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To NAB or Not to NAB? Questionable ISBN
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Mod
I'm also not sure why you assume the 9 people who chose to rate this edition did so erroneously.
I've seen ISBNs beginning with "555" on tons of English language books. Most from the 80s. I have no idea why; I have no special knowledge in this area. A lot of them seemed to be works put out by major publishing houses, but "value" works - i.e., the kind of things you see on the remainder tables at the large chain stores.
rivka wrote: "I'm also not sure why you assume the 9 people who chose to rate this edition did so erroneously."I use several sources for data regarding Heinlein books. None of them list that ISBN as an edition of that work (or any other Heinlein work).
Mod
I suspect Lobstergirl is right and these are those so-called "value" editions, which probably are not tracked as carefully by many of the online databases, so it's not too difficult to believe they wouldn't be on any of them. The publishers tended to sell limited (one- or two-run) rights, or kept the rights and paid for cheap copies to be printed under an in-house imprint. (A practice which continues, but I think foreign ISBNs are rarely used for it now.)
rivka wrote: "I understand that. But there's no cover. It's not the edition that shows up on search by title or author. So odds are those 9 users deliberately chose that book by ISBN."I agree with you in principal. However, I have seen people deliberately add the DVD of the movie made from a book, or editions with an invalid ISBN (here's an example*), even when it's not the most popular edition. (Maybe they added it before it was combined? ~shrug~)
Also, the Amazon link for the 555 book in my first post, shows the same cover as for the first edition.
*Note: I have been eyeing this book for some time. I did not merge it because it has a unique cover and matches the details for the first edition, which does not have a unique entry (yet). I had been thinking about deleting the 9997 ISBN data from the book page and reimporting the ISBN and NABbing, similar to the book in question.
Okay, since it is virtually impossible to prove a negative, I will leave the book from my OP alone (ISBN 5551614603).However, I would still like feedback on the book I linked in msg #6. The book page gives the ISBN as 9997412052. This is not a valid ISBN. According to http://www.isbn-international.org the highest value available for an ISBN is 99969xxxxx.
Here is my solution: Delete the invalid ISBN from the book's data (leaving the rest of the data and the book page as is). Then I could re-import the ISBN and NAB.
Would this be okay since the ISBN isn't valid?
(Of note, this book was published in 1957. Since it appears to be a first edition hardcover, it seems unlikely that it would have reprinted with an ISBN, much less with an invalid one.)
Mod
Once it's working would it be okay then?
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/95...
I verified that the ISBN is technically valid, but I'm not really sure that it belongs with the given book data. In fact I can't be sure that the ISBN was even used on any book at all.
Let me 'splain. If you follow the Amazon link for the edition above, it gives the language as English, but ISBN's starting with 5 should be Russian. Plus, the data for the book linked above, matches the data for the 1st US edition (seen here). Searching on google on the ISBN only gave me sites that reflected the same questionable Amazon data.
I am thinking of merging this book with the 1st US edition. Then I would reimport and NAB the questionable ISBN. I figure worst case scenario it can be retrieved from NAB status if it turns out to truly be legit.
Still, I want to get some second opinions before I forged ahead with this kind of thing (esp. since I have seen it now on at least three different works).