Comment by ryzvonusef | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryzvonusef | Hacker News Reader

Goodreads is so bad it allows reviews of books that don't even exist.

There exist pages for books that are "presumed" to exist based on author expectations, but have not been even conceived of yet, much less written, edited, titled, covered, published and read to be reviewed.

For example, Brandon Sanderson thinks that his current big hit series (Stormlight) will have ~10 books, he's currently half way writing the 5th book, so the 10th is a LONG way coming.

It's entirely possible he will change his plans, after all he did so for his other series Mistborn, he put four more books in between book 3 and what was originally going to be book 4 (now possibly book 8), if he doesn't change the plan again, or cancel the book series entirely and re-write the entire multiverse setup he has in his brain.

Yet a page for this hypothetical Stormlight book 10 exist:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17250985-untitled

There is no harm in pre-emptively creating a page bookmarking purposes, I supposed, but it already has 22 written reviews and 94 ratings giving it 4.68 stars.

WHY? why allow such things for non-existent books? How hard is it lock star ratings and comment box until the book is, you know, actually existant and read?

Pretty hard. There is no centralized book registry.

All you need to publish a book is a valid ISBN10/EAN13. You can buy those online in bulk. And technically you don't need one, but generally if you want to sell it enmasse you want one.

Given its owned by Amazon you'd think they'd limit it to known ASINs but then I guess they can't account for rare or old books that predate the isbn system.

Not long ago, I was in charge of a lending library at church. A very small lending library, like we started with one bookcase and grew to two.

At first, the most important task was sorting the donations, and determining which books were good for our shelves, and which to discard/recycle. So I was studying a lot of publication houses and authors and reputations. And at that time, I was sorting the books more or less by size and shape, or randomly.

So I had no catalog of books; each had a little library-style pocket with a library-style checkout card, and on the honor system, the parishioners would choose a book, remove the card, and keep the book for a few weeks. But we didn't know what was on the shelves in the first place.

So I decided I would find a book cataloging app for Android. You know, something that a small-time librarian could use. Ahahaha! That was a pointless exercise at the Play Store! Perhaps I gave up far too early. I also looked for a barcode scanning app, so that I could just zap each book and immediately know its ISBN and other details. At that point, I started noticing whether a book had a barcode or ISBN, and guess what, a lot of them had neither. More ISBNs than barcodes, that's for sure. What did I expect? These books were donated from parishioners who passed away, and represented 50 years or more of collecting tomes.

Eventually I just started taking photos of the bookshelves after I was done organizing them all. Oh, and there was at least one unknown person whose mission in life was to purposely mess up all the organized books, and put them in weird arrangements. Far more than someone who's innocently browsing the shelves, this was some kind of deliberate messing with my mind. It came to a point where I had to decide whether I would spend volunteer hours re-re-re-arranging and organizing, or just do a 10-minute tidy on it and stop worrying about this living Catholic troll.

There was a “personal library” tool for MacOS back in the 2000s that supported quite a bit, including scanning barcodes and getting data.

But as you found, there are tons of books without isbns or barcodes, especially if you go back far enough.

But even today there can be major press runs with neither - they’re only needed if you’re selling through bookstores basically.

For example, everything here is self-published with no ISBN: https://johntreed.com/collections/all

I’ve seen small libraries that gave up and organized everything by size or by color; if it’s a browsing type library it can work decently wel.

But the author is alive and active on Goodreads!

Why not give Authors/Publishers control on adding books and flipping the "book is released" switch?

If Amazon just put a little bit of effort, they could make this into a "goodreads premium" thing and earn money to boot.

Imagine selling input codes for ARC reviewers to be able to input reviews before the book is released for the public; publishers would gladly pay for the privilege, so that when the book is actually available, the top reviews are those of ARC reviewers.

There could be other things Amazon could do, this is just something I thought could earn them money and thus align their incentives with readers. They just need to "care"

Outside of a few niche scenarios with large authors, I don’t see the upside. And those authors have to care in the first place to keep Goodreads updated else Goodreads has a new problem of being stale since now it’s relying on author activity.

I don’t think this is as trivial as you suggest. Training users to not take “reviews” too seriously seems like a sensible trade off.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com