Goodreads Librarians Group discussion
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The problem is that the vast majority of books have been automatically added by Amazon and its subsidiaries. I doubt they would comply. ;)

Although, if while Goodreads librarians are cleaning up book data, and we get to these types of books, I do think it would be polite and helpful if, at the beginning of the book description box, we added which plays, etc. are contained in the volume(s), if that information isn't already given.

Speaking of which, has there been any discussion on deleting some of those ? Eg HC/ Hans Christian Andersen has a seemingly endless number of "Favorite/ Five major/ Four Favorite.. Fairytales that are out of print, lack cover and any information as to contents, has no reviews or any shelf-holds and were added like three years ago. I don't dare combine those as there's no info on them and quite frankly, they're just annoying. Is it OK to delete some of them, after CAREFUL checking - of course!
Lisa - I so agree and I've been trying to but many of these books lack info even on the Amazon homepage


(My idea was that it'd be better if adding books was an active choice, ie that whoever had an out-of-print Puffin edition of FFT from 1958 could add that book.) But good to know - I'll puy my organizing urge away for a while. :-)

Well, we can also manually add books. I've manually added many books.
But unfortunately, that does not help at all with the problem you're describing.
There's still plenty of organizing we can do; we just need to try to ignore the books we cannot "fix."
My tendency is to clump those long-out-of-print and without-any-reviews collections as a single edition. It makes the search results much cleaner, which I feel outweighs any issues of them not really being a single edition.
I wasn't clear. I don't mean all such collections; just the ones that are indistinguishable.
So Five Plays published in 1915 and the same title (by the same author) in 1937 might be five different plays. But if neither has a cover (or only one does), how would one distinguish them? And for some authors, there are dozens of volumes with almost identical titles -- and no way to tell them apart, except by ISBN. And sometimes not even by that.
Anyone can put up reviews for more than one edition, in any case.
In my opinion, my suggestion does help the general user -- at least, more than leaving all 20+ of the similarly titled as separate search results. Having more data about the individual volumes would be nice, but isn't always practical.
So Five Plays published in 1915 and the same title (by the same author) in 1937 might be five different plays. But if neither has a cover (or only one does), how would one distinguish them? And for some authors, there are dozens of volumes with almost identical titles -- and no way to tell them apart, except by ISBN. And sometimes not even by that.
Anyone can put up reviews for more than one edition, in any case.
In my opinion, my suggestion does help the general user -- at least, more than leaving all 20+ of the similarly titled as separate search results. Having more data about the individual volumes would be nice, but isn't always practical.
I'm guessing that even when you've been here a while, you still won't be able to read my mind. ;) Sorry about being unclear.


It seems a lot of those books stem from Amazon's sale of used books?
Also - should someone suddenly get hold of and wish to shelf and review that collection from 1905, it is just a matter of separating it from the rest of the editions (or ask us librarians to do so).


Exactly. And often the only information that Google can find is that there are two copies in existence, and they run $30-50 apiece. ;)

Oh, so have I. (It's amazing how the price drops if/when it's reprinted.) But the lower range is more common -- and still ridiculous for most of them.
That's a good question.
Maybe Otis could weigh in on this, but it seems to me that sort of info should be included in the description. Which certainly doesn't preclude anyone from putting such things in their reviews.
Maybe Otis could weigh in on this, but it seems to me that sort of info should be included in the description. Which certainly doesn't preclude anyone from putting such things in their reviews.


Sorry, is there a consensus on this yet?
(Asking because the two different editions of Richard Bach's There's No Such Place as Far Away have two different illustrators, and I don't know if they should be separated)...
They should not be separated. As mentioned above, one can review each one individually, even if they remained combined (as they should be).

There's a huge grouping for "Snow White" picture books. Different authors, different illustrators (different ISBNs)...not just all Grimm, variety of editions. If I were the illustrators, I'd be peeved to have them all grouped.
Sure, we can review them all separately, but when I 'search' one by its ISBN, I get a whole bunch of very (very) different works.
Help?
-When someone adds a book and that book is a collection of plays, stories fairy tales FROM THE SAME AUTHOR, could there not be a "word of advice" box that suggested writing the names of the plays/ fairy tales in the "about the book"-field?
I am really beginning to hate the "Five Major Plays", "Seven Favorite Fairy Tales" etc titles :-)