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Amazon is going away as a data source
Brixton wrote: "Is there anyone working specifically on French books/editions? This friend has 39 books at risk for deletion, and I cannot help at this time with French:http://www.goodreads.com/rescue_books/at..."
I'll take a look and see what I can do. No guarantees, though -- and if someone in France has any good resources, they'd be unquestionably better positioned than me!
Elizabeth (Alaska) wrote: "The notice was posted on the 20th."Please differentiate--as I have been doing-- between a notice posted on the librarian group page for active group-checkers, and the notice sent to librarians' personal email accounts, and you will perhaps better understand why I believe twice as many records could potentially have been saved had the email notice been sent in simultaneity with the posting of the group notice. I maintain that given the scale of the problem, all librarians could and should have been rallied by every possible communication channel as soon as was prudent-- and according to when this change was made known on the group page, that seems to have been on the 20th, not the 25th. I do not anywhere say we should have been notified before goodreads knew what we should do to prevent loss of records, as you suggest in your previous response. I hope this clarifies for you what I'm saying and what I haven't said, as I shall not contribute any more to the lengthening of this thread by repeating this point again. My concern has been expressed; I have not asked anyone to agree with it, but understand it correctly at least.
Thank you.
Themis-Athena wrote: "I'll take a look and see what I can do. No guarantees, though -- "Thank you!
Mod
Mod
Ok, the devs figured this one out. It was ONLY affecting the publisher field, FYI -- no other data should have bee affected. And as of the next release, it won't do that anymore either.
Thanks for reporting the bug!
John, your academic friend's reviews are safe. It might in some cases be a little tricky to match the reviews with the books after Feb 1, though, so, for extra peace of mind, he should do a quick export from his "My Books."Hmm - you might be able to do it yourself, actually, by looking at his 'My Books.'
Cheryl in CC NV wrote: "John, your academic friend's reviews are safe. It might in some cases be a little tricky to match the reviews with the books after Feb 1, though, so, for extra peace of mind, he should do a quick ..."Thanks Cheryl. I don't really see it as my job to export my friend's books for him: it's been tough enough looking after my own.
I've posted on Facebook so that, hopefully, he'll become aware of this predicament, given that even after the Ingrams import he has hundreds of unmatched ISBNs.
But my main point is that given the scale of what he has been left with, and as I don't know that he's even been informed by Goodreads that he has an issue, he'll need more time to save and match up his books.
For anyone rescueing german books, I've found several books on my rescue list that weren't listed with the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek but I found them on the respective publisher's websites, mainly:Reclam Verlag
http://www.reclam.de/
Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag
http://www.dtv.de/
Might be worth looking into for future goodreads imports as well where german books are concerned. =)
You could send him a PM, John.
Brixton wrote: "Themis-Athena wrote: "I'll take a look and see what I can do. No guarantees, though -- "Thank you!"
Done -- and no problem. Mind that I didn't upload any images of book covers, though, so unless somebody else finds the time and resources to do something about this, you may want to warn her that she'll find about 40+ books without cover images on her shelves come Jan. 31 ... My focus at the moment is on saving books! :(
Themis-Athena wrote: "Done -- and no problem. Mind that I didn't upload any images of book covers, t..."Awesome! I wrote to let him know to export his books just in case, I'm sure he'll be relieved to hear his books are saved at least, thank you so much!
I'm having the feeling that on Tuesday I'm going to check the site and it will look like it did 4 years ago when I joined. A lot more "No Image Available"s and no descriptions. I think it's appropriate to (maybe this language is too strong, but how else to put it?) grieve the loss of so much of our work. Diligently did I once pull all the books off my shelves and enter or fix page counts, original publication dates, and everything else, and all the library books I fixed which I most certainly will not get again for this purpose; so much of that work has been goofed up by amazon, now simply disappearing before our eyes. Sorry, I'm having a Sisyphus moment. :o\ But I also think of this as an opportunity to start clean(-ish), since I've always felt amazon has been more of a wrecker than a support of good, hand-entered data. I'm hoping this means all the calendars, floor displays, posters and everything else not a book will disappear from the combine pages? :o)))
i hate to ask this (and i haven't seen it asked anywhere else, but you know... 200 pages of comments...), but is there a way to find out if there are any books in our groups that are at risk for being deleted?*cringe*
Mod
Not really. You could go to each one's book page. How annoying that would be depends on how many your group(s) have shelved, of course.
