Publisher Series: Assign Individual Books and Covers

Two suggestions for Publisher Series:

1: It would be nice for collectors to see what copies they have in the series. If I'm looking at Everyman's Library, it would be great to be able to see my copies, and ignore (or have distinguished) works that I have copies of, but not from that series. Would this even be possible, or is there no way to tie a publisher series to an individual book?

2: It would be great to be able to assign a cover to a publisher series; I realise this has been proposed before - including by myself - but I don't think there's really been a conclusion. While some publisher series have multiple covers for a given title, even if we don't get perfectly consistent covers for all series, it would still be a significant improvement, imho. I suppose this creates the possibility of conflict where different editors prefer different covers, but I'd be surprised if it becomes a problem.

Concur 100%

I doubt the book-level info on publisher is in a good enough state to do that, but I believe Tim intends to work on it 'real soon now'...

>3 sarahemmm:
What if individuals could assign their own copies to publisher series? You could at least have the same ISBNs follow suit, even if you don't use publisher data. There'd be lots of unassigned copies, but (1) members who wanted it could assign their books to the proper publisher series and have their data make sense and (2) at least for recent publisher series, ISBNs would give less-enthusiastic cataloguers some better data than they currently have.

It doesn't make sense to add books to a publisher series because series are at the work level.

In order to do this (which would be nice, I agree), Tim et al. would need to develop the legendary edition data layer. That would be a really big change at the database level.

>1 gabriel: You should already see checkmarks of the books you own in the series, publisher or regular.

>7 gilroy: The point would be to see the books from that publishers series only. Not works that the member owns from a different publisher.

I'm no coder, but wouldn't there be a workaround at least for the book covers? Create a dedicated "book" for the publisher series, and then when people assign a cover to the publisher series, they're actually assigning it to the book. Then when the publisher series queries covers, get it to query the associated book first.

>6 Felagund:

Maybe this is the case for spreading publisher series information around, but I would think you should be able to resolve publisher series for your own books. You'd could simply mirror the publisher series information from the work to the book, and then the owner/editor could have the option to dismiss irrelevant ones (or select the correct one). That would solve the problem for the individual - and then, when and if the long-hoped for edition-level data layer is created, you'd have a whole bunch of information to import (via ISBN or unique edition information).

>8 MarthaJeanne: Yeah, until the fabled Editions layer appears, that's a unicorn of a pony with a sparkly tail. The coding alone would be a semi nightmare.

>11 gilroy:: I'm sure it's not simple, but I would leave the determination of whether it's worth pursuing to the development team. Is there something particularly challenging with the limited procedure I outline at #10?

>12 gabriel: Well to start, the publisher isn't its own field in the edit books page. That would have to be created and populated. If that was created, it might make your procedure simple. But without that field existing, your book attaches to the full work, with all the bumps and bruises it contains. Details bubble up from book to work, not down from work to book. From a database standpoint alone, that's trying to reverse a link that may not be possible from what I remember (Been a while since I've built one.)

>13 gilroy: Right, I definitely had something like that in mind. I don't think it would be a "publisher" field per se - it would probably work best as a drop-down box like the current media but for "publisher series". But you're right, rather than having it as a set list, you'd have to have it populate from the work. I don't know how difficult populating that list would be.

I still see it as being a really significant improvement to publisher series - right now, publisher series for individuals is useless - I don't think you can even see what publisher series you "have".

Now that I think about it, you should be able to get the publisher series to travel with the ISBN just as you currently get "best-guess for ISBN" covers. So we could then have "publisher series set"; "publisher series best-guess for ISBN" "publisher series unknown" for everyone's library, as well people being able to see what they actually have on the publisher series page.

Perhaps Tim & Christopher are too busy with switching over to the new design to weigh in, alas...

I've started a new thread on a related idea: assigning publisher series to publishers, which would also help make publisher series more useful.

edit: I hope people will continue to weigh in on this thread too.

It's the same thing for both threads. Why start a new one?

>16 gilroy:

This thread is for discussing assigning books to publisher series (and assigning proper covers to the publisher series page). The new thread is for discussing assigning publisher series to publishers.

>17All of which are interlinked. Same thing, same thread, same concepts.

Okay, so I had a thought about how to help the cover problem by using my suggested "assign to publisher series" function.

Right now, covers are calculated (correct me if I'm wrong) based on the most common cover. But if we allow users to select the relevant publisher series for their book, perhaps you can calculate the most common cover among those users who have selected the relevant publisher series. Then, instead of the publisher series page pulling the general cover, it could pull the cover calculated for the subgroup of users who've selected the publisher series.

I'm not sure if this would be easier, but it's a different method, and it would avoid having to create a way for users to select the relevant cover.

>19 gabriel:
I think I like this idea.

>20 Felagund:

The main drawback, as I see it, is that it would only work when editors who actually own the works go and edit their books. Helpers couldn't just go and sort out covers for an entire series (unless they created ghost copies in their libraries). But for the larger series, I think you'd get the covers sorted out fairly quickly. (Although I don't actually know what proportion of people actually edit their book data when they add their books... maybe it's a fairly tiny number, and we all talk to each other on this board.) That said, I hope it would be a good start, and it might be a fairly robust solution for all but fairly low-member publisher series (really low-member publisher series are fairly likely to have the correct covers anyway, since they are often the only covers).

Okay, another possible way to improve cover selection for publisher series.

Another user suggested making a separate field for publisher (in the work data). If LT were to implement this alongside my suggestion to allow us to assign publisher series to publishers, you could perhaps link them - and then allow cover selection to flow through that way.

I think this would work similarly to what I proposed at 19 - allow only those users whose publisher field matches the series publisher to determine the cover for the publisher series.

>22 gabriel: One thing that would have to be considered is that there's going to be a fair amount of variation in how publishers are entered. Many publishers have merged or split or changed their names at various times, and mega-publishers have subdivisions and imprints.
This makes for messy data that doesn't sort well into tidy groupings -- i.e., it's data that will, by and large, probably have to be linked up manually.

Even if the relevant publisher information were to be entered into LT and somehow made consistent across all users' individual entries, publisher alone isn't going to be enough information to determine which copies of a book belong in a publisher series. Classic novels may have been published by the same publisher in multiple publisher series. Occasionally, a publisher series may be published by multiple publishers (e.g., small university presses that rely on a larger publisher as their distributor, or affiliated publishers in different countries).

Allowing users to associate ISBNs of a work with specific publisher series might be a more feasible option. The information is already available on LT and it maps much more cleanly.

I support the original poster.
I find the present implementation unsatisfactory, where a work is represented, e.g. in publisher series, by a particular instance/edition of that work, an instance which will in many cases not be the correct edition to appear in a publisher’s series.