Feature:90091 Edition label for publications

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Feature:90091 Edition label for publications OPEN It would be useful to be able to label publications as being printings of a particular edition. For example, there are plenty of Puffin printings of Le Guin's "A Wizard of Earthsea". They have different prices, and may have varying cover art, and we certainly should capture them. Displaying every printing, interspersed with all the other printings (US etc.) is going to be quite confusing. What would be better would be some way to group printings as being all printings of a given edition, and then show the edition level data (or maybe just the first printing, and a note saying "and 14 reprints)". Following on from the "Series" approach Al suggested for magazine organization, this is like a "publication series", though the display rules would be different. Mike Christie (talk) 06:58, 31 Dec 2006 (CST)

So it sounds like the title app would still show all of the publications it was published as, it would just give control over the organization of the display. Would this require just one level of organization, or would there be a need for hierarchies, like series for titles? Alvonruff 13:52, 31 Dec 2006 (CST)
I can't think of a reason for multiple levels. Seems like the most you'd want to do is hide reprints, and a single level would suffice for that.
This is a sideways approach to a generalized tree structure for some kinds of display, though; one could have a translated editions node, I suppose, with countries nodes below that, and editions below that, and reprints below that. More generally you could build a biblio that way: Le Guin -> Novels, Collections, . . . -> Editions -> printings and so on. Mike Christie (talk) 14:41, 31 Dec 2006 (CST)
One other situation just came up: I'm entering some first edition data for Le Guin from Currey, and there are two states of the first edition of "The Farthest Shore". He calls them A and B. I could see us wanting to give these the same edition name ("Atheneum 1972", say) and then series number "1A" and "1B". There could also be bindings without known priority, which could make it desirable to have two or more printings with the same series number. Mike Christie (talk) 16:26, 31 Dec 2006 (CST)
Mike – I’m looking at A Wizard of Earthsea and am wondering – could you provide an example of how you would like this page to be formatted? One complication I see is that there are two omnibus titles in there – maybe those should get separated out? Related to this is something bugging me is that since ISFDB is only collecting the “published” date that we will end up with a lot of later printings dated 0000-00-00 which pops these publications to the top of the list as they are sorted by date. Unfortunately, the fix is kind of messy as publishers change names. For example, I recently verified a collection of later printing Zelazny books and something I saw there was Avon became Avonva though the book’s first printing, printing number, etc. all continued to sequence up. Here's a layout where I clustered by publisher name and then by price though still keeping the overall date order so that we know that Parnassus did the book first. Marc Kupper 04:04, 1 Jan 2007 (CST)
  • A Wizard of Earthsea (1968 , Parnassus, $3.90, 205pp)
    • A Wizard of Earthsea (1968 , Parnassus, $3.95, 205pp)
  • A Wizard of Earthsea (1970 , Ace, 90075, $0.75, 205pp, pb) - [VERIFIED]
    • A Wizard of Earthsea (1975 , Puffin, 0 14 03 0477 0, £0.45, 203pp, pb) Cover: David Smee - [VERIFIED]
    • A Wizard of Earthsea (0000 , Puffin, 0-14-030477-0, L1.95, 203pp, pb) Cover: David Smee
    • A Wizard of Earthsea (1992 , Puffin, 0-14-030477-0, L3.50, 203pp, pb) Cover: David Bergen
  • A Wizard of Earthsea (1984 , Bantam, 0-553-23461-7, $2.95, 183pp, pb)
    • A Wizard of Earthsea (0000 , Bantam, 978-3-11-6096-, $1.95, 183pp, pb) - [VERIFIED]
    • A Wizard of Earthsea (1991 , Bantam Spectra, 0-553-26250-5, $4.95, 183pp, pb) Cover: Anne Yvonne Gilbert
    • A Wizard of Earthsea (1991 , Spectra, 5-552-89816-8, $4.95, pb)
    • A Wizard of Earthsea (Sep 2004 , Spectra Books, 0-553-38304-3, $14.00, 192pp, tp)
  • A Wizard of Earthsea (1986 , Lythway Large Print, 0-7451-0337-5, L6.95, 328pp, hc)
  • A Wizard of Earthsea (1989 , Gollancz, 0-575-00717-6, L9.95, 191pp, hc) Cover: David Smee
  • A Wizard of Earthsea (1991 , MacMillan Atheneum, 0-689-31720-4, $15.95, 197pp, hc) Cover: Margaret Chodos-Irvine
  • A Wizard of Earthsea (1991 , Roc UK, 0-14-015776-X, L3.99, 203pp, pb)
Ombinibus publications
  • Earthsea (1977 , Gollancz, hc, omni)
  • The Earthsea Trilogy (1983 , Penguin, 0 14 00 5093 0, £2.95, 478pp, tp, omni) Cover: Jonathan Field - [VERIFIED]
Something like the layout above would be fine. I think the grouping has to be enforced by something like a series name, to address the publisher name changes you mention. For example, there might be a publisher series called "Bantam/Bantam Spectra/Spectra". The rules could be something like this:
  • Each publication series is tied to a particular title -- that is, it will only ever display pubs attached to that title, but that will included vts.
  • The publication series has a date associated with it, which defaults to that of the earliest (non-zero) date in the set of pubs in that series.
  • The biblio would print in pub series date order, with each pub given a pub series number; unnumbered ones come last.
  • Two options -- short and long, or full and abbreviated, or some similar name. For "long", we display the pub series name and date, and then indented below it we display every pub that belongs to that pub series. For "short" I can think the best thing would probably not to print the pub series titles, but instead to make the display look like the displays we have now, but only print pubs which are listed as 1 in some pub series. Mike Christie (talk) 06:22, 1 Jan 2007 (CST)
Would the series name be artificial (series names in the summary bibliography don't necesssarily relect the title names within the series), or would the series name be a publication as show above? For instance, would the following be okay:
 o A Wizard of Earthsea - Parnassus
   o A Wizard of Earthsea (1968 , Parnassus, $3.90, 205pp)
   o A Wizard of Earthsea (1968 , Parnassus, $3.95, 205pp)
 o A Wizard of Earthsea - Puffin
   o A Wizard of Earthsea (0000 , Puffin, 0-14-030477-0, L1.95, 203pp, pb) Cover: David Smee
   o A Wizard of Earthsea (1975 , Puffin, 0 14 03 0477 0, £0.45, 203pp, pb) Cover: David Smee - [VERIFIED]
   o A Wizard of Earthsea (1992 , Puffin, 0-14-030477-0, L3.50, 203pp, pb) Cover: David Bergen
 o A Wizard of Earthsea - Bantam
   o A Wizard of Earthsea (0000 , Bantam, 978-3-11-6096-, $1.95, 183pp, pb) - [VERIFIED]
   o A Wizard of Earthsea (1984 , Bantam, 0-553-23461-7, $2.95, 183pp, pb)
   o A Wizard of Earthsea (1991 , Bantam Spectra, 0-553-26250-5, $4.95, 183pp, pb) Cover: Anne Yvonne Gilbert
   o A Wizard of Earthsea (1991 , Spectra, 5-552-89816-8, $4.95, pb)
   o A Wizard of Earthsea (Sep 2004 , Spectra Books, 0-553-38304-3, $14.00, 192pp, tp) 
 o A Wizard of Earthsea (1970 , Ace, 90075, $0.75, 205pp, pb) - [VERIFIED]
 o A Wizard of Earthsea (1986 , Lythway Large Print, 0-7451-0337-5, L6.95, 328pp, hc)
 o A Wizard of Earthsea (1989 , Gollancz, 0-575-00717-6, L9.95, 191pp, hc) Cover: David Smee
 o A Wizard of Earthsea (1991 , MacMillan Atheneum, 0-689-31720-4, $15.95, 197pp, hc) Cover: Margaret Chodos-Irvine
 o A Wizard of Earthsea (1991 , Roc UK, 0-14-015776-X, L3.99, 203pp, pb)
 Omnibus publications
 o Earthsea (1977 , Gollancz, hc, omni)
 o The Earthsea Trilogy (1983 , Penguin, 0 14 00 5093 0, £2.95, 478pp, tp, omni) Cover: Jonathan Field - [VERIFIED]

