4......"
Thanks for the advisory.
Javier wrote: "The bot is adding Cover Art as secondary author for existing editions, e.g.:https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4......"
It’s also got that “author” as primary author on editions that are Invalid in and of themselves.
Scott wrote: "It just gets worse and worse."Yes. We all know how much I love Goodreads, but to be honest, whoever made this new bot decision wasn't thinking clearly. It's even scary to think that decision-maker isn't familiar with the Goodreads database and how truly fabulous it is. This decision is causing the deterioration of its very product.
Elizabeth (Alaska) wrote: "The bot needs to stop making new 2-space profiles. We've always been told that the import will come to the 1-space profile. Librarians can move if necessary. I honestly don't understand why it wo..."
Not just new 2-space profiles, it also adds new books to existing 2-space profiles.
Mod
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4......"
Thanks Javier - I've reported this to the team.
Elizabeth (Alaska) wrote: "It’s also got that “author” as primary author on editions that are Invalid in and of themselves."Cover Art (known to his friends as Arty) is quite a prolific author, with an average rating of 3.94, 47,433 ratings, 5,026 reviews and 2,268 distinct works.
I still remember the 2,000th book party we had. Even at 95, Cover was still the life of the party.
ETA: an artist's rendition of Cover, in his 2,000th book party.
https://imgur.com/zOyKyux
Image by DALL-E, drawn in a shelter while hearing the sound of a missile attack sirens (I'm fine, it's probably a false alarm).
David wrote: "Elizabeth (Alaska) wrote: "It’s also got that “author” as primary author on editions that are Invalid in and of themselves."Cover Art (known to his friends as Arty) is quite a p..."
Hahaha!
David wrote: "Cover Art (known to his friends as Arty) is quite a prolific author, with an average rating of 3.94, 47,433 ratings, 5,026 reviews and 2,268 distinct works.I still remember the 2,000th book party we had..."
Thanks for the laugh, David! I love the author's picture.
It appears that Arty has several relatives and imitators on Goodreads, including Coverbook Art, COVER SCIENCE ART, and Cover Art (sexy). A great author like Arty always attracts so many wannabes.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/simi...
Mesembryanthemum wrote: "It appears that Arty has several relatives and imitators on Goodreads, including Coverbook Art, COVER SCIENCE ART, and Cover Art (sexy). A great author like Arty always attracts so many wannabes."LOL - goodness gracious! I'm so glad GR has gotten the bot to make these improvements.
Mod
David 😂😂
We've cleaned up Cover Art's profile, sadly destroying his prolific career in the process.
Arty is faster than you.While you destroyed his career, he quickly wrote three more books, which the bot promptly added to his profile.
Mod
Another wrinkle in this whole bot mess.I've been working on getting books out of (Rescuing it used to be called) the Unknown author listing for over 10 years. I've been concentrating on the listings titled like "Unknown Book 10257629" for example. I have my bookmarked page listing for Unknown set to 100 titles per page. I bookmarked where the Unknown Book listings started. That was roughly page 1500. Now it starts at page 2815. That means over 130,000 new titles that come before the letter U have been added to the Unknown author books. I have no idea how many have been added after U, but I'll bet it's a bunch as well.
Bargle wrote: "Another wrinkle in this whole bot mess.I've been working on getting books out of (Rescuing it used to be called) the Unknown author listing for over 10 years. I've been concentrating on the listin..."
And unfortunately, the vast majority of those recently added books are likely Invalid.
Bargle wrote: "Another wrinkle in this whole bot mess.I've been working on getting books out of (Rescuing it used to be called) the Unknown author listing for over 10 years. I've been concentrating on the listin..."
the "unknown author" profile has millions of works - and quite a lot have valid authors. (bot imports most of them recently)
as it were way fewer works I tried to correct books there, but in the time I corrected one (even if the name was on the cover and no research needed) 3 others were added.
Now the profile is so huge I can't even open it properly. and I've seen that it's now something with 4 million guess finding the to be resucued unknown might become more difficult.
I reported it a few days ago, as follows:"A bunch of librarians and I have noticed in the changelogs that an alledged bot called "amazon_catalog" has been adding editions and work mistakenly, not to mention changing information that is correct to a wrong status, as mentioned in this post here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
I have come across this mistake with an edition of Lord of the Rings, that I was able to correct and combine with the pre-existing work. But it was added to the GR Catalog as an unknown author's work, with no info besides the book cover and the ISBN, not to mention the ISBN10 was logged into as an ASIN (which it is NOT). You can check that on these editions' changelogs:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
"
Their only reply was "We are sorry for the inconvenience and we appreciate your understanding and patience as we work toward a resolution for this issue."
