Goodreads Librarians Group discussion
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Why is this allowed to happen, is it a known issue/going to be fixed?
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Okay, a little more search term manipulation found me the following comment -> https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...Since that topic has been locked, I will respond here.
It is most definitely a bug with the Amazon-> GR import because it was never a problem until later in 2022 when the import scripts were modified to ameliorate the horrendous delays created by the policy change restricting book adds to librarians.
The association of an ebook ISBN with a Kindle edition has been in practice for many many years and was never imported when the Kindle edition was added by a bot. Not until late 2022. The only change was on the import bot behavior, not on the Amazon functionality, or author/publisher actions.
Here is a May/June 2022 (pre-bot change to expand the database) example of how it worked (and should still work) before the bots started adding ebook ISBN's to Kindle editions or vice versa:https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6...
If you audit the log to view the sequence of edits you will notice that the ebook edition (this one) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6... was added to the GR database prior to the Kindle edition auto-import from Amazon. At the time of import, the bot created a new Kindle edition here -> https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6... despite the ebook ISBN being associated with the Kindle edition on Amazon. As expected, it created a new/separate edition. It didn't add the Kindle ASIN to the existing ebook record or change the format to Kindle like it is currently doing.
The two things a bot did wrong in this work example are 1)add the ebook ISBN 10 to the Kindle edition last month (wrongly IMO) because it wasn't already populated in the ebook edition along with the ISBN 13 and 2)create a duplicate paperback edition in Dec 2022 using the ISBN 10 of the paperback edition which only had the ISBN 13 entered. Both of these bad edits occurred after the change to the import scripts announced here -> https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
There are literally thousands (probably tens of thousands) of book records that need corrections because of this late 2022 change to expand the database and the subsequent damage to the data that is ongoing.
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Closing this thread as reports surrounding site functionality should be reported via the Contact Us form (see this post). Alternatively, feel welcome to add a post to the existing thread for feedback. A single example of any issue is sufficient and we'll follow up if we need more input.
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https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2... was added by the author with the epub ISBN on Feb 25, 2024
publisher page -> https://www.jms-books.com/ellie-thoma...
Then on Mar 1, 2024 "Goodreads" set the format to Kindle, added the Kindle ASIN & ISBN 10.
Instead of creating a new separate Kindle edition, it is importing into existing valid epub editions with ISBN's. Technically, I understand this is likely happening because on Amazon when you enter your Kindle ebook info there is the option to include an existing author/publisher registered ebook ISBN, which is "hidden" on the book page because the unique identifier for Kindle ebooks is supposed to be the ASIN. This "hidden" ISBN is in the Amazon search index though, which allows you to search the Amazon database with it.
Whatever bot is responsible, it seems to be using that "hidden" ISBN to search for an existing ebook GR record, then changing it to a Kindle one. In the example above, readers who got an ebook ARC and had shelved it prior to Mar 01, now have the Kindle edition on their shelves.
Is this behavior a known issue that development is working to correct, or do authors & publishers need to stop including the ISBN's for their ebooks (if they have one) when they create their Kindle editions on Amazon? Something that I know personally has been common practice for 10+ years.