Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

There are coloring books, notebooks, and calendars that are listed on Amazon with the same author name as established authors. These publications are probably not even created by humans, and they are obviously using the name of a popular author in order to get seen by people looking for books on Amazon. In the case of coloring books, we are not supposed to mark them as invalid. Is it okay to remove the author's name so they don't appear alongside works by actual authors? I would suggest we use the author name "coloring book" for these.

Can you link to an example of a colouring in book, Sarah?

I'd be inclined to take this as a legal matter & contact Support (marking attention Legal Dept)

You could also edit your thread title & put Attn: Jaclyn to get a staff ruling.

Unless the Powers That Be say otherwise, I'd be reluctant to remove the name/replace it with something generic, because the name might be somewhere in the book (even if it has absolutely nothing to do with the established author). You can, though, add a space between first and last name (so that, e.g., John^Smith becomes John^^Smith—or John^^^^^Smith if there are valid authors on those other profiles) to move the book off that profile. It'll still show up in search but at least it won't be on the 'real' profile anymore.

Carol Still on Fiji Time! wrote: "Can you link to an example of a colouring in book, Sarah?

I'd be inclined to take this as a legal matter & contact Support (marking attention Legal Dept)

You could also edit your thread title & p..."

It seems like most authors with more than 10 books have at least one coloring book, notebook, or calendar with their name on it. The author I was working on at the time is Roger Morris. Sure enough, there is an AI-generated coloring book attributed to him: Floral Coloring Book: A Stress Relieving Mandalas Coloring Book For Adults.

There are over 2 million coloring books on Goodreads. The vast majority are not created by people. This is a known moneymaking scheme: you can find tutorials all over the internet on how to make coloring books using AI and then list them for sale on Amazon. I'm kind of a book purist, so to me these are all just more of the garbage listings that are quickly filling Goodreads and making it less usable than it was five years ago.

Ideally, I would like to see *all* coloring books made inactive on Goodreads. In the meantime, though, it would be great if we had a protocol for culling the garbage out of the listings of actual authors. I don't love the idea of creating a new author page for every scam author name: there is enough maintenance to be done on legitimate books to keep me busy.

I'm on a slightly different topic. There are many Roger Morris in the database. I would move historian (and all other real authors) from this profile (Roger^Morris) and leave it for books added by the bot. You can do this in one click by merging this profile into Roger^^Morris/Roger^^^Morris/etc. Add links to profiles as now and clarify in the description that this profile is for automatically added books. It will be less messy in the future.

Honestly, I don't think coloring are worth the thought. I usually add a few spaces in the author name and forget about it. If they are on another profile, no one will see them.

Olga wrote: "I'm on a slightly different topic. There are many Roger Morris in the database. I would move historian (and all other real authors) from this profile (Roger^Morris) and leave it for books added by ..."

I can't recall exactly, but there is something like 6-7 Roger Morris author profiles already. It is actually difficult to do what you are saying, because you have to edit the book to add a space to the author name, then wait for Goodreads to update it (3–5 minutes), then check and see if the new author page was already being used for another Roger Morris. If it is, then you have to edit the book again to add another space to the author name, wait, and check again. Again I want to stress that we are talking about literally *millions* of coloring books here, so if this is the policy, it strikes me as impractical. You would need thousands of volunteers to make this work.

If you want to see all Roger Morris, there are ways:
1 - edit author - similar names
https://www.goodreads.com/author/simi...
2 - add book/author (right here or any other thread) - author - Roger^Morris / Roger^^Morris / Roger^^^^Morris / Roger^^^Morris
There are four profiles now.
3 - from the book page. When you change the name and open the book page, yes, the author is wrong for a few minutes. But if you open all editions. there will be a correct profile.

Carol Still on Fiji Time! wrote: "Can you link to an example of a colouring in book, Sarah?

I'd be inclined to take this as a legal matter & contact Support (marking attention Legal Dept)

You could also edit your thread title & p..."

This coloring book, which says "AI generated" in the title, is a good example: AI Generated: Ladies of the LEAF: Stress Relieving Adult Coloring Book

Sarah wrote: "Ideally, I would like to see *all* coloring books made inactive on Goodreads."

Totally agree. The name of this site is, after all, GoodREADS not GoodColors or GoodNotebooks. Pointless to have them on here. GR should not just blindly accept anything with an ISBN, or anything sold on Amazon, as a book that can be read -- if we do we risk turning the site into nothing more than a junkyard.

Olga wrote: "I'm on a slightly different topic. There are many Roger Morris in the database. I would move historian (and all other real authors) from this profile (Roger^Morris) and leave it for books added by ..."

Olga, you might post this over in the "Looking for a project?" folder https://www.goodreads.com/topic/group... Someone interested in that sort of cleanup task is likely to look there.

I can remember the storm of protest when adult colouring books were allowed on the site in the old Feedback group. Can't remember when all colouring books were allowed on.

You would think there would be some legal issues with the Roger Morris one (I don't know Larry Powell, sorry)

Maybe contact GR's legal dept & see what they say.

I recently read an old thread discussing coloring books. When the decision was made to allow them (can't find it now). The point was to add books like this:
Secret Garden: An Inky Treasure Hunt and Colouring Book
My aunt loves this book, and I think that this book should be on Goodreads. It was translated into many languages (there are captions for the pictures) and has some kind of plot. It is more popular than many real books.

Other good coloring book:
The Throne of Glass Coloring Book

The problem is that along with these books a lot of garbage was added. But I don't see a logical way to separate "Secret Garden" from "Ladies of the LEAF". They both have ISBN, both are paperback, both sold on Amazon.

There is no legal issue here. Amazon says this is the other Larry Powell, not the writer. Just the same name. The problem is that the bot adds authors with different names to one profile. If it had separated them like on Amazon, we wouldn't have seen these junk publications.

Olga, you make a good point, there are human-made coloring books that should be on Goodreads. My concern is with non-human-generated materials in general, and this would include almost all coloring books along with items that we are already allowed to remove, such as blank notebooks and calendars, that are machine-generated and then listed under the name of a published author on Amazon (there aren't two Larry Powells, there is Larry Powell and grifter spam). IMHO, Goodreads can trust librarians to be able to tell the difference between these items and human-created books.

LOL! Accidentally stumbled on this thread because I've spent the last couple of days making a start at separating works for the author name "Larry Powell," including the AI generated coloring books.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

FYI:
The coloring book Larry Powell seems to be a real guy with that name who just likes AI-generated art creation. His company website:
https://midastouchlaser.com/about/

If the author name does not appear on the cover it seems reasonable to change the author to “Unknown author” in cases like this where it’s obviously fake.

Shim wrote: "If the author name does not appear on the cover it seems reasonable to change the author to “Unknown author” in cases like this where it’s obviously fake."

You shouldn't add 'Unknown Author' as an author as that profile is used by incomplete Amazon imports. There is an author profile 'Unknown' too. When to use that one is in the manual. (I'm not saying it should be used in this case.)

Could you provide a link to the author manual page that says this? Searched but haven't found it yet.

It's in the description of each profile.

Unknown:

Books can be attributed to "Unknown" when the author or editor (as applicable) is not known and cannot be discovered. If at all possible, list at least one actual author or editor for a book instead of using "Unknown".

Books whose authorship is purposefully withheld should be attributed instead to Anonymous.

Unknown Author:

Books with known authors are imported from Amazon to this profile. Please do not merge this profile into Unknown.

Also per rivka here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...