Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Hey, long-timers. Was there a reason that Otis removed the dates from massive amounts of Kindles? At least that is what it shows in the logs. I thought perhaps it was due to the acquisition and the bots, but the dates don't match. There seem to be even amounts of active and retired ASINs. I was just curious if the reason was a policy from back then. I imagine the dates were removed by others as well, but Otis' edits are the only ones I've came across.

If they're edits from 2012-ish, that was from prior to Goodreads' acquisition by Amazon. Goodreads switched the API they used to get metadata in early 2012 and that led to Goodreads removing data it got from Amazon. Those removals were all done under Otis's name which is why there are so many from that time period.

After Amazon bought Goodreads the following year, that wasn't an issue anymore and GR started using Amazon data again but I don't think the information that was removed was ever fixed unless someone manually comes across an edition it happened to and fixes it.

Ah, and that is why it has only been Kindles and not ebooks. If it had only been a few here or there I wouldn't have thought anything about it. Now that I've seen it hundreds of times, I figured there had to be a reason.

Thank you, Melanie.