XPost: rec.arts.tv

So search.worldcat.org is no longer showing separate
editions, it formerly could list separate editions
and I could search for a specific edition and how
available it is in Featured Libraries and a
different search in All Libraries. First they
made this more confusing and difficult a few years
ago and now have revoked it.

In my book, publicly accessible information that
becomes members only is a severe downgrade and I
don't care how unanimously "internet experts"
proclaim that obscurantism is always desirable,
it doesn't make it true.

This annoyed me when book shopping today, and I
won't know the exact edition of the book I ordered
until I get it, because I have no further information
on the different editions (sometime what's listed as
different editions by booksellers are actually the
same edition using two different ways of listing
the publisher, which I think likely in this case).
Of course there are editions of books not listed
on worldcat.org, such as not listing an oddly
formatted british edition of an american book,
otherwise unavailable.

On the directly related subject of shopping, Amazon
can't be said to be open when it's complete set of
reviews cannot be read by non-members, it shows only
a limited set of reviews and then lies to it's customers
and tells it's not-logged-in users there are no more
reviews. I first noticed this on foreign amazons years
ago and I mistakenly blamed the restriction from showing
all reviews on the clumsiness of Chrome auto-translation,
but really is because I wasn't logged in on the foreign
amazons. I can guess only guess this started in 2020
when Amazon's new management produced major downgrades
such as deleting all Comments without warning,
collapsing all reviews of different editions into the
same set of reviews with no way to connect reviews with
a particular edition, etc. So at the very time that
technical information revealed in reviews becomes more
important over twenty years of reviews are denatured by
amazon by removing the link from the particular review
to the particular product.

(sorry this post isn't about cats but you may
find references to cats in the referred to websites.)

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