adding item to series, but not to member acct.

I have seen items in series with 0 copies
How can I add items to a series page, but not record them as belonging to me (ie 0 copies)

You can't and you aren't supposed to. It has been asked that we don't add books solely to complete series.

0 copy works are usually an artefact of splitting incorrectly joined works.

I will say that I have added a few 0-copy works to series when I was cleaning up some comic book series, but I did not create them myself; they were already in the database and found when I was searching titles/authors. I recall some early issues of Cerebus were like that.

Partly it was because there was the chance of finding some owned issues which could be combined, partly because there were entries which were just the title with no cover image or issue number. If the latter are in the series along with 0-copies, then the owner may be prompted to clean up their entry and combine with the correct work. (Although I suspect it’s a case of I have a bunch of these and are making a note of the issues in comments rather making individual entries.)

You can catalog a book in your Wishlist or Read but Unowned collections as appropriate to fill out a series. But if you don't actually put it in your own catalog, you can't put it in LT.

It's probably worth mentioning that there's a quirk/bug with combining: if there is any series info on a 0-copy work, it gets erased in a manual combination with a 1-or-more-copy work. Bug topic on that is at /topic/335019.

Still, I also do as per >3 Maddz: and add pre-existing 0-copies I find in LT into a series, and that is entirely fine – since there's a chance that future copies added to LT will get detected by the autocombiner and the series info is preserved, or a manual combiner who notices the series can takes steps to recreate the info after it gets erased – but be aware that a series on a 0-copy is liable to get wiped off, at present, due to this.

thank you all for your responses
now that I know the facts about what I've seen I'll close this thread

There is no way for you to close the thread if others still wish to comment. You can stop replying. You can ignore it. But anyone can still add to it.

>3 Maddz: >5 Nevov: See, I'm the exact opposite. I remove zero copy works from series if I find them, if they don't have a matching single copy edition.

>8 gilroy: Hmm not sure about that. We wouldn't delete CK off a zero-copy work, and series did start off as CK data so I think it's fair to continue along with that principle. I'd suggest it's of course your discretion about adding in the first place if it's you that's building the series page, but meeting one that someone else has already added maybe leaving it be is the better course.

It also does rob the chance of any future copy that the autocombiner correctly handles, of re-inflating the zero-copy in the series into a 1-copy.

(assuming this is talking about such as a 6 work series, where say #4 happens to have dropped down to 0 copies, rather than mistaken-created 0 copies with bad titles etc.)

>8 gilroy:, >9 Nevov: The other thing about keeping 0-copies in the series is that the person making the later addition may not be the sort of person who would go and check things like series data.

Also, you get things added in when they are announced, but they never get published. People may delete their wishlist books, nut not worry about the series.

My first assumption about a 0 copy edition is that something about it is not good data. Usually it is obvious - a typo or extra garbage in the title, incomplete author name, bad ISBN. Never published isn't so obvious, but is very bad data.

It also opens the door to spammers.

>9 Nevov: >10 Maddz: Yes, you have points.

But most times, I find that people loaded the work, filled in the series, then deleted the work. (I can tell this because the entire series is only owned by that one person.) And since Tim has said that we are not a place like Fiction DB, trying to be complete-ist, I try to keep it to just what the database currently holds.

>12 Aman1995: Yeah, I need coffee to take in so many big words so early in the morning.

>14 gilroy: His profile portrait is a stock photo. Methinks he isn't here for a good reason.