Phil's comments (member since Feb 23, 2009)

Phil's comments from the Goodreads Librarians group.

Given that the number of pages is used to compare against "I'm on page xxx of this book" it would make sense if this matched up with the last numbered page of the story. Do the figures on Amazon, etc, usually correspond to this, or to the number of physical sheets of paper (doubled, obviously)?

Are we anywhere near to having series available as entities in themselves, to which books can be added as appropriate? I'm sure I've seen mention of that as a wanted feature, but I don't recall where, or whether it's imminent or even likely.

I would imagine, as mentioned above, that individual editions of a book would be added to a series. Not only for the sake of the different language editions, but also for re-issues. In particular, the recent "Science Fiction Masterworks" series comes to mind, which includes reprints of classic SF books. It would not be appropriate to be showing the original editions of those as belonging to the series.

On the other hand, it might be that it could be optional that membership of a series would apply to all editions. Where that classic book was part of a series, for example, the new edition would equally as well be part of that series and should be so implicitly instead of having to be added explicitly.

Not sure how coherent that is, but I hope the thought manages to struggle through.

Lisa wrote: "…to me they're not books and I thought Goodreads was supposed to be cataloguing books…"

I thought Goodreads was about cataloguing good stuff to read. Does it really matter that much how that stuff is delivered? Somebody mentioned short stories above: should those not be included if they are not in a "book"?

Case in point: Tim Pratt is writing a prequel story (Bone Shop) to his Marla Mason series, publishing it on his web-site. It might or might not ever make it to a dead-tree edition. Should we include this story for completeness' sake, or disdain it because it's "not a book"?

Elizabeth wrote: "Oh yes, I like everyone's suggestions! I personally think this would be a wonderful addition for imaginary places, like Discworld."

Exactly: I was wondering why nobody had brought up the subject of SF and Fantasy which frequently have settings which have no possible zip-code, post-code or anything similar.

Would it be possible to have some way of indicating whether the setting is a real place or not? This could then be used to determine whether the offered list contained the current list of real places or a list of imaginary places generated from entries already added to the database.

It would be really nice if the lists could be multi-tiered, to allow say the entry of a State within the US, or a county within the UK, or similarly a country (such as Lancre) within a "setting" (such as the Discworld). I'm sure there are sufficient of us here who know enough to police such lists and make sure that they don't attempt ridiculous depths of granularity.

Ben wrote: "I don't have a problem with people giving credit to the cover artist. I'm not sure if giving them a role as an "author" is the best way to do it"
Isn't that exactly the point? They're being given the role of "cover artist", not "author".

Given the importance attributed to the cover art when people choose books, my personal feeling is that listing the artist is a good thing for GR. I have several times been persuaded to buy or read a book on the strength of knowing that the particular cover artist does a good job and that the picture is actually relevant to the story. Cases in point: Michael Whelan as already mentioned; Jody A. Lee; Donato Giancola; Chris McGrath. Do I even need to mention Darrell K. Sweet? I would find it very useful to be able to look up an artist on GR to find a book which I vaguely recall seeing without registering the author (as has indeed happened to me in the past).

OK, so the paperback sitting next to me also lists people responsible for the "cover design" and "interior text design" which might be going a bit far, but on some books that's actually important. Who remembers the big reveal on Terry Pratchett's Reaper Man? Absolute genius (totally ruined in the paperback edition, by the way)!

I also endorse the idea of having "series" as a separate object, and would like to suggest the possibility of allowing a series to belong to a series in turn.

This would cover a situation like say the Velgarth books by Mercedes Lackey in which the books are clustered in sets of 2, 3 or 4 books, and each cluster belongs to the overarching sequence.

Of course this could also be covered by having each book belong to the "cluster" and the "overarching sequence" in which the latter are both series and are collated independently; we would simply have to be careful to keep the collation consistent between related series.

I would like to be able to mark a series so that if a new book is published it could be added to my "to-read" shelf automatically, and also the system could keep track of my progress through a series as well as through the individual books.

So many fun possibilities, so many ways to make the programmers' heads asplode ;-)

Thank you. I'm still not clear on why I got an actual error, rather than a complaint about leaving a required field blank, but I'll try to remember this way of doing things next time.

I see somebody has preempted my follow-up question in the case where the erroneous primary author is not an unwanted duplicate of a secondary ;-)

Author "J.D. Robb" (ID 17065) has been translated into a language I do not recognise, and the translations have been attributed to "J.D. ロブ" (ID 806407) with the original author and translator added as extra roles. This prevents these editions from appearing on the "combine editions" list for the real author.

I attempted to remove this "primary author" from the first book on the list (ID 5984602) in order to merge the translations in with the other editions, by the simple expedient of blanking the author field: I assumed it would either roll the other roles up to fill the gap or complain about a required field being blank.

However something went wrong and I can't even view the book now. It's not on the list of that "author" any more either.

What did I do wrong, and how can I do it right next time?

It's particularly unhelpful for Science Fiction and Fantasy novels. It doesn't have an entry for "Middle Earth" or "The Liaden Universe" or "Mars", just to grab the first few off the top of my head.

So what's the current policy? I've just fixed up a book by "K.E. Mills" which is a pseudonym used by "Karen Miller" (I had to remove the reference to the latter to combine two editions which were listed one under each name). Do I add "Karen Miller" as a co-author, role=pseudonym, or do I edit the entry for "K.E. Mills" or what?