If GR knows what's going on and what's causing it, they need to stop it from working WHILE they solve the issue. Leaving it running loose while they try to solve it, just makes their and our jobs harder in the long run.
giuli wrote: "not to mention the ISBN10 was logged into as an ASIN (which it is NOT)"They started doing this months ago. The ISBN10 in the ASIN position is as intended. See:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
Most especially the first sentence of the 2nd paragraph:
For physical books, in many cases the ASIN and the ISBN10 will be the same.
Every time I look up one of these 'unknown author" books on Amazon, there is actually no author credited on the book page, so I don't know what they're doing over there.
Scott wrote: "Every time I look up one of these 'unknown author" books on Amazon, there is actually no author credited on the book page, so I don't know what they're doing over there."Sometimes trying a different amazon locale (.co.uk | .de | .co.jp | .fr | .ca | .it | .es | .in | .com.mx) helps . Same goes for author "_" (it's always com.br in this case).
At least those are actual books. Half full glass, half full glass 🙄
Scott wrote: "Every time I look up one of these 'unknown author" books on Amazon, there is actually no author credited on the book page, so I don't know what they're doing over there."Well, that makes sense. If there is no author on their book page, the author would obviously be Unknown. But keep in mind, I don't think Amazon actually does the data entry. It is the author or publisher (or 2nd hand bookseller) and that person simply fails to fill in the author field.
So many publishers, and so suddenly, though?
Scott wrote: "So many publishers, and so suddenly, though?"The bot is going into the Amazon database and getting everything in the Kindle and Books database and pulling it over. Old, new, everything. For what reason they thought this was wise and wonderful I don't know. Surely, you've seen my post that I thought this was not a wise decision. And other posts.
There are stray authors on the Authors with Similar Names lists. There always have been, but the proliferation is new. I have mentioned this previously. The problem comes up when the bot marks the associated books as Invalid. There is no longer a way to see the books because the bot has marked them Invalid. When all of the books for that author are so marked, you get a "you've lost your way" page and there is nothing on the disambiguate page.
One could simply merge the author to clear it, but without being able to see which books are associated with the author, it's hard to know if this is the right thing to do. The only way to find these books is to go to the Librarian edit log.
Today there were 4 Kindle books that I could see no reason for them to have been marked Invalid. I managed to change the author, merge them with the primary work ID, and then merge the stray author.
But there are simply too many of these for that nonsense. How are we supposed to clear the Authors with Similar Names lists?
Not sure if it has been mentioned yet, but lots of books by various authors importing under KAVNLON "brand" (which is how they are listed at Amazon for some reason.)
I just fixed one of those after a mbr request. Only 5 minutes ago.It was an Italian book and was correctly listed on amazon.it, but sadly was KAVNLON on amazon.com.
Scott wrote: "Not sure if it has been mentioned yet, but lots of books by various authors importing under KAVNLON "brand" (which is how they are listed at Amazon for some reason.)"I was working on those too as I noticed that many italian books were interested but now the page is no longer available :/
Bad combine: Silas Marner by George Eliot combined with Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I will separate, but noting here for Jaclyn.https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
amazon_catalog changed this book into an entirely different book.https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
Scott wrote: "amazon_catalog changed this book into an entirely different book.https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1..."
Wow. Does it appear on Amazon with the same ISBN or something? Argh.
Scott wrote: "yes, it changed to match Amazon."So the publisher used an ISBN that was already in use?
EDIT: Yes, that's what happened. The publisher re-used the ISBN. See:
For the golf book:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...
and for the children's book:
https://www.amazon.com/Hes-Got-Whole-...
Elizabeth (Alaska) wrote: "For the golf book:https://www.amazon.com/Hes-Got-Whole-...
and for the children's book:
https://www.amazon.com/Hes-Got-Whole-..."
They are both the link for the children's book. I can't find the golf book on Amazon searching by ISBN.
lethe wrote: "Elizabeth (Alaska) wrote: "For the golf book:https://www.amazon.com/Hes-Got-Whole-...
and for the children's book:
https://www.amazon.com/Hes-Got-Whole-..."
They are both the link for the child..."
Sorry, I edited my post. For me, if I just click the buy link on the children's book, it goes directly to the golf book. But I'm in the US, and your buy link probably doesn't go there.
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Yes, you can just mark all of them invalid.