Goodreads Librarians Group discussion
Requests for Superlibrarians
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Drace wrote: "The following edition of the book Irregular Army is listed with a junk ASIN created by the Goodreads bot. This ASIN is not valid and does not correspond to any existing Kindle or Audible editions o..."Be careful with requests like these...many of these editions that no longer look "valid" are in that state because of the botpocalypse that merged ebooks/kindles and many were ACE's to boot. I find it odd that there is no ACE for the ebook edition, and the edition you want deleted is an alternate cover of that ISBN.
The ebooks don't have ACEs because the original ebook editions were invalidly merged (one with a legit Kindle edition with a valid ASIN, one with this edition that has an ASIN that does not exist anywhere on Amazon - I've checked the US, UK, CA, and AU versions of the site). I asked staff to recreate the ebook editions by removing the ISBNs from the invalidly merged editions and re-create the ebook editions, but because the original cover art (helmet in the center of the cover) is no longer on the publisher website, only the post-paperback cover art (helmet at the bottom of the cover), plus the fact that there's not an archived version of the publisher site from before the cover art changed, there's no way to recreate the original pre-ACE editions with cover art from a valid source.The UK Kindle edition, ASIN B00G2DO7JO, has been given an ACE using the post-paperback cover art by the publisher on Amazon, but that edition was never created on Goodreads, and the one I link to in the OP that I believe is invalid is still using the original art. I don't think it's an ACE of any kind.
Drace wrote: " ...one with this edition that has an ASIN that does not exist anywhere on Amazon - I've checked the US, UK, CA, and AU versions of the site"There are thousands and thousands of ASIN's in GR book records that no longer exist on Amazon but which once did. Not finding a current ASIN on any Amazon marketplace doesn't equal that it is one of the "fake" ASIN's GR assign, and those are easy to see in the log history anyway. This is not a GR assigned "fake" ASIN, assigned by GR instead of imported.
Anyway, while this work is indeed a mess and the bot went delete crazy (prior to the Fall 2024 merge madness it was deleting/merging OOP legit Kindle editions here on GR once they were no longer found on Amazon) what struck me as strange is that the ebook (ISBN: 9781844679058) with the following cover ->
is not the cover on the ebook with the same ISBN that I can borrow from multiple libraries or even purchase today.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/bo...
*the page defaults to the pb edition,you have to switch to the ebook
RE: The ASIN: The fact that both of the valid ASINs (B007HXLCNW and B00G2DO7JO) still exist and have the correct publication dates associated with them is what makes me think this is an invalid edition. Australia and Canada each use one of those two ASINs, neither one of them has been changed since they were published on Amazon in 2012, and the ASIN B009NCHDOM has an incorrect date that doesn't correspond to any existing edition of the book. I'll let the supers make the final call, but I think there's pretty decent evidence that even if this one wasn't outright created by Goodreads, it doesn't seem to be linked to a valid Kindle edition either.RE: cover art: Good catch on the cover art. When I asked staff to re-create the ebook, I linked to the art available on the publisher's website (Verso Books) rather than the distributor publisher's site (Penguin), where they use the same newer cover art for both digital and physical versions of the book - https://www.versobooks.com/products/2.... I'll send a message to staff to update it to the correct one when I get the chance.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...