Goodreads Librarians Group discussion
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Book Assigned ASIN That It Shouldn't Have (I Think)
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I left a message for you on another thread. ALL! of the books will soon have this nonsense. The system has always assigned them, but they weren't visible to us. Back in either May or June (right before Jaclyn went on leave) they told us that this was going to happen. It started in full-force on November 24.
Didn't reply to it at the time because I had to drive someplace, but I did read it. Sorry if it seemed like I ignored it.The ASIN thing seems to me like just a pointless change that does nothing but slap a Special Proprietary Amazon Number on something that shouldn't even have it in the first place for some vaguely shady reason I would probably be able to articulate my theory on better were I not congested and about to go to bed. Goodreads books without ISBNs already have an identifier, but apparently nobody at Amazon ever looked at a Goodreads URL and saw that series of numbers that comes before the title. Has nobody on Staff explained why they're doing this?
(Also, any input on if an ISBN-less self-published ebook obtained via an official author storefront can get added to the site or not?)
Do you have to sign up for her newsletter? Or is the book available for straight download? As long as it's the latter there should be no issue, depending upon who is hosting her site. I honestly don't understand why the newsletter thing is such a big deal. Most authors seem to do them nowadays. Or perhaps it just seems that way since I have been on an Urban-Fantasy kick for a long while now. The legality of what is or isn't allowed makes my head hurt. I started reading the very oldest threads. It has been interesting to see how things that we take for granted now came into being. There seemed to be less restrictions before Amazon took over. It truly is like a bunch of brats not wanting to share their toys, even though MOST of the toys are the same. We cannot use certain sites, and yet their watermarks appear on Amazon constantly. I am not talking about just used books, but rather ones that should have a publisher's cover. It is quite odd. They seem to have no oversight whatsoever. I click the "Report an issue with this product or seller" at least once a week, and have yet to see them correct anything. Just today an author I was checking on had 3 of his books combined. They have similar titles, but are not the same book. Last year I had an author who had 10!! books together. But by far the most egregious, offensive mistake I found was for two completely different named authors whose works were combined. One is an American art instructor who teaches kids how to draw. Those idiots had his book combined with a Korean author's book on how to talk to teen about suicide! How disparate of topics!
Anyway, I will step off of my soapbox. Normally it is the powers that be not knowing that graphic novels and comics are not the same thing that get me riled.
I hope you feel better soon.
Tawnya wrote: "Do you have to sign up for her newsletter? Or is the book available for straight download? As long as it's the latter there should be no issue, depending upon who is hosting her site."It's a pay-what-you-want download on the author's Gumroad store. If you don't have a Gumroad account, you have to provide an e-mail address for the site to log the download and send you a link to the file for future use, but it's not a newsletter sign-up. Same situation as plenty of indie publishers out there who sell ebooks on their site, just using an existing storefront site instead of her own website.
Also I totally get what you mean re: unintentional combines. I spent a good long while trying to get someone to uncombine two short story collections by the same author with extremely similar names (thankfully someone seems to have done it and just not said anything in the thread), and in an earlier cleanup thread I had a few months ago, an entirely unrelated Spanish book had somehow been listed on the editions page for the book I was trying to get cleaned up.
Thanks for the well wishes!
I am unsure about the book. I haven't encountered that form before. You definitely want someone more experienced than me. Hopefully one of the supers will answer.
Just giving this a quick bump to get a second opinion on the validity of this ISBN-free ebook.
Another bump for input on the ebook question.
The physical edition is a super limited indie release in collaboration with a friend of the author who runs a super indie press that mostly publishes zines. It does not have an ISBN or an ASIN and is very out of print. It has never had a Kindle release either, so it would not receive an ASIN through that method either.
Despite this, the bot has assigned it a random ASIN. This ASIN doesn't correspond to anything that's on Amazon, and the ASIN was assigned just a few weeks ago, so if it were a secondhand seller on Amazon that the bot imported, it would still be there.
1. Should this ASIN be there?
2. If not, is there any possible way to remove it without completely invalidating the book?
3. I've seen people talk about how the bot is purposefully assigning ASINs to items now for some reason. Why, exactly? What purpose does that even serve? In cases like these, you can't search the ASIN on Amazon since it never had a corresponding listing on the site. What does this accomplish?
4. The book's ebook release is a PDF download hosted on a storefront the author uses for her self-published works. Is this edition OK to be added to Goodreads since it's not already on the site?