Brixton wrote: "I'm having the feeling that on Tuesday I'm going to check the site and it will look like it did 4 years ago when I joined. A lot more "No Image Available"s and no descriptions. I think it's appropriate to (maybe this language is too strong, but how else to put it?) grieve the loss of so much of our work. Diligently did I once pull all the books off my shelves and enter or fix page counts, original publication dates, and everything else, and all the library books I fixed which I most certainly will not get again for this purpose; so much of that work has been goofed up by amazon, now simply disappearing before our eyes. Sorry, I'm having a Sisyphus moment. :o\ But I also think of this as an opportunity to start clean(-ish), since I've always felt amazon has been more of a wrecker than a support of good, hand-entered data. I'm hoping this means all the calendars, floor displays, posters and everything else not a book will disappear from the combine pages? :o)))"My thoughts exactly -- and wouldn't the loss of all those other-than-book-paper-products be a nice byproduct of the whole process?! ;)
Sorry for the inadvertent gender bender on your friend, btw :~ (seems I've been doing too much of my joint resuing thing with women up to now; besides, in my defense I' just mention that it's already rather late where I am ...)
/s/ Sysypha
rivka wrote: "Tiffany wrote: "i hate to ask this (and i haven't seen it asked anywhere else, but you know... 200 pages of comments...), but is there a way to find out if there are any books in our groups that ar..."I was afraid of that :) Okay, thanks rivka!
vicki_girl wrote: "The particular title and author being associated with that ISBN was the service that Amazon was providing. Now the relationship is dissolving and so Goodreads can't use that information to make that association anymore in any way."I just can't wrap my mind around this. Maybe this is a product of granting corporations personhood, but there's something I'm missing fundamentally in understanding where amazon gets off forcing us to pull data which has *become* ours through use over time.
For instance (and I'm just making this example up for illustrative purposes-- or maybe this actually happened? after 4 years, who can remember such things?): Let's say once upon a time I was looking at bookswap and I saw someone listed a book which said this: "last picture show" by "larry mcmurty" isbn1234, and this data was sourced from some sloppy amazon used-book seller. I say to myself, oh that's not right, and like a good little librarian, I edit the record to "The Last Picture Show" and "Larry McMurtry". Where did I get this information? Technically, I first got it from having seen the film. Sony Pictures Entertainment is not going to come after goodreads and say "That's our data!" (or will they? <-kidding). But amazon can come and say, "Hey, that isbn1234, 'The Last Picture Show' by 'Larry McMurtry'? That's ours-- yeah thanks for improving our data, but suck it."
And I can't rescue that book now if that's not an edition I own, it was probably an old mass market paperback I'll never find a url for, but I can't say "I recognise that copy from when I fixed it from bookswap, and I know 'The Last Picture Show' and 'Larry McMurtry' go together" without a weblink.
This is just bizarro-world to me that what's in our brains has effectively become through legal tricks and turns property of a corporation.
Brixton wrote: "I just can't wrap my mind around this. Maybe this is a product of granting corporations personhood, but there's something I'm missing fundamentally in understanding where amazon gets off forcing us to pull data which has *become* ours through use over time."It's not so much that the data belongs to Amazon.
What it comes down to is that Amazon and Goodreads had a contract that permitted Goodreads to automatically import and display data from Amazon. The contract is no longer valid and Goodreads can no longer use that data.
Once upon a time a boyfriend of mine let me have his old video card for my computer, after I dumped him he called and wanted the video card back. Amazon is doing the same thing - the only difference is that I said no and kept the video card, Goodreads can't do that.
