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jenn

Murder by Death

I read cozy and historical mysteries, a bit of Paranormal/UF, and to mix it up, I read science and gardening books on occasion.

Librarian Updates

Just cleared out a largish queue of book additions, edits and reports.  A higher than average rate of rejected requests, so a few reminders:

 

1.  Covers WILL NOT be changed without a source link.  Please include a valid source showing that specific edition with the cover you're trying to add.  Any changes without source code (exception: placeholders) will be rejected.  Also, please don't just put "Amazon.com" as a source link.  If you can't be bothered to hunt down the correct full link to the book, why should a librarian?

 

2.  DO NOT REMOVE ISBNs.  These are automatically rejected.  If the ISBN is an invalid one, please use the flag to file a book report, so a librarian can confirm and merge the record with the correct one.

 

3.  Please do NOT mark books with ISBNs as Kindles.  Ebooks with ISBNs are ebooks.  Kindle and Audible formats are the ONLY books that should have anything in the ASIN field.

 

I think that hits the main points.  

 

A note about the damn Kindle/ASIN bug:

Look I don't speak for BookLikes - I'm just a librarian volunteer, so I have no idea when this damn bug is going to be fixed and I'm starting to not care.  My personal, unofficial advice is to stop adding Kindle editions.  

 

Those who know me might assume (fairly) that that is bias speaking, but not this time; this bug is a massive pain in the ass.  Librarians can't edit any Kindle record from 2017 or 2018 without an 8 out of 10 chance of the edits being blocked b/c of the damn ASIN number.  The best we can do is a combination of accept-and-reject of edits regular users make (we accept all changes except the removal of the ASIN, which the user has to do to get the edits to go through to the queue).  

 

This leaves us all in the very messy position of having to keep empty kindle records in the database, and at this point there are thousands of them, which means we're never going to be able to get them all corrected should this bug ever be fixed and at some point they're likely to get merged with ISBN ebook editions because the librarian can't see the ASIN in the source field unless the record is open (and we don't open records when we combine/merge).

 

So if you can, add the ebook edition with the ISBN; I know this is not always possible for Kindle users because Amazon isn't going to show you the ISBN - they don't want their customers thinking the book exists anywhere else - but the ISBN of any book that has one can usually be found on the copyright page.  It's not as easy as cut/paste, but it will ensure that your edition record won't get merged accidentally somewhere down the line, not to mention allow librarians to edit the record should we need to.