Start Conversation: - Anthologies, Collections & Editors

[glennWilliams]

Start Conversation: - Anthologies, Collections & Editors

Firstly if there is another thread here somewhere discussing this topic please let me know and I'll go have a read through.

I'd like to start a conversation here regarding users thoughts on ways we could implement the requirements of metadata for Anthologies and multi-author works. I was going to just jump in and start coding but think I'd rather talk this through first and see if some kind of consensus can be reached

Note: More than just having the multi-authors listed and ampersand separated.

I am looking for thoughts regarding the following:

• A method of flagging the Author as an Editor
• A way of having multiple authors and the title of each work within the volume credited to each author.
• Also be able to use the system with single author collections (short story collection/ essays etc) within a single volume.

I’m not going to say much else now, I’d like to hear if there is an interest out there for this sort of thing. For example, being able to list all of an author's works, including the titles of short works contained inside anthologies or collections, being able to find the title of a book from a search of its containing works.

So, let me know your thoughts.

[theducks]

Melinda M. Snodgrass (ed) & George R. R. Martin (ed)

Author sort ignores the () stuff
I also use (trans) for the translator

I use the editor(s) in {Authors}, and have a custom Authors type, field for (when) the contributing Authors
My old device only used file names on its bookshelf: {author_sort}-{title}
that kept the path name short(ish)

If you want a entry Per

EPUB Split the book
Add a tag: From <title of collection edited by...>

[kovidgoyal]

I agree with theducks, best way to handle anthologies/omnibus editions is to split them up rather than trying to somehow shoehorn the concept of a book that is actually multiple books into calibre.

As for tagging the role a person plays in the book creation process. That is IMO a level of detail too far for core calibre. You can simply add that info in freeform to the comments field, or if you really want to manage it in a column, then create custom columns for the common types, such as editor, illustrator, translator, etc. And simply enter the names in those columns.

[BetterRed]

To whoever moved this thread from the Development Forum, the OP seems to be suggesting he is prepared to write the code -

Originally Posted by glennWilliams

.... I was going to just jump in and start coding but think I'd rather talk this through first and see if some kind of consensus can be reached

@glennWilliams - I recently began experimenting with One Note to maintain many-to-many relationships via MARC relator codes between Works (books, movies, transcripts etc) and Persons (Authors, Editors, Translators, etc).

For me, the killer feature of the approach is that I have carte blanche control over the Note content using ONs 'library' of note elements - check lists, pictures, drawings, web links etc. etc.

BR

[Sami]

My input here as an ocd series order romance reader, who normally splits most multi-books into individuals, for you guessed it series order.
1: a permanent column hidden by default for editor, would come right after author (if possible? linked to the Editor field for metadata download)
2: I do the reverse of this now, each split book utilizes a custom column "Secondary Title" to hold the anthology title, this could work for editor as well, but I could see a similar to 1 feature for this as well although I believe metadata integration would be impossible
3: single author collections as part of series get split and treated like 2, not part of a series get the tag collection so I know it's not a single book
Goodreads has also taken to splitting anthologies into single books as so many at least romance writers re-release as individuals now with full metadata, covers and the previously released disclaimer in the comments.
I agree keeping them whole and trying to fit all that various metadata into Calibre would be beyond it's scope, especially when you consider the abysmal web based metadata for download when it comes to most multi-author works, you'd never get all the fields filled properly except by hand and thats the beauty of custom columns.

[Krazykiwi]

Dismissing this out of hand is a little unfair. Omnibus editions, certainly. But good anthologies are often carefully curated and themed and designed to be read together as a whole.

This situation often applies to non-fiction. Tertiary level textbooks and academic publications for instance, will often have an editor (or ten) and multiple contributors who provided specific chapters related to their expertise. These are very often pdf's too, if you can get them electronically, which even if you did want to split them up, isn't necessarily as convenient to do as epubs. For a start, a great many textbooks are DRM'ed, which opens that whole can of worms. For a second, they often are heavily cross-referenced between chapters, which again is exceedingly inconvenient if you split it up into 8 bits just because there are 8 chapters.

This is not shoehorning a concept of books onto things that are not meant to be books. They most certainly are books, and splitting them into pieces would lose some of that context, as the pieces relate to each other.

Like the OP, I would be pretty happy to have a plugin that helped manage multi-author and/or edited books in a sensible manner.

In the meantime, I simply put the editor names first in the author list so they are sorted there, so I can at least find them, and add all the other contributors as authors after the editors. I suspect there's a better way.

(Offtopic, but post #5 is incorrect. GR does not split anthologies unless the author republishes parts of them separately. Short stories that have never been published separately are routinely merged back into the anthologies they came from and removed from the database. This is not "splitting up anthologies" but simply recording what's actually been published.)

[kovidgoyal]

For a textbook/reference book that has multiple authors, I certainly dont recommend splitting it up (as a matter of fact I am a co-author of one such book on Quantum Computing, and I would certainly not want people to split up the book). But what's the problem with just listing all the authors in the authors field, in order of significance? And adding a note in the comments field (or a dedicated custom column you create) about any special role any of the authors might have had?