Alvonruff 10:16, 1 Jan 2007 (CST)

I think they'd be artificial. I don't think I'd include the title in the series name, though, since you wouldn't want this to be a lexical link. So the first couple above would look like this, I think: 

 o A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)
   o Parnassus
     o A Wizard of Earthsea (1968 , Parnassus, $3.90, 205pp)
     o A Wizard of Earthsea (1968 , Parnassus, $3.95, 205pp)
   o Puffin
     o A Wizard of Earthsea (1975 , Puffin, 0-14-030477-0, £0.45, 203pp, pb) Cover: David Smee - [VERIFIED]
     o A Wizard of Earthsea (0000 , Puffin, 0-14-030477-0, £1.95, 203pp, pb) Cover: David Smee
     o A Wizard of Earthsea (1992 , Puffin, 0-14-030477-0, £3.50, 203pp, pb) Cover: David Bergen

(I regularized the data a little bit.) One thing I did was move the 2nd Puffin to the middle of the list, since the price makes it clear that's where it would go. On reflection I don't think we want to use the ordering number to cause "1st printing" to appear; that should stay in the pub notes.

We could have other attributes for the edition series record, such as date of first printing of that edition, notes on the text, or country. Hence the above could look like this: 

 o A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)
   o Parnassus (1968, US)
     o A Wizard of Earthsea (1968 , Parnassus, $3.90, 205pp)
     o A Wizard of Earthsea (1968 , Parnassus, $3.95, 205pp)

We would also presumably need an "edition series edit" tool.

It strikes me that the ability to create collections of editions and/or publications might be a way to represent things such as the DAW list, or Ballantine, or Ace Doubles, and so on. That would be a hierarchy in some cases -- the DAW list would have as its first member the set of publications of "Spell of the Witch World" which were part of the "DAW" pub series tied to that title. Mike Christie (talk) 11:02, 1 Jan 2007 (CST)

From: Marc Kupper 23:53, 3 Jan 2007 (CST) (testing this style to see if it looks better than indenting)

Al, have you ever tried showing the publication list in a table? The example lists look good because things like the pub dates are all YYYY but they can get pretty ragged when YYYY is mixed with Month YYYY and you have both ISBNs and older book codes.

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