Editing/Adding Endangered Books

[Marilyn]

As a Librarian I enjoy adding book images for rare books that were printed prior to the introduction of ISBN's. There are a number of the Endangered Amazon books that have invalid ISBN's.

With the much-needed cleansing of the bad ISBN's I don't know the best way to add book images for those books that are currently on the endangered list that should have the ISBN deleted.

Should I complete the form, then delete the ISBN?

What do you recommend?

Thank you.

Marilyn

[Paula]

Can you link to an example please

[Marilyn]

Hi Paula,

I just added a book image for The Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury. This book was published in 1951. This book was listed with an ISBN and without even opening my copy of this book, I know that this book doesn't have an ISBN which were added in the early 1960's.
Yesterday I added book images for books published in 1887 to 1934. I ran across only one book which was listed with an ISBN. Today I wanted to concentrate on the 1950's, but many of the books are listed with ISBN's.
I guess I will have to go back to the early 20th century until the Endangered copies have been eliminated.
I would concentrate on that but only have fictiondb.com as a resource.

[vicki_girl]

I have actually been wondering the same thing. Here is an example:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16...

The currently listed ISBN is not a valid ISBN. Should I rescue the book record using say, isfdb.org, then delete the number from the ISBN field (leaving the rest of the record untouched)?

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Sounds reasonable.

[vicki_girl]

WooHoo! Done.

(That particular one had been bugging me for months!)

[Marilyn]

Fantastic. Thanks for the help!!

[vicki_girl]

On a related note, there are pre-ISBN books, listed with invalid ISBN's that are being rescued. Examples below:

http://www.goodreads.com/work/edition...
http://www.goodreads.com/work/edition...
http://www.goodreads.com/work/edition...
http://www.goodreads.com/work/edition...

I know these are being rescued, because when I looked at them earlier, they were listed as being at risk for merging. Since the ISBN is invalid, can I go ahead and merge them with the other edition? I checked and for the cases listed above, the data is identical, except for the bad ISBN.

[rivka, Former Moderator]

They're being rescued because that ISBN was verified by another site and the information was imported.

[vicki_girl]

But the ISBN is invalid. An ISBN can't start with 9997. The highest possible value for an ISBN is 99969. Also, these books are from 1929, and 1930, long before the ISBN or even SBN system.

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Nonetheless, it is being used. Moreover, I believe our new importers have some sort of ISBN validity test (I don't really understand the details), and it passed.

[vicki_girl]

I think maybe some investigating is needed for that ISBN tester. According to http://www.isbn-international.org/ there are NO ISBN's that start with 9997.

[vicki_girl]

In addition, I just tested one of the ISBN's using the formula from wikipedia (link)

I tried it on this book:
http://www.goodreads.com/work/edition...

The ISBN given is 9997489047. Using the formula from Wikipedia, the check digit should be 3, not 7.

[Marilyn]

I frequently see pre ISBN books listed with a later issued Publisher's ISBN.

If the programmers were to set a safe date and prevent ISBN's to be entered for the early editions, maybe that would fix the problem. That is, the fix would not allow an ISBN to be entered for early publications.

[vicki_girl]

Often a book is issued in a later printing (but the same edition) and has an ISBN assigned then*, so I'm not sure that is the best option.

However, I do believe we should not have invalid ISBNs on pre-ISBN books.

*ETA: This actually happened alot with books whose first printing was in the 1960's and for example the 25th printing was in 1975. Goodreads does not make a distinction among various printings of a given edition.