Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

The most popular shelved edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez is, to put it mildly, a nightmarish labyrinthine mess of an edition. Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...

It has a bot-assigned ASIN and no ISBN, the edits to this particular edition go back almost 20 years, and I am having no luck figuring out what ISBN may or may not have been assigned to this edition while digging back through the edit logs. The current cover art is that of a 2003 hardcover edition, but it's mistakenly labeled as a mass market paperback, and that hardcover edition (One Hundred Years of Solitude, ISBN 9780060531041) is mistakenly labeled as being published 2019. Has the linked edition always had the cover art of ISBN 9780060531041, or is this some kind of Ship of Theseus where it's had so many different ISBNs and cover arts over the years that it's impossible to know what this edition actually is? It should be merged with something, and based on image alone (and Occam's Razor) I would assume it needs to be merged with ISBN 9780060531041, but if this edition previously had a different ISBN that got removed for some reason, maybe it needs to be merged with whatever that other edition was.

Any input from librarians on what I should ask the superlibrarians to do with this thing would be hugely appreciated.

Considering that edition is shelved over 2 million times, leaving it as it is seems for me the only option. It would mean there is an 'imperfect' edition in the database, but the only realistic option in this case.
I don't know if the staff would be able to do this on the technical level, but as you point out, it is impossible to determine what the correct edition would be.

Was going to suggest asking staff to move the ISBNs off of 9780060531041 and onto the duplicate, but a merge would still be required after that, so nevermind.

Would the following steps be an acceptable way to mitigate errors?

On https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...

- Change the format to Hardcover
- Change the description to match the book jacket
- Add a note to the top of the description saying "this is a duplicate of ISBN 9780060531041" with a link to the book

On ISBN 9780060531041:

- Change the publication date to the correct 2003 date
- Change the description to match the book jacket

Bumping for further input re: my last post in the thread.

Another bump to get some input.

Bumping.