Goodreads Librarians Group discussion
Book & Author Page Issues
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Books that are not published yet
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Okay, thank you for the answer. But I still have to ask something: won't that create more confusion? I mean, what if people start adding books based on rumours?Don't get my question wrong, please, I'm just trying to understand in all the points of view.
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In the case of the original book linked, I would expect that the author made a blog post or gave an interview and said something like "the fourth book will be called 'Rapture' and it should be published sometime in 2012", which is enough for a preliminary book entry. As you can see from the huge number of people who shelved it to-read, this is apparently a popular series! With a preliminary book entry, all of those fans now have a reminder that there's an upcoming book that they know they want to read, and they can even vote for it in listopia lists of future books which are generating pre-publishing buzz.When the book is formally scheduled for publication (has an ISBN, cover art, publication date), there will be a new book record imported from Amazon or B&N with the publisher's data. At that point, a librarian (or, in this case, a superlibrarian, since so many people have shelved it) will merge the preliminary record into the publisher's record and all of that buzz will be moved onto the real book record. (In the rare case where the book is pulled from publication instead, a librarian will edit the preliminary record in order to give the final word on it, so that people who heard of it will be able to come here and find out what happened.)
...and on that note I believe strongly that books that have not yet been published should not be allowed star ratings. If you look at Bitterblue or The Dark and Hollow Places they have 4.48 (from 88 ratings) and 4.24 (from 41 ratings), respectively. This only serves to skew the true value of the book and mislead potential readers into buying a book they might not enjoy.
thync, a substantial number of GR members receive Advance Reading Copies (ARCs) substantially before the official publication date. How soon those come out before publication varies wildly, so no good cut-off date could be devised. Reviews of these ARCs are completely valid though, and are truly a boon to the GR community.
So there are 88 ARCs for Bitterblue in the hands of GR members? If so, then why hasn't a single one actually written a review?
There was a long discussion about this issue in the feedback forum some months back. The site policy seems to be that people use ratings in many different ways and GoodReads doesn't interfere.
Rivka and Cait: alright, I get the point then, I just got confused for a moment because I thought you couldn't add books that weren't already published. I'm sorry for my mistake.thync: I kinda agree with you, but if it is as Evan says, which we all know it happens, it also makes sense that people rate.
willaful: well it is true that people use rating in many different ways. Some of my friends don't like the 1-5 star rating and think that instead should be a 1-10 star rating, so they adapt the system (like 1 star in goordreads, for them, is between 1 and 5 stars; 2 stars is between 6 and 7, for example). I guess we just have to deal with fact that not always the ratings are accurate (in my case, for example, I see the ratings, how many people rated and then I read reviews to understand if it's worth or not to read a particular book).
Well, I'm sorry that I brought that up. It wasn't my idea to trouble everybody.
The book is published (????) in 2012. Is this supposed to be online? Is this alright? Also, I checked the 3rd book of the series and it's not published yet. (wikipedia)
Thanks for the attention,
Laura*