combining editions

[Kristina]

I was just granted librarian status here. I would like not so much to mess around with people's books but to be sure that the books that I have added to Goodreads are in order. This is probably a question that's been asked before but I can't seem to understand how to combine editions. The below two books have the same author and the same book title, yet they are not listed in each other's "other editions" pages and I don't know how I can transfer the one book to be an edition. Please let me know what I am missing here. Thank you in advance. And sorry, I know it's so obvious I'm the new kid here.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15...

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/81...

[Kristina]

Is it necessary to delete the edition, then go to the page with all the other editions and add it via the "add a new edition" button? Is that what I did wrong in the first place by adding the book on it's own?

[Cait]

Kristina, there's probably a problem with the encoding you used to type in the accented character in Emily Brontë's name. The system isn't recognizing the name you typed in as "Emily Brontë", which is why the book you entered isn't showing up on the combine page. I'm not sure why it's different -- they look identical on my computers -- but that's a problem which can happen with author names. (A similar problem can happen if you leave two spaces between a first and last name, or if you miss punctuating an initial -- it's a fairly picky system.)

What you can do about it is edit the book record you created and copy-paste the author name from one of the correct editions into the author field. Then, when you've saved the book record, it should show up with the rest of Emily Brontë's books and you will be able to combine them using the "combine editions" link from the "other editions" section.

(Alternatively, you could edit the author name from the author's bio -- but I don't want to get too fancy on your first day out!)

[Kristina]

Thank you so much, Cait. I think that might have been the issue. I changed the name and managed to find the different editions in order to combine them.

[Cait]

Yay! I'm glad that solved it!