Combine question

[Moloch]

About the Italian editions of two short stories collection by P.K. Dick:

Le voci di dopo is the Italian edition of "The Preserving Machine and Other Stories" (1969), while I difensori della terra is the Italian edition of "The Book of Philip Dick" (1973).

The problem is, while the original editions contained 15 (the first one) and 9 (the second one) short stories, the Italian publisher decided to put the exact same number of short stories on both editions, so 3 from the first book were transfered to the second (so 12+12).

Can we still combine the editions, even if they do not contain EXACTLY the same stories?

[vicki_girl]

The current policy is that if 80% of the text is the same, they should be combined. However, this has been mostly applied in cases of "Revised and Expanded Editions" and severe abridgements. I don't know if it applies to short story collections. In the past it has not. I have been separating collections unless they contain the exact same set of stories. To complicate matters, going from 15 to 12 is exactly 80% of the original content. However going from 9 to 12, means that only 75% of the content is the same.

For this case I would keep them separate, but others may want to weigh in.

[Cait]

The rule as far as I know has always been that short story collections must contain the exact same stories in order to be combined. The "substantial" or 80% difference is for singular entities which have been partially revised, not for collections of distinct stories. The only time you might see things combined with different distinct content is if a later edition has an "extra" which is somehow marked as being not significant when considering the work as a whole (such as a novel with a postscript extra in a later edition).

[Moloch]

Ok, thanks