Recognize duplicate for different editions of same book

Feature requests
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#1

I’m filing this as a feature request because I assume that the current behavior is intentional, but I’ve recently discovered that if I add the paperback edition of a book from Amazon and then later add the hardcover I end up with two entries in Paperpile. I assume the same thing happens for Kindle editions? (The book in question doesn’t have a Kindle edition so I didn’t test.)

Personally I don’t really want to have separate entries for each edition - I just end up in different places depending on how I get there (via Google or friend’s link on Twitter, etc.) and I would rather only have the book listed once in Paperpile.

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Feature requests I'd still like to see
#2

If the editions have two different ISBNs they won’t be flagged as duplicates. That’s by design. We have rather false negative duplicate assignments than false positive.

#3

“We have rather false negative duplicate assignments than false positive.”

Many other apps (both reference managers like Sente and other database based apps such as contact managers) address this dilemma by offering two levels of duplicate management - automatic merging of those that pass the bar you have set for yourselves above, as well as flagging potential duplicates and offering users the option of merging these manually. While I appreciate the need to avoid false positives, the result of the current design is a lot of unwanted duplicates and no easy way to identify them or handle them within the app.

#4

We are aware that there is room for improvement. Actually we have a whole section in our internal issue/feature tracker dedicated to duplicate detection improvements. But for now I think it works ok and we don’t have any plans to make a push in this direction given all the other issues that need our attention.

#5

I trust the developers to know best what priority different features should be given. I’m just glad to know that this is on the list. If it was to be broken down into two separate features: flagging of duplicates and manually merging of files, I would give the latter priority, as there are many situations where items might need to be merged, including accidentally uploading a PDF to a new record instead of an existing one.