Goodreads Librarians Group discussion
Policies & Practices
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Authors of reference books
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This causes a number of problems (with author counts, with books showing up properly where they should, with combining and separating), and thus should be avoided.
I'm sorry, rivka, I don't understand - are you saying that Patrick should leave the human as the primary author, and leave the books uncombined?If so, I agree.
Patrick, I see how it seems logical in many ways to combine these, especially given precedent with other books, but I, personally, think that we at GR do all too much combining, and this looks like a perfect excuse to back off a bit.
After all, I wouldn't want to rely on a 1997 edition of a travel guide to Croatia, for example, just because it was combined with the 2011 edition and I ordered the wrong one from ebay, or whatever like that.
Mod
I am, yes. If we wish to link the various editions, this is one of the cases where I think a series is appropriate for non-fiction books. Not for all the Insight Guides (that's an imprint, certainly not a series), but all the Alaska guides seems like a series.
Mod
If the 1997 edition and the 2011 edition have the same editor, they would still be combined.
Huh. So, properly speaking, maybe Patrick should be referring to editor rather than primary author. In any case, it's a person, not a publishing entity. I like what I see in that linked list of 'Insights to Alaska' series - I could live with that.I think I've thought about all this I can until we hear from Patrick again. :)
Mod
rivka wrote: "Cheryl in CC NV wrote: "I wouldn't want to rely on a 1997 edition of a travel guide to Croatia, for example, just because it was combined with the 2011 edition"If the 1997 edition and the 2011 edition have the same editor, they would still be combined.
On that issue, I think combining is a benefit. You're less likely to order the out-of-date edition if a newer one is clearly visible.
Having spent more time in the Insight Guides than is probably healthy, I can give a bit more context.Some of the guides are over 20 years old, so several authors have been accumulated. I think one of them had seven. These include authors, editors, photographers, publishers (Insight, APA, APA Singapore, Langenscheidt and sometimes all four), not to mention names whose role is unspecified. Even if we decided to list by editor, we often wouldn't know who that was.
Insight's website only lists the most recent edition. Information on GR for older editions is therefore hard to verify, though clearly some of it is unreliable.
Rivka, your comment: "This causes a number of problems (with author counts, with books showing up properly where they should, with combining and separating), and thus should be avoided", I'm not saying I disagree, I just don't really understand the argument.
On the issue of series, I have created these for types of Insight guide: Insight Guides, City Guides, Step-By-Step Guides, Smart Guides, Select Guides and Pocket Guides. Maybe we could have separate series for each guide, but this would take time and would need agreement as to what would go in each series. There are about 1000 separate titles under these imprints, and probably 4000 books overall.
As an aside, adding books to a series can be a bit awkward. If you're editing a book, you can only create a new series, not add it to an existing one. So you have to find a book in the relevant series, edit it and then search for the book you were just looking at. Occasionally you don't find it.
Mod
rivka wrote: "Having editions combined that do not have the same primary author causes problems with the database..."Right, I see the problem now. That's a shame. It would be nice to have a definitive way of handling these - one that acknowledges the different author-title relationship in reference books compared with fiction. Nobody's about to rewrite the database; we just need something coherent and sensible.
Philosophically speaking, these editions really ought to be combined on the "updated content but not substantially new content" basis. I wish there were a good way to do this on the technical side.
It seems obvious to me that (say) The Insight City Guide To Paris (3rd edition) should be combined with The Insight City Guide To Paris (2nd edition). After all, the manual does say "do combine: Different publications of the same book".
If we say they are editions of the same book (and it's only just occurred to me that some people might argue they aren't), then the only way to combine them is to give them all the same primary author. But authors and editors of such books change over time, with the only constant name being Insight Guides. So I found the only way to combine them was to list the primary author as Insight Guides - which is usually listed as an author and often the only author, both here and on the publisher's site. But that ran into conflict with Post 1424 (http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/2...), which prefers us to list a proper human author first.
Even though I'm also reluctant to give a human second billing to an imprint, I was all set to argue here that maybe, in this case, we should make an exception. After all, the publisher is the instigator of the book, while the author is hired much like the photographer and editor.
However, it seems that books remain combined even if you change the primary author. So I could have changed the order of authors, combined the editions and then changed the authors back to what they were. I think that's a fairly elegant solution, but what do others think?
Anyway, the three issues are:
1) Are different editions of reference books, even though updated and rewritten by new authors, still the same work (i.e. needing to be combined)?
2) Is the human author the primary author, even though the project is directed by someone else?
3) If the answer to the first two questions is 'yes', is there a better way to combine the works?