Goodreads is removing entries for fan fiction stories at the request of the authors. This means the stories disappear from your catalog and your reviews vanish too. Therefore I would like to know Booklikes' policy toward fan fiction. Are we even supposed to add it (I have done so, but I am not sure whether it is legit)? Once added, will the entry be removed if the author requests it? If the entry is removed, what happens to our reviews? What is the policy towards Works in Progress?

Thanks much for clarifying these issues.

Our book catalog includes books from our affiliate partners, titles from public domain & public resources and those added by BookLikes members (including fan fiction). Each BL member can add a book entry and a fan fiction piece. If no ISBN/ASIN is provided, please add a source link to verify the book data. If we receive a request from an author about the book removal we'll consider it and follow all necessary actions. However, and we're 100% sure of that, we will not remove any book review from your BookLikes webpage. Even if the book entry would be removed from BookLikes book catalog, the review is always attached to your account and to your BookLikes blog, thus it will not disappear even if the book entry will.

The same thing refers to Works in progress - if the book entry has no ISBN or ASIN, please provide the source link to verify the book data. No reviews will be deleted from your BookLikes webpage.

Thank you! Now I feel safe adding reviews.

Reply to post #2 (show post):
Can you clarify this for me I'm not positive I understand this and I want to be sure.
When you say the book entry (can be removed), that refers to the book record listed in our shelves? I don't generally write reviews of fanfic but I absolutely want a record of the fact I read it and when. I use a "read in x year" shelving system to know what books I've read each year and how many there are. If the entry for a piece of fanfic is deleted by Booklikes does the record of it disappear off my bookshelves?

Would still like an answer about this. I sent an email about it a couple days after my last post, never got a reply there either (has the amount of time gone way up for getting a response from staff? Every time I've sent a question or needed help before I got a reply within a few days or less. Are they just super busy now?) and I'd still like to know for certain if book records -like fanfic- ever can/will be deleted from our bookshelves. And if that's going to happen, do we get some kind of notification or back up of our data sent to us? Especially since you can't export your book data here this is really important to know.

GR just deletes book records and doesn't tell you anything. So unless you have an saved export with the information then everything you have, shelving data, read dates, reviews all of it is gone without a word, and nothing to warn you it has happened unless you notice something is missing.

If anything like that can happen here I want to know now, because I'm not thrilled at the thought of spending a bunch of time keeping my bookshelves here up to date if they can just be vandalized without my consent or even my knowledge.

I'm not speaking on behalf of BookLikes, of course, but I believe that if a record is removed from the database, it will be removed from the bookshelves, since bookshelf entries pull from the database. As BL made clear above, any review will remain because it's stored separately.

As a librarian, I can tell you that so far, the only book entries we've seen deleted are ones that are definitively not valid books - display packs, wall-calendars, and old Amazon marketplace listings that sneaked into the data feed.

Don't know if that information is any help or not.

Nuts, that's kind of what I figured, though obviously not what I was hoping for. Not sure what I want to do then. I spent over an hour at the end of March tracking down a missing book between my 2015 shelf here and on GR since I maintain both at the moment. It ended up being a fanfic that was deleted over on GR. If I hadn't had the same shelf mirrored on BL I probably wouldn't have noticed the loss till way later and had a much harder time finding the missing book, but I square up the records between both sites regularly so I knew it was wrong for one shelf to be off and not the other.

Thing is, I'd rather stop shelving on GR entirely -I hate the direction that site is going- but especially if I can't export records here -which is why I 'm still on GR, so I have that backup- I don't really want to risk switching over to only BL if the same thing could ever happen here. And while that it hasn't happened yet is a good thing, if entries in my bookshelves can ever just go poof and disappear -especially if like on GR it can happen with no notice and no record provided of the deleted data- I don't think I want to risk it. I read a lot, 600+ books last year and while I'm not much for reviewing, I absolutely want to have that record or it's too easy to forget the title/author of something I read a year or more ago. But a record isn't going to do me any good if entries can just go away without notice.

Thanks for the info Murder by Death, it did help. I'll have to do some more thinking to figure out what to do.

Aerulan, I would like those answers too. I am guessing TPTB don't really know themselves yet.

Reply to post #9 (show post):
That's a really good point, Booklikes is pretty much in their infancy compared to Goodreads and so they must have a lot of situations -like this one- where they're feeling their way through new territory. With GR their priorities are already firmly in place and often going to be quite different than a company just starting up. I just really hate the way GR handled this issue (seriously I was so pissed off when I figured it out I'm surprised my hair didn't catch on fire) and I'd particularly hate if the lousy precedent they set gets followed by BL or other sites.

Hey all, sorry for the late reply. At the moment we're brainstorming this issue with our team and looking for the best possible solution that would suit all parties. As we've mentioned the reviews will stay on your blog (and we're 100% sure of that), now we're working on keeping the book records on your shelf but hiding them from book catalog - if the author of the fan fiction requests so. We'll keep you posted.

Reply to post #11 (show post):
Thank you.

Whoohoo I love you guys! Thank you! Even if you can't make hiding the book records work -which would be perfect and wonderful but sounds complicated to do- the fact that you're even trying to come up with a solution like that is awesome. And it makes me feel a lot better about the safety of my books here that you're willing to try to work something like that out. Thank you BookLikes!!


edited to change if to it because typos are irritating.

Ok wtf, why is someone going around adding these "bad fanfiction" images as fanfiction covers?

The few I know of are here, here, here, here and here.

Also they're removing the description.

It seems to me a librarian is abusing their power.

Reply to post #14 (show post):
Ugh, that's a really shitty thing to go around doing, did you report the books to bring it to BL's attention?
Hopefully that person will get their edit privileges revoked for being a jerk.

I reported the ones you listed, so hope that helps.

Reply to post #15 (show post):
Seriously, I just don't understand it.
Thanks! I've now also sent some reports myself and will report anymore I come across.

I've just found these as well: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here *sigh*