Well - I suppose they could, but only if they want to spend the next few months going bankrupt as they attempt to fight off the Amazon Super-Giant in court... which doesn't sound like a great idea to me. ;)
In working through some friends' lists I have encountered this situation a few times and I'm not sure what to do. This book is an example - I can find this book on WorldCat and Open Library, but it doesn't have an ISBN. There are no other editions on Goodreads. Do I rescue it even though I can't confirm that the ISBN is associated? There's no way to edit anything about the listing unless using the rescue page, and I don't think we're supposed to change ISBNs. Should I create a new edition without an ISBN and hope they get merged?http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/91...
Same sort of thing, Sarah, I believe. I found a book on a friends page that she apparently got through Amazon's used books, which had an ASIN. This book was going to be deleted, but there were other editions (I had to combine to get them for her to see), one of which I suspect was the book my friend actually had. I wrote to her, suggesting she change editions. That way, we don't really care whether the Amazon ASIN edition disappears.
Mod
rivka wrote: "Actually, if it's a non-Kindle ASIN edition, it should get deleted (and only imported due to a bug)."That what I thought, which is why I suggested she switch editions.
rivka and Elizabeth - I did just now see where it's possible to edit more of the books details (from a link at the bottom of the rescue page). Would it be better to take out the ISBN and then rescue? Or to create a new edition without an ISBN and then combine them?
Vicky wrote: "Brixton wrote: "I just can't wrap my mind around this. Maybe this is a product of granting corporations personhood, but there's something I'm missing fundamentally in understanding where amazon get..."The problem I'm having has to do with well-known works. For example, I have a book I'm trying to rescue which is a rather obscure omnibus of a very well-known SFF series. I can only find a handful of sites through a Google search which recognize it, and they are all pay sites. The only piece of information which is needed for rescuing is the author name. If I went up to 100 SFF fans and asked who wrote TITLE (of the omnibus), 99 would probably know the answer without thinking about it. However, we cannot rescue this book unless we find a source for the author. There's just something fundamentally wrong about this.
Every book on my shelves that still needs to be rescued is an obscure omnibus collection of a well known author or series. In no case is the title in question; every single one requires an author, with about half looking for publisher, # pages etc. Since the author and title are the most critical pieces of information, the fact that we can't rescue books whose (not-needed-to-be-rescued) titles are known and which many people could easily name the author from the title without every having seen a physical copy of the book, there just seems to be something fundamentally problematic with the requirements.
It's not as bad as the person who asked why we needed a source for every individual copy of Moby Dick to confirm that it was Herman Melville, but the principle is the same.
Legally this may be the situation we're stuck with, but it really doesn't make much sense.
Mod
This is better. It's cleaner -- there's no question of where the record came from.
I'm trying to save as many books as possible. I'm wondering if there's any way to see how many books still need to rescue. With so many hardworking librarians it would be nice to see some progress. Or is the number too high so it's actually better not to know?
Mod
This Is Not The Michael You're Looking For wrote: "The only piece of information which is needed for rescuing is the author name. If I went up to 100 SFF fans and asked who wrote TITLE (of the omnibus), 99 would probably know the answer without thinking about it. However, we cannot rescue this book unless we find a source for the author. There's just something fundamentally wrong about this."I think the answer to what that something is might be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v....
Some quick pull-quotes:
"information alone without a minimum of original creativity cannot be protected by copyright"
"Information (that is, facts, discoveries, etc.), from any source, is fair game"
"a copyright holder in a compilation of public domain data cannot use that copyright to prevent others from using the underlying public domain data"
Btw, I'm the one who said that about Melville ;o)
It's not the information that Amazon is copyrighting, Brixton. It's more along the lines of Amazon saying that GR cannot use the SERVICE that Amazon provided anymore, which was the service of providing this data. They had an agreement to facilitate that service, and now that agreement is gone.
