Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Amazon has apparently made the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die available as a chapter-by-chapter purchase. See here.

Normally we don't want to combine dissimilar editions, but my guess would be this is a good place for an exception.

The book is, after all, still a unified whole. The fact that Amazon is doing some weird neo-victorian serialization doesn't change that. So my impulse is to combine all of these separate chapters in with the full volumes (printed, audio, etc.), since the print volume will have many more reviews and ratings and will inherently direct people towards the complete work.

Sound good?

Oh, blech. Can't they just have it as the the whole book? I'd really like to kick the chapters off GR altogether, and force Kindle readers to rate the Kindle edition of the whole book. :P

I think this one needs feedback from Otis.

Hi Jay, You've made a commonly made mistake. This isn't the group that's best for your post. It's one of the official Goodreads groups that's here for volunteers to help with the running of Goodreads, primarily improving the database of books. It's always a good idea to read a group's description before posting. Thanks.

Yes, sorry, Jay -- I suspect you'll find more assistance at the Amazon website. I'm not familiar with the kindle, but isn't Amazon still the only vendor of kindle editions?

Rivka - but I've gotten the impression that stuff from Amazon, when deleted, tend to return like a nightmare in a bad gothic novel.

The best theoretical resolution to this would be to permit individual editions to have more than just the two ISBNs. Heretical, yes, but it seems so burdensome to have so many redundant ISBNs in a few cases -- books that have gone through many printings, for example. Perhaps a 'hidden' feature that a non-librarian simply adding a book manually wouldn't even perceive?

[On a similar note, authors should really have aliases, so someone searching under a misspelling would be correctly redirected without fuss or muss. In looking for an example of this, I've discovered pure chaos in the world of Samuel Longhorn Clemens... ah, nevermind. BTW, Otis -- your month is almost up :-) ]

Rivka - but I've gotten the impression that stuff from Amazon, when deleted, tend to return like a nightmare in a bad gothic novel.

Heh. True enough. That's why this one needs Otis -- I'm hoping that with items that only have an ASIN (and no ISBN) that GR can impose some sort of filter to prevent the individual chapters from showing up.

That's what engineers call a kludge, and as such I can't recommend it.

If enough bad stuff keeps coming from Amazon, then a general solution is warranted, but probably not just about ASINs vs. ISBNs; some sort of blacklist of rejected feeds would probably be a more elegant solution.

Meanwhile, this single problem probably isn't worth any programming time, since combining the kindle chapters into the larger work should make 99% of the problem go away.

I didn't simply go ahead and do this because I've only been around a month and I'm not aware of whether other techniques are preferred or even available. But don't go making Otis write code for this one instance.

That's very annoying. There was nothing from Amazon to even indicate that it was just a chapter save the (Chapter 4) in the title. So we will start blocking those in the next release (monday).

Bless you, Otis. Then it will be safe to delete them, without them doing the gothic-villain trick, right?

Oh, That will be great. Thank you.

Beautiful! The full Kindle edition imports perfectly; the chapters don't come back once deleted.