After canceling a contract to publish my first book two years ago, I have been haunted by its digital ghost. Until recently a reader could search for my name on Amazon.com and find two pages: One showed my actual debut poetry collection, What to Wear Out, published by Get Fresh Books in April; the other showed a different book, also called What to Wear Out, supposedly published on April 14, 2023. While “unavailable” to order, the book, according to that second page, weighed 1.11 pounds. On the thumbnail of the cover, my surname was misspelled as “DiGregorio.” When you clicked on Amazon’s author link for the title—my name spelled accurately there—pages for both books appeared, giving the impression that I had published two poetry collections with the same title, two years apart.
But I did not publish a book in 2023. I nearly did, but I nixed my deal with the press in January of that year, after I found that very Amazon page and other web pages advertising my almost-book. Having spent nearly a decade working toward my debut, I winced seeing it listed so carelessly. I hadn’t even received feedback on the poems from an editor, let alone been shown cover designs, on which I would have asked to correct the obvious typo in my name. After I brought these errors to the attention of the press’s director, she apologized for the mistake and allowed me to terminate our contract. I was disappointed, to be sure, but I embraced the feeling of freedom to move on and, hopefully, find the right home for my book.
While I did manage to publish a revised version of the collection with Get Fresh Books, a press I love, I had not yet outrun the shadow of my almost-book. For twenty-eight months I was embroiled in a maddening quest to purge the internet of the various web pages that offered an alternate version of my literary history: the one in which I published a book called What to Wear Out with a university press in 2023, or the one in which my doppelgänger, Jen DiGregorio, did. This quest took me on a labyrinthine trek across the vast and mind-boggling terrain of digital bookselling and cataloguing. Though I finally managed to get Amazon, Google Books, and other websites to remove the page for my almost-book, online references to it may well exist that I have not yet discovered. My odyssey through the wilds of the internet book trade has taught me this: Writers are simply one pawn in the tangled reality-warp that the age of Big Tech and Big Data hath wrought.
“The book industry is at a scale where we can’t manage all the metadata,” says Brian O’Leary, executive director of the Book Industry Study Group (BISG). By metadata, O’Leary means the information about books that helps people keep track of and sell them: title, pub date, ISBN, author name and bio, blurbs, price, keywords, and dozens of other particulars. This sounds simple enough, but the problem is that there is no one repository—what O’Leary calls “a single source of truth”—where this information resides. Instead it is dispersed across a web of hundreds of different entities: distributors; physical and online retailers of print, digital, and audiobooks; companies that aggregate and sell data for commercial purposes; industry associations; libraries and library service organizations; and many more. These sources do not often consult the publisher directly to find the information that appears on their sites; instead they rely on secondary or even tertiary references, such as book distributors and data aggregators like Bowker, which issues ISBNs, or EBSCO Information Services. “It is easier for a retailer to talk to a handful of distributors or aggregators rather than a group of several thousand publishers,” says O’Leary. Each outlet also has a unique way of interpreting the data: For example, one company may have its own method of establishing page counts, leading to discrepancies across different platforms. Other outlets may fill in categories the publisher left blank, such as awards given to a title or the number of books that come in a shipped box. Errors are, of course, inevitable. “When a record is updated using a nonpublisher source, some retailers ‘freeze’ the metadata, so that a subsequent update from the publisher does not overwrite the good data picked up from a distributor or aggregator,” O’Leary says. “This can lead to issues updating other parts of a record.”
In other words, the facts about a book are elusive: They depend on what source you query at any given moment in time.
A major online bookseller like Amazon (which did not return requests for comment) often surveys multiple sources for a given book, picking and choosing the metadata it prefers to record, says O’Leary. So when a reader searches online for a given title, the information they see about that book is often a kind of “Frankenstein’s monster,” he says. While that may sound scary, “the consistency and quality of the metadata that we share with the consumer is pretty good,” he says. “The problem is that the systems aren’t in place to modify the records in a consistent manner.”
O’Leary was not at all surprised to learn that I had struggled for years to get references to my almost-book removed from Amazon, Goodreads, Google Books, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, and other websites where I found it listed. With so many new volumes released each year—O’Leary estimates three hundred fifty thousand traditionally published titles in the United States alone—my almost-book is something like a pebble on Mount Everest.
“The notion of trying to take one book out, it’s just not a priority,” says O’Leary. “And it’s hard to do at scale across multiple versions of metadata that exist across the entire ecosystem.”
