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Originally Posted by gmw
For this purpose the distinctions made earlier between "stand-alone" and "self-contained" are (or should be) irrelevant.
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But they're not irrelevant to me. Nor would I ever agree they "should" be.
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People that care about such things will still try to read in publication order (or whatever), but that's a separate argument.
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People may not want to read them
at all (or at least not yet). In any order. Hence the desire for distinction.
There's always going to be fringe/borderline/overlap cases where the connections are tenuous at best. One size rarely fits all. But that doesn't mean the general distinction between stand-alone and not-stand-alone (self-contained, but part of something else) is (or should be) irrelevant. The fact is: one person's "
can be read as a stand-alone" is another person's "
why on earth did you mislead me so badly!?".
When it comes to making/getting recommendations, the recommender's desire to promote a book that's clearly part of a series should never override the asker's request for a stand-alone. There's no need to try and pound a clearly square peg into a round hole. But that's exactly what so often happens.