Brooke wrote: "It's not the information that Amazon is copyrighting, Brixton. It's more along the lines of Amazon saying that GR cannot use the SERVICE that Amazon provided anymore, which was the service of provi..."I understand, Brooke, but that service being pulled should not require us to have a physical copy at hand or otherly-sourced url to prove we know ISBN 9780141439723 = Bleak House = Charles Dickens. Those three pieces of information are public domain; we can't use amazon to automatically plug in the numbers/titles/authors, but in my understanding of the case cited above we can use our own hands to plug those numbers/titles/authors in from anywhere, including our own eyeballs, memories, and even cutting and pasting from the existing goodreads page or amazon's (as probably a super lot of us have always done during regular every-day editing).
Please note I am not advocating doing anything other than what goodreads has asked us to do, I have merely provided the information above in an effort to help myself and others get at something many of us are having trouble putting our fingers on, specifically: how is it that amazon "owns" the ISBN/title/author association, and that continuing to use this information would be a legal infringement of some kind. Seems to me come Jan 30, goodreads would have to stop importing from amazon, and only creative content (descriptions, reviews, covers, etc) would have to be deleted. Right now, it's the needing to have a physical copy/record or source url that is perplexing, and preventing folks from rescuing certain books.
Since I apparently suck at finding good source urls, I personally am going to wait til Tuesday to see what the fallout looks like-- and return to normal librarian editing in the normal way, which is what I'm good at, even if that means we're having to re-build from the ground upwards again. We've done it once, it can be done again.
What is copyrightable is not the data, as you point out, but the database that Amazon has created. I am not privy to the contract, but I am assuming it is the use of this copyrightable database that Amazon has forbidden GR to now use. In some way, that contract must have included language that prevents GR from displaying any of the information obtained from said copyrighted database should the contract be severed.
Brooke wrote: "It's not the information that Amazon is copyrighting, Brixton. It's more along the lines of Amazon saying that GR cannot use the SERVICE that Amazon provided anymore, which was the service of provi..."But if that's the case we should be allowed to google the book we're looking for, click on the Amazon result (because let's face it that's often the first one) and then manually input that data into goodreads, but we can't. For a description of the book created by Amazon that would be fair enough, but we're not supposed to get any of our facts from there.
Like Brixton I'm not suggesting anyone ignore goodreads' rule to not use Amazon as I'm sure they put it there for a reason. Just saying that this change hasn't just stopped the importing of data from Amazon but also librarians using it simply to check *facts* that Amazon has no copyright over and enter them manually.
rivka wrote: "Sarah wrote: "Or to create a new edition without an ISBN and then combine them?"This is better. It's cleaner -- there's no question of where the record came from."
Okay, that's what I'm doing. It ends up creating essentially a duplicate book. I'm combining editions so that reviews show up in the right place. My hope then is that when January 30 comes around, the editions should be merged so there won't be any more duplicates.
Please notice the legalese on the save screen. One, you say you own the book, the other says you legally obtained the information. Owning the book means you have obtained free use of certain data contained therein, while using an online database means you use that data according to their terms of use.
Elizabeth (Alaska) wrote: "What is copyrightable is not the data, as you point out, but the database that Amazon has created. I am not privy to the contract, but I am assuming it is the use of this copyrightable database tha..."I would understand that database to be a "compilation of public domain data", as in: "a copyright holder in a compilation of public domain data cannot use that copyright to prevent others from using the underlying public domain data" (emphasis mine).
I learned this stuff a couple of decades ago when I started working genealogy. The dates of my grandparents birth, for instance, is factual and cannot be copyrighted, but the way I present it, including the database in which it is housed, is absolutely my copyright. I'd give you the information for free, but I suspect Amazon thinks it has put forth considerable $$ and will not.
Brixton, the save screen reads:I have a copy (physical, ebook, or audio) of this book or a personal record of the book data.
Do you think the Amazon police are coming to your house to inspect your personal records of book data?
