New feature: "Series"
Chris and I have added "series" to our Common Knowledge feature, creating a way to deal with book series like the Chronicles of Narnia, The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, Will and Ariel Durant's The Story of Civilization or the Bluffer's Guides.We've started off simple:
- A page for every series, with covers and titles.
- A simple method of ordering works within a series.
- A series-level tag cloud.
- A mechanism for showing series overlap, as between the Chronicles of Narnia in publication and chronological order.
I've also added fields for a work's "Canonical Title" and "Canonical Author." As of now, the values of these fields do not affect work or author titles. They will soon.
Labels: common knowledge, new feature, series
posted by Tim at 1:45 AM
24 Comments:
Wow,
Much fun to be had / time to be spent.
Thanks for this, it shoudl prove really useful.
Excellent! This is something I've been hoping for for quite some time!
I've just put a load of the SF Masterworks series in there (which were always annoying because there was nothing other than genre connnecting them....
Well, there was always the SF Masterworks tag, but that doesn't give you the order. When I saw they'd been added already I thought it was Tim testing from my catalog. ;)
It would be extra nice if we could choose the covers for the series so that the SF Masterworks series page showed the SF Masterworks covers. But I can't see a good way of doing that.
BTW - I can see I am going to be busy what with Marie-Antoinette and this.
Hey, that's awesome, especially this part: "A mechanism for showing series overlap, as between the Chronicles of Narnia in publication and chronological order."
Thank you! This is a nice new thing to have.
On a different note, a bug seems to have crept into the automatic language detection feature. I don't know exactly when it started, but for the last few weeks, every time I add an English book by searching Amazon.DE, I end up with German in the Language field. Seems as though the system is assuming that any book from Amazon.de will automatically be a German book?
Not a huge issue, but it would be nice if it went away again. :)
This is so exciting. I love mysteries and when I'm working my way through an old series sometimes it's hard to figure out what book I should read next. This is going to be so great!
Just a note on the SF/Fantasy Masterworks. Since these books are published by a wide variety of publishers, aren't they covered by Tim's suggestions that we "avoid publisher series, unless the publisher has a true monopoly over the "works" in question. So, the Dummies guides are a series of works. But the Loeb Classical Library is a series of editions, not of works."?
Nice feature though, I can only presume that this means collections and other like features are on the way!
This is a fabulous feature! I love seeing how quickly books are getting assigned to their series, and seeing the covers all in order is great.
Aww... I needed this about three days ago. Isn't that always the case. But thanks for something that's very useful to a lot of people.
About the language thing. When we get from Amazon—as opposed to a library—we have to guess. If the work has an ISBN, we use the publisher-country data embedded in the ISBN. Unfortunately, this means that an English-language book published by a German publisher shows up as German. I think if there's no ISBN it does guess "German" for an Amazon.de selection. Want to shoot me the exact book you had problems with?
Hallelujah!
A very useful feature, indeed...one I have been previously solving by changing the book title.
Is there a mechanism for adding works that cover multiple books in a series---like one containing all three volumes of Lord of the Rings, for example?
What about series-within-series? Perhaps by allowing series themselves to be part of other series?
Just some thoughts for the future!
Hot stuff! This is terrific.
Cool! This will help simplify things--some authors wrote one series after another.
Now I want to "add" series to my library.
Is there a way to make this more prominent, perhaps in tools?
Great work!
PS
I'm partial to the published order for Narnia. ;)
Tim: I've had this problem with pretty much every single book I've added in the last few weeks, but the two most recent ones (neither of which seems to have been published by a German publisher) are the following:
http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/1595540024
http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/0825432979
I entered the books by typing in the ISBN-10 (one of them doesn't have an ISBN-13 anyway).
The interesting thing is that this behaviour with the Language field is fairly recent. I remember seeing it a long time ago, just after automatic language detection was introduced, but it went away and language detection has been almost error-free until just now.
Seems like this one has been picked up very quickly!
One quick question....
How about when there are some books published that have more than one original book from a series in.
for example, the Cities In Flight series (by James Blish) currently has the 3 books from the series in, plus the book that contains all of them.
Another would be some of the David Eddings books - I've got one series (of 5 books) that's in 2 volumes (1,2,3 and 4,5)
Oh, and WRT the SF Masterworks series, I'd definitely second (third?) the suggestion/request to be able to define covers to be shows in the series.
And also (last thing, I promise) it would be great to be able to have a "series" column in my library view.
Too much stuff going through my mind at the moment.....
How about also having the ability to, somewhere, see a whole series with something signifying which books you've got in your library?
This is so great. I was entering these as tags and comments. Now I will go back to add the series. Too much fun.
It would make more sense to have "order" to the left of "title" in the table.
Someone already mentioned it, but I would also love to have a series column viewable in my library as well.
Tim: Further to the language issue -- I don't know if this is related, but the "Add to LibraryThing bookmarklet" no longer seems to recognise Amazon.de pages. (It works perfectly on amazon.co.uk for the same book; browser is Firefox for what it's worth.)
I distinctly remember the bookmarklet working in the past, but I haven't used it for some time so I don't know when it went dysfunctional.
To the language thing. Both Amazon.de and Amazon.fr do this. Every time. That includes searching on ISBN. They also both end up with all authors entered twice. If I end up having to search on either, I know now to clean up authors and language.
Post a Comment
<< Home