Book descriptions needing work

[Kaion]

I find many, if not most, of the book descriptions are really terrible (including the default ones), suffering from various issues*:

1. spoilers: many, many older editions suffer this
2. editorializing: reviewing the work rather than describing it (sometimes leftover
3. formatting issues
4. being too long
5. just plain awkward or bad writing

*as common sense would dictate and outlined in the librarian manual: "The description can be a couple of sentences or a couple of paragraphs describing the content of the book. It should be a generic summary and should NOT include reviews or personal feelings (i.e. 'This is a book about sisters. It was good. You should read it'). The summary should also NOT contain any important spoilers such as mentions of characters deaths, how the book ends, major twists or other information that would spoil the story for those who have not read it."

So the first step is identifying the problem, right?



A Tale of Two Cities editions suffer much from the spoilers.

[willaful]

In this context, the first step is including a link to the bad ones you run across. All we can do as librarians is correct them one by one, the overall problem is beyond our control.

[Paul]

Thankfully, I haven't came across many with spoilers or the likes.
I guess you can only deal with them as you come across them.

[Kaion]

Oh, I know. I thought it would just be helpful to have a thread to do it in.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13...
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38...
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19...

[Cait]

The easiest thing to do on multi-edition books like that is to make sure that the default is set and then change all of the bad descriptions to the default.