What's a "draft edition"?

BookBrainz
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This is something I’ve been confused about for a long time. When you add a new edition, you have a drop-down list asking if it is “official” or a “draft”. But how can a published edition be a draft edition? I can understand a published work can be a draft (e.g. if it leaked while the author was still working on it, or if the author died and it was published as it was written up to that point), but how can a published edition be a draft? It could be unofficial, such as Soviet Samizdat, but that doesn’t make it a draft.

The tooltip also says “Has the work been published or is it in a draft stage?”. So it is referring to the work, not the edition? Is the drop-down list simply on the wrong entity? But it still doesn’t make sense to me, can’t a draft be published? It’s not really an either-or situation.

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You are right. It is there from the very first beginning, I guess and it’s useless.
Maybe it should be changed to something like “promo” or “promotional edition”. These sometimes have the statement “uncorrected reading copy” and are often different from the “official” editions.

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OK, it’s good to know I’m not missing something. Maybe it would be better to just remove it for now.

I’ve never seen those, but that makes sense to me.

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for samizdat and leaked works, its probably worth waiting for a bootleg option. theres a ticket open Issue Navigator - MetaBrainz JIRA that includes it among other requests so hopefully it eventually happens.

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