Score

Books with a three words title like Investigating the Paranormal (#38) or The Arabian Nights (#64) shouldn't be on this list.... And if a book does have a longer title than given in a certain edition, then please, do pick the edition where the longer title is mentioned (which is quite easy, just type in the ISBN).

@Diane
Maybe the description should mention a minimum for the number of words in a title?

^ Yes! on a lesser note, I take exception to titles with colons, which clearly indicate a subtitle. I don't think they should be excluded, but they should be considered with sufficient prejudice.

Booklovinglady wrote: "Books with a three words title like Investigating the Paranormal (#38) or The Arabian Nights (#64) shouldn't be on this list.... And if a book does have a longer title ..."

The problem is that once someone removes duplicates, it can change which edition is listed to the most popular edition, and which is often a shortened version of the title. And once that happens, there's no way to go back to the edition the voters meant to vote on.


But, I agree, a 3 word title like Investigating the Paranormal barely qualifies as "long", let alone "really long". Looks like a case of someone trying to do some marketing.

Melanti wrote: "The problem is that once someone removes duplicates, it can change which edition is listed to the most popular edition..."

You're absolutely right, I completely forgot about this, even though I have encountered the problem myself (I've made Listopia's with titles translated into Dutch, and had noticed the, very annoying, change into English titles).

Booklovinglady wrote: "Maybe the description should mention a minimum for the number of words in a title?"

I agree! What does the list creator think? I vote for 6 words at a minimum.

Diane?

I'm not sure if Diane is going to weigh in. We could do it by consensus? Surely I think less than 5 words shouldn't count, but there are some books voted for here with only 4 word titles.

Rainbowheart wrote: "I'm not sure if Diane is going to weigh in. We could do it by consensus? Surely I think less than 5 words shouldn't count, but there are some books voted for here with only 4 word titles."

I fully agree with your proposal of 'less than 5 words shouldn't count' :-) Also, subtitles/straplines (anything after a colon really) shouldn't be included, I think... But that's just my opinion.

Daniel wrote: "^ Yes! on a lesser note, I take exception to titles with colons, which clearly indicate a subtitle. I don't think they should be excluded, but they should be considered with sufficient prejudice."

Agreed. Six words minimum, post colon material to be judged on its own merits.

Does anyone know a good way to check for duplicates? I checked the book page of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals and I don't see this list linked from the default edition, so I'm guessing I could add it, but I'm not sure....

A librarian can do it.

ETA: I combined duplicates, but there was nothing to combine.

Ok, I decided to go for it and change the description. Ok?

Also deleted Arabian Nights and a couple of others that obviously aren't don't have well-known subtitles or whatever.

Would like to delete Lamb, Longitude, Wicked, and the Harry Potter books because they violate the intended spirit of the list. What do you think?

I wanted to say 'six meaningful words' or something like that, because many of these have 'and' and 'the' paddings.... I'm also thinking that, because of those 'padding' words, maybe six words isn't a high enough limit...?

Removed spam books by Lynessa Layne. Four word and two word titles, not qualifying for this list.

Downloaded my goodreads list (it is helpful to have a lot of books on your shelves).

Pulled out the titles. Truncated after the colon. Sorted by length. Removed titles with # or ( or [ or /

cat goodreads_library_export.20240914.csv | csvcut -c Title > titles.txt
cat titles.txt | sed 's/:.*//' > titles2.txt
awk '{ print length, $0 }' titles2.txt | sort -n | cut -d' ' -f2- | egrep -v "#|\(|\[|/"

And then voted in order by length

And then went to the end of this list and voted on books that met my search criteria