Quote:
Originally Posted by haertig
Then I MANUALLY go and check their respective websites, Wiki, "Book Series in Order" website, Goodreads, and Amazon to see if they have released/announced anything new. This is a real pain for authors where I have a lot of their books already. I have to then go through my Calibre library again, and my print books, to determine if what I am looking at is a new book, or an old book that I just don't remember.
This is horribly tedious, and that explains why I rarely do it. Which just compounds this problem when I put off doing it.
Boy it would sure be nice if there was a website that listed just about every author known to man and all their books - arranged into series and then sorted into oldest to newest - with checkboxes by each title that I could click on and save.
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WorldCat lists most books known to mankind. By playing with P-CIP/C-CIP data, you can sort by series and publication date. The gotcha is different formats and publishers play havoc with the publication date. In theory, the only P-CIP/C-CIP data that changes is year of publication, ISBN, and publisher. Occasionally, practice can be radically different.
Things that authors do, that make series numbering hard:
- Publishing a book as a prequel, then deciding that it is the start of a new series;
- Publishing a book as volume x, retracting it, and then publishing a different book/title as volume x;
- Publishing the same book with two, or more different titles;
- Changing the name of the series in mid-stream;
Things that the estate does, that makes series numbering hard:
- Completely omitting the name of the deceased author;
- Using the name of the deceased author as the secondary author;
Then there was the publisher who decided that an omnibus edition was desirable. But instead of combining the first few books, the order in the omnibus was the third or fourth last book, the third or forth book, the last book, and then the first book. An order that was neither chronological publication date, nor chronological written date, nor when events occurred in the series, nor anybody's suggested reading order, nor even the generally considered best books in that series.