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Questions (from Librarians only) > Adding a book to a series without ISBN

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message 1: by Kamila (new)

Kamila | 1360 comments Hi, is there a way of searching and adding a book to a series (through the series edit page), if the book in question does not have ISBN or ASIN ? Obviously, you can search by title, but if there are many books with similar titles on goodreads, there are just so many results - and also I went through them, but the book I needed to add wasn't one of them (might take some time to show..?)

However, it would be great if it would be possible to search and add books using the number of the edition.


message 2: by Scott (new)

Scott | 8608 comments title and author doesn't narrow it down?


message 3: by Kamila (new)

Kamila | 1360 comments It doesn't give me any results, when I put both title and author in the search field :-(


message 4: by Mesembryanthemum (last edited Sep 02, 2024 06:56PM) (new)

Mesembryanthemum | 195 comments If a book doesn't have an ISBN or ASIN, and the series search can't find it, you could contact support for help. Perhaps they have a staff-only way to add the book to a series using the work ID or edition ID. If not, it wouldn't hurt for them to get another report about the "series search failure" bug.

And here are a few tidbits about the series search, because it's different from the regular Goodreads search:

- You can't include both author and title in a search (as you found out).
Correction: You can include both author and title.


- Newly added books take days to show up in a series search. This is also true for the regular search, but IMHO the series search seems to take even longer.

- Worst of all, the series search results are truncated. If there's more than a page of results, it shows only a percentage of the books that a regular GR search would find. (Small lists are chopped by about half; larger lists are chopped by up to 90%.) For a bit more info, see this discussion.


message 5: by Scott (new)

Scott | 8608 comments You can include the author if the title isn't precise enough.


Mesembryanthemum | 195 comments Scott wrote: "You can include the author if the title isn't precise enough."

Oops! And thanks! I'm glad to know that this works. I've edited my previous post to cross out that incorrect information.


message 7: by Kamila (new)

Kamila | 1360 comments Thanks for the tips!
5 days later, the search still doesn't give me any results after typing in both title and author. So I will contact the staff for help.


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