Elizabeth (Alaska) wrote: "Do you think the Amazon police are coming to your house to inspect your personal records of book data?"Is this really a serious question? Well if you insist on asking, I shall provide an answer: Certainly I do not, but I also am not capable of being purposely dishonest (if this is what your question is rhetorically designed to suggest). You know they added "personal record of" only after I asked about friends providing me with needed information to save their books, so I am not sure why you are pointing this out. Doing so does not answer the lingering question of why we must provide otherly-sourced urls for books we do not own or have record of, or why we are strongly advised to not get even a page count from a bookseller.
I for one will not ever defend amazon's supposed right to require goodreads to self-destroy records when there seems to be legal precedent stating goodreads should not have to do so.
I don't work for Goodreads - have you seen and perused the legality of their contract with Amazon? And I'm not going to be purposefully dishonest either - I spent about 30 minutes this afternoon looking for data I could legally acquire to rescue a book. I really don't see why you're fighting this so much. It is what it is and you nor I nor the next person is going to be able to change it.
Do whatever you're comfortable with! If you are wary of the legal implications, interpret the GR instructions strictly. If not... *shrugs* I want to keep my books, and I'm not going to recheck library books out just for this. I've been very careful to add the correct editions of my books, and a quick check of WorldCat has been enough to make me comfortable. I think most of this work is just verifying that the ISBNs match the title/author. (After all, someone could have just made book info up!) At this point, my understanding is that we're just trying to disassociate the data from Amazon and make sure we're replacing (or verifying) the data via independent sources that won't cause us to have future issue of this same nature.
We are importing directly from WorldCat, so you can feel fine about using data from there (though it should get imported automatically, eventually).
Two concerns I would have about WorldCat data are: - weird diacritical marks that don't match the ones in the GR database, which will not match up with GR author entries.
- they don't have format data (hardcover, paperback, etc.)
Yeah, when I said that, what I really meant was:* I open the existing GR book page in one window
* I open the rescue page in another window (side-by-side)
* I check WorldCat to make sure the author/title is what I'm expecting
* I copy/paste the URL
* I type in correct data according our GR way of doing things (if there are differences)
Of course, there are going to be issues with author ambiguity again... At least, I haven't been paying attention to spaces! (I just thought of it, actually!) But at least the spellings will be correct...
Patrick wrote: "We are importing directly from WorldCat, so you can feel fine about using data from there (though it should get imported automatically, eventually)."
My wrist is tired -- so I hope when I wake up tomorrow the imports will be completed! :)
My wrist is tired -- so I hope when I wake up tomorrow the imports will be completed! :)
Late this afternoon, we received word from Amazon that we will not get a feed of book information for Kindle and CreateSpace books. Previously, we’d been told that we would get a feed and that’s what we’ve been communicating to Librarians and authors. What this means is that these books will now need to be rescued. If they are not, the reviews and ratings will be merged into other editions of the same book, if we have other editions. If no other editions of the book exist, the ratings and reviews will move to a blank book record with no author or title until we can find a new, alternate source of data for those books. We apologize for the late notice, but as I said, we just got the news late this afternoon. If we could have given you more notice, we absolutely would have.We have just opened up the rescue books page to all users, and later tonight (Friday) or early tomorrow (Saturday), we will be sending an email to all authors with a book at risk, as well as to all users with books at risk. We are continuing to import books from WorldCat and several other sources, which will help a bit.
Thank you for all your efforts in helping us with this transition. We’ll continue to keep you updated and please don’t hesitate to let us know if you have additional questions.
Crap... And eek! And a lot of other interjections!
Makes me wish I'd bought a Nook.
In response to the Kindle books now needing rescueing as well, will they be showing up in our rescue lists? Or is there another easy way to find them?I ask because I sorted out all my other books so my list is currently saying: "Great news, all of your books have been rescued!" But I went and found some kindle books I have shelved and they're still in need of rescuing according to their book pages. So it would be great to see those on the rescue list if that's possible.
Unbelievable!!!!I don't think Amazon realises how many people they've p$@*ed off, and now they've done the same to their customers and authors.
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An excellent point. There are millions of books out there. Even 10,000 librarians can't make that much difference in a week. I hope someone is making an assessment of how many books in the database remain unrescued after the big import.