Goodreads Librarians Group

message 1: by Tal (last edited Mar 01, 2024 12:37PM) (new)

Mar 01, 2024 09:57AM

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message 2: by Tal (last edited Mar 01, 2024 08:32PM) (new)

Mar 01, 2024 02:49PM

The bot issue seems to be even worse than I reported above. Catastrophic from a cataloging perspective. Further investigation shows that "Goodreads" switched ~~dozens~~ hundreds of my shelved editions from Kindle to ebook, nook, paperback, hardcover or even in a couple cases, no format. I cannot recall how Delete works in the new book status system, but the results are similar to having my valid edition merged (deleted) into a different edition, which used to happen far too often even before bad bots so I suspect in these cases the valid Kindle editions are getting "Deleted" rather than set to "Invalid" and whatever edition my Kindle edition got merged into is then what shows (incorrectly) on my shelves.

Example(s):

This is the (Kindle) edition I own and had shelved here on GR:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9...

This is the edition now listed on my GR shelf, which I never owned or shelved:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4...

Did the Kindle edition get merged into the paperback here?

Another example:

This is the Kindle edition I own, and had shelved on GR: (I also was able to find the orig Amazon book page from the Wayback machine)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...

This is the edition GR is saying I shelved, which I most certainly did not:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...

So how did these editions get switched?

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message 3: by Melanie (last edited Mar 01, 2024 04:40PM) (new)

Mar 01, 2024 04:37PM

There is currently a known bug that is causing the amazon_catalog
bot to set editions to Invalid in error (and it's not just out of print editions, it can happen to any Kindle edition).

It's been going on for some time and I don't know if support is working on a fix.

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message 4: by Melanie (last edited Mar 01, 2024 04:40PM) (new)

Mar 01, 2024 04:38PM

Tal wrote: "The bot issue seems to be even worse than I reported above. Catastrophic from a cataloging perspective. Further investigation shows that "Goodreads" switched dozens of my shelved editions from Kind..."

I have reset the two Kindle editions from your example to Public (it may take some time for the Invalid message to disappear from the book page). They were not deleted, just caught up in the bot error.

I imagine the editions being set as Invalid may be what has forced the other editions onto your shelves. Now that I've reset the Kindle editions as Public, give it a day or two to see if that fixes the edition shown on your shelf.

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message 5: by Tal (new)

Mar 02, 2024 11:07AM

Melanie wrote: "There is currently a known bug that is causing the amazon_catalog
bot to set editions to Invalid in error (and it's not just out of print editions, it can happen to any Kindle edition).

It's been ..."

I don't doubt it is happening to currently available Kindle editions as well, but I can only confirm it affects every single one of my out of print Kindle editions, where there is no longer a corresponding Amazon book page for the ASIN in my GR book record. Of which there are hundreds since my Amazon Kindle library numbers in the thousands and many of the publishers I read a decade ago have gone out of business.

I'm just now starting to research if this destructive process is also affecting my Kindle books that had ACE's created later on where the ASIN was moved from my edition to another record. So far every Kindle edition I had shelved that is now missing its ASIN has had the format changed to ebook, up to 77 so far. Haven't dug into the logs yet to see if this was bot damage or human damage because someone saw Kindle editions with empty ASIN fields and got delete happy after the process changed to move the ASIN instead of leaving it with the original record. Either way, what a disaster!

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message 6: by gem (new)

Mar 02, 2024 11:16AM

I would recommend contacting Support directly or put Attn: Jaclyn in your thread title to get GR staff awareness and input on this issue.

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message 7: by Tal (last edited Mar 02, 2024 11:43AM) (new)

Mar 02, 2024 11:36AM

Melanie wrote: "I have reset the two Kindle editions from your example to Public (it may take some time for the Invalid message to disappear from the book page). They were not deleted, just caught up in the bot error.

I imagine the editions being set as Invalid may be what has forced the other editions onto your shelves. Now that I've reset the Kindle editions as Public, give it a day or two to see if that fixes the edition shown on your shelf."

Thanks for the effort, but I didn't post hoping for a fix, or hundreds of fixes in my case. I posted to provide a dataset of real damage the GR automated processes are doing to user shelves, to demonstrate the huge scope of the impact. The fact that this seems to be a known issue among volunteer librarians and that further searching in this group yielded me the following topic from last summer -> https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/... leaves me with one conclusion, they know and it's acceptable collateral damage from their perspective.

Regarding your resetting the editions to Public, one had no effect and the other added a second copy back to my shelves so it said I had read it 2x. Like I said, I don't expect my examples to be fixed by volunteer librarians, what would amount to putting a band-aid on an arterial bleed.

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message 8: by Melanie (new)

Mar 02, 2024 12:21PM

Tal wrote: "Melanie wrote: "I have reset the two Kindle editions from your example to Public (it may take some time for the Invalid message to disappear from the book page). They were not deleted, just caught ..."

I fixed those 2 because I wasn't sure if resetting them to Public would actually fix the shelving issue. So more just testing that part out. And based on your response it sounds like it didn't actually fix it so that's good to know.

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message 9: by Jaclyn, Librarian Program Manager (new)

Mar 04, 2024 03:22AM

Mod

Hi Tal. Thanks for the feedback, we are aware of books being incorrectly set to invalid / deleted.

We have an open thread for reports of import issues. While it's not necessary to report this case there as it's already been reported, please add any future concerns to that conversation - a single post with examples for any unreported issue is perfect. Alternatively, please feel welcome to contact support about issues surrounding site functionality.

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