Book combining
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For help, advice, talk and arguments about combining or separating books, go to the Combiners! group
Contents |
[edit] Rules and conventions for combining books into works
Intro, books vs. works.
[edit] Combining Books
You combine books from the Author page. From that page, click on the "combine/separate works" link in the top section, where it lists all the author's titles. Follow the instructions on that page, placing a checkmark in the box next to the works you wish to combine. You can also go to the Debris section for a specific work, where 'potential combinations' will be suggested. If a book is listed in the catalog as by multiple different authors but with the same ISBN, you can combined them via this method.
[edit] Separating Books
Separating books is just like combining books, but in reverse. However, while you can combine any number of books in one go it is currently not possible to separate more than one book from a work at a time. This means mistaken combinations can be very time-consuming to undo -- while you can combine Hamlet with Macbeth with a single click, each of the hundreds of books contained in each work must be separated individually.
At least once a week there is a post to Bug Collectors or Combiners! along the lines of:
These two totally unrelated books are combined and I can't separate them! (They don't show up as separable entities in the Debris page or the author page. Books affected by this issue don't share an author and have no relationship to each other.)
There are two main reasons for this:
1. ISBN re-use (which publishers aren't supposed to do, but which happens anyway)
2. Hash collison.
The two title/author combinations get converted -- hashed -- into some internally-used format, which is shorter than the title/author combinations and easier to deal with. For example, say that Title A: A Book gets turned into, for instance, x134a and Title B gets turned into z231w, and the hashed versions are used internally. Then along comes Title C, and it gets turned into x134a as well; the system says "oho, here's another copy of good old x134a" and puts them together. Presently the only way to resolve this is for the owner of one of the 'tangled' books to make a small change to the title or author. This will separate that book from ALL the tangled books, both Title A and Title C.
Chris has indicated that resolving the hash collision issue is on the radar screen, in message 6 here.