I wish I had known this two years ago. And I wish the director of the press that first offered to publish my poetry collection had known this, as she spent months embroiled in the same saga as me. It was a little over a week after she agreed to cancel my book in 2023 that I found it was still listed online. I e-mailed her and asked her to have it removed; she replied that she had “made the change in the database that bookstores upload information from.” (Later I discovered that she was referring to Firebrand Technologies, which offers a software system that presses use to communicate with the larger book trade.) She also said she’d contact the seller sites I had pointed her to. Months later the almost-book was still showing up on Amazon, Google Books, Goodreads, and other outlets. First came the emotional wallop: Seeing these web pages was akin to stumbling upon photos of an ex, triggering feelings of grief over the lost relationship and all its promise—in this case, my debut poetry collection. Then my mind reeled with thoughts of the professional consequences: Another press might be reluctant to publish my book if it saw web pages advertising the same title. I reached out again to the press’s director, expressing my sense of urgency to extract the listings; again she said she’d do what she could. We went back and forth like this for months. Along the way I directly contacted Amazon and Google Books to see if they could do what seemed like an easy task: delete pages listing my nonexistent book. I also contacted Bowker and the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), a nonprofit that offers global technology for library book cataloguing. Each correspondence seemed to contradict the last. More often than not I was told that it was up to my press to correct the record online—as if this were a straightforward process. When I relayed the message to the press director, she was flummoxed, saying she’d done everything in her power, including contacting the press’s distributor—which also claimed that it had exhausted its options.
“I don’t understand why the book can’t be delisted,” the university press director said at one point. “As far as I can tell we did everything humanly possible to fix an error that was made.”
We did have some success. Around the time my actual book was published by Get Fresh Books, BarnesandNoble.com and Bookshop.org took down pages for my almost-book after e-mail requests were sent to contacts at those websites. And in the process of working on this article, Amazon and Google Books also took down their pages, alleviating my biggest concerns. For better or worse, Amazon is the biggest bookseller in the world, and Google has become synonymous with research: Anything on the websites of either company has the imprimatur of an official record. The change from Google Books came in June, after I e-mailed a contact there requesting comment for this article. As for Amazon, I have the Authors Guild to thank.
I had become a member of the guild earlier this year, hoping that the organization might be able to assist me. It offers legal services to most members; I paid $149 for my regular annual membership. In early June I logged in to the guild’s website and filled out a legal help request form; I digitally signed a retainer and received a message that I should hear back in one to two weeks. I had been advised to fill out the form by Umair Kazi, the guild’s director of advocacy and policy, whom I’d contacted for this article. He told me that he has successfully helped nearly a dozen authors remove online reference to books that were never published. He wouldn’t call digital book hauntings like mine a common complaint, but it was certainly one he was familiar with. “Most contracts actually get fulfilled,” meaning it’s unusual for metadata to be disseminated for a book that never gets published, Kazi says.
Without the intervention of the guild, which took less than two weeks to solve the problem I had been battling for two years, it’s possible I would not have received any relief. Retailers have no real motivation to remove a book record once it’s in the system; there are simply not enough hands on deck to deal with the “flood of information,” says O’Leary. And totally ridding the metadata system of an error that exists in any record of a book—even one that falsely represents its existence—is a herculean task with no guarantee of success. “Figuring out exactly where the echoes happen is really hard because you don’t know where all the data went, and there is no place to go back to change it as a single source,” he says.
While O’Leary agreed with Kazi that my problem was one that arose infrequently, he says other kinds of metadata errors have been a huge pain for the industry. Publishers are frustrated by how often distributors, aggregators, and other outlets change records of their titles “without their knowledge or consent;” this in turn creates a lot of work “to find the source of incorrect, public-facing metadata,” according to a 2012 report O’Leary authored for BISG, which he says is still accurate. Meanwhile “metadata recipients reported that they continued to receive incomplete or incorrect metadata from a wide cross section of publishers,” he wrote in the report.
There is no easy fix. “The solution involves revamping the supply chain,” says O’Leary, who published another report on the subject in April.
O’Leary is working with BISG’s constituency to take on this enormous project. “If we’re successful, that would mean there is one place to look for information about your book. There would be a clear record to change.” Canada and some European countries already use a single-database system to house book records, avoiding the metadata problems encountered in the United States. What BISG is proposing is a little different than that. O’Leary calls it “a federated set of databases,” with each book appearing in only one database in that set. Such an overhaul is years away from becoming a reality, he says, though there is consensus in the industry for making it happen.
In the meantime, writers and publishers are at the mercy of the imperfect system that exists. “It’s a legacy of being ahead of the curve in the seventies and eighties. We were actually really good at managing metadata for a physical supply chain,” O’Leary says. “And then we went online.” And online is exactly where the ghost of my almost-book may continue to haunt me—at least until O’Leary prevails in his plan for a supply-chain and metadata makeover. Until then, be wary of anyone claiming to be the poet Jen DiGregorio, author of a 1.11-pound book that doesn’t exist.
Jen DeGregorio is the author of the poetry collection What to Wear Out (Get Fresh Books, 2025). Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, the American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Third Coast, Tupelo Quarterly, Verse Daily, and other publications. She is the associate director of creative writing at Binghamton University.
Thumbnail credit: Matthew Simonetti.