Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Hello!
I was checking out this book from Open Library https://archive.org/details/roumanian... and I was looking for it here on GR but... there's so much confusion, I thought I'd ask more experienced librarians before I make a bigger mess.

The edition I'm looking at is written by Mite Kremnitz (alias Marie Charlotte von Bardeleben) and translated by Mary Joanna Safford.
published in 1885 by New York, H. Holt and company.
I can't find an ISBN for it (I'm not even sure there is supposed to be one for public domain books).

I've so far found this, with the translator listed as author instead https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...

this, with the author name in full
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...

This, where the title appears mainly in... arab (? ) but that seems to be the most exhaustive list
https://www.goodreads.com/work/editio...

And this, which I believe is the same thing with a wrong title
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9...

Could anyone kindly sort this out ? thank you very much :)

I would also like to take this opportunity to ask what the policy on public domain books is. Are they to be added to the goodreads database? And if so what are the rules?

Again, thank you to anyone willing to help ^_^

Adding PD books is fine, but the existing entries for most of them are a disaster.

Without looking, it's probable that all the above are legit editions, and just need combining. To combine them (And for the GR database to be happy longterm), the first or primary author needs to be the same.

First step is to be a little aggressive about combining author profiles. A lot of the PD republishers are more concerned about volume than accuracy, and use all kinds of weird combinations of author names, dates, etc. Ideally you gather them all under whatever name was actually printed on the books on their first publication. Merging author profiles into the target will get you a long way there, then on the remaining editions, add it if it's not there, move it to the top if it is or if you just added it.

If they were republished (then, or more recently) under other names, such as a real name in place of a pseudonym, you can add that as a second author name. Translators/introductions/annotations etc with credits, can be added after that with roles as appropriate. A lot of old books have internal illustrations and plates too, so illustration credits may be ok (you usually have to actually look at the book to figure that out though).

Titles generally should be as on the cover. A lot of older books have a lot of translations, so it's not unusual that there are a bunch of titles in arabic or russian or whatever, they get combined as usual. However, the republishers often put things like "illustrated edition" or "annotated edition" in the title, and this should be removed to the edition field.

And now if someone didn't already fix them while I was typing this, I'll go fix that book up a bit.

ETA: Forgot to say: ISBN's were introduced in the late 60's, and became ubiquitous in the 70's, and are only required for printed books, so no, e-book editions of PD works don't necessarily have one, and the originals never did.

ISBN is an standard that was created in the 1970s, so any book published before that doesn't have an ISBN. An ISBN, while not mandatory, identifies a version of a book, the publisher, binding used, etc, so even if what is written inside is exactly the same, each version (unless a reprint) gets a new ISBN, including e-book versions.

Once a book, that has been scanned by Google (well, every single book...) hits public domain folks around he web format it in a accessible way for ebooks and release it for free (usually you can find it at Project Gutenberg, like your book: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20552/... ). What it allows is that, besides the "traditional" publishers that already had it's means of publishing public domain books, anyone can publish it now, especially online (including, I'm sure, bots). As anyone can do it, it can happen that not everyone will be very careful to give out the correct information.

As to adding the book to goodreads, I believe, again, anyone can do it, so mistakes can and do happen, for more diligent the librarians around here are. Also, I believe that if it has been made a book, it can be added to goodreads. Usually some people add a version with the publisher as Project Gutenberg, which is the freely available public domain version, but if anyone takes that and starts selling it on amazon, it can also be added, if anyone cares about doing so. The sensible thing, and what happens when librarians spot it, or are directed to it, is combine the countless versions of public domain that pop up, so it doesn't end up cluttering everything.

If anyone is ever bored and wants to dig around in the PD books, the fastest way to find one that needs work is search for "Dodo Press" in the title, and then when you find one you feel like working on, search again for a couple of words in the title, plus the author surname. You'll almost certainly find several variants on the author name, and once you're done with that, you'll have a whole ton of book combining and title fixing to play with.

(Not that Dodo are the worst of the republishers, in fact I think they're pretty decent at it from what I can tell. But they do leave their publisher name in the titles on Amazon and that comes in with the imports, so it makes them easy to find :)

Haha, and now I have a way of searching for public domain books, haha..

Well, only the ones nobody has fixed all the editions of yet. Which is, to be honest, probably most of them :)

Thank you all very much!
I'll go have another look at the manual for the merging of authors' profiles :)

Ugh, the public domain books are monsters. It doesn't help when the author has written so many books that the Combine Editions page takes FOREVER to load every time.