[glennWilliams]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

For a textbook/reference book that has multiple authors, I certainly dont recommend splitting it up (as a matter of fact I am a co-author of one such book on Quantum Computing, and I would certainly not want people to split up the book). But what's the problem with just listing all the authors in the authors field, in order of significance? And adding a note in the comments field (or a dedicated custom column you create) about any special role any of the authors might have had?

i read a paper of your ages ago if im right. exciting work you are doing. we are at the start of something incredible. I just wish I had more than a single lifetime to witness it all.

i'll get back to the subject with a post a in a couple of hours once ive finished work.

[glennWilliams]

just as a quick note: my interest in writing an extension is to handle short stories. single author collections, anthologies etc

its about the handling of a books contents, which is absolutely outside the core app.

Im looking at a plug-in that will allow author and title and maybe more for each work contained within a 'Titled' collection. omnibus editions, I suppose so, I hadn't actually thought of that.

my interest is in fiction, short works. I wasn't thinking of non-fiction, books, or papers with multi authors. Its really for books with multiple self-titled works that are collected together by a editor or a single author collection. i'd like to be able to list abnd sort an authors smaller works and find them inside anthologies etc

i'll be back and post shortly.

im just interested if anyone else would use something like this

[Cynosarges]

Originally Posted by glennWilliams

just as a quick note: my interest in writing an extension is to handle short stories. single author collections, anthologies etc

its about the handling of a books contents, which is absolutely outside the core app.

im just interested if anyone else would use something like this

I'm new to this forum (though I've used Calibre for a number of years), and I approached this forum specifically to investigate the anthology issue. I would be very interested in any anthology extension, and would be using it extensively.

Terminology note: To avoid confusion. in this posting I use the word title for a book/ebook title, and story for a single story within an anthology. Anthology is a type of book containing multiple stories.

I currently have a Kindle touch with a good collection of ebooks, and because I am planning to move, I thought as I boxed the books up for the move would be a good time to add my print books to my Calibre database,

I then came across a problem with anthologies, which I was unable to solve (unless this thread has been resolved but not documented on the forum).

To illustrate the problem, an example: Print book ISBN 038794950X title The Mathematical Magpie, editor Clifton Fadiman. This contains a famous short story which I re-read upon occasion, The Nine Billion Names of God, by Arthur C Clarke (and fifteen other stories by multiple authors). The story is also contained in an anthology titled The Nine Billion Names of God, but I don't own that book!

What I would like to see in Calibre is, when I select the author Arthur C Clarke, the story The Nine Billion Names of God and the book it is contained in listed. (I would also like to see the story listed when Calibre generates a Calibre catalogue, but this is less important)

There are at least 3 reasons why it would be of value

1) I want to find a story to re-read, and I can't remember the anthology editor/title.

2) I want to compare the titles/stories I own against an author's bibliography, as there may be short stories I want to acquire.

3) There is a new anthology published, and I want to decide whether to buy it. If I already own 9 out of the 12 story, it may not be worth buying the anthology for the 3 stories I haven't read.

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

But what's the problem with just listing all the authors in the authors field, in order of significance? And adding a note in the comments field (or a dedicated custom column you create) about any special role any of the authors might have had?

I can see two problems with Kovid's suggestion.

Firstly, it is vulnerable to damage. If I manually updated the metadata as he suggested, and subsequently used the download metadata function (if I wanted to add ratings, for example) Calibre would overwrite the list of author names I typed in with the editor name it populated from Google or Amazon, destroying the database links I would rely on.

Secondly, since the individual story titles are not fields in the calibre database, Kovid's suggestion meets the reasons I have for using anthology data poorly -> (1) can be achieved, but only be drilling down into the metadata for every book, as a column listing a dozen titles (probably average for an anthology) would make the library display unmanageable, as the new field (or re-used comments field) would take up a dozen lines of screen. (2) suffers from the same problems as (1), but is needed far less frequently, so not such a serious impact. (3) would be near unmanageable, as it would require the user to suffer the problems of (1) repeated for each author who contributed to the anthology.

I would be very interested to hear from glennWilliams and kovidgoyal on this subject, as I am planning a project to add 15,000 print books to my 600 ebooks on my Calibre database, and (like any developer) I am determining the best strategy before starting the work.

[kovidgoyal]

Huh? Why dont you actually try my suggestions before coming up with theoretical objections to them. If you did you would discovers that:

1) If you think that for some reason you are going to be randomly downloading metadata for books you have already edited the metadata for, create a custom column instead of using the authors column. Although practically speaking, the answer is, simply dont download metadata for random books. And if you do happen to do it, use the review button or the cancel button to reject changes you dont want.

2) I suggested using the comments column for that, which is not displayed in the book list and in any case columns in calibre never take up more than a single line

[Cynosarges]

Kovid,

My apologies for a posting that appears to have been taken as criticism. However you were incorrect - I had (partially) tried your suggestions, as follows.

I was not 'randomly downloading metadata'.

1) In my test set-up, I have recorded a small number of anthologies, added story authors, added a list of the stories in comments (noting that I would lose the book blurb from the book jacket) as you suggested and then thought (incorrectly) that a metadata download would fill null database elements (specifically Rating, which is not a Dublin metadata field) while leaving non-null values unchanged. A wrong conclusion, certainly. But given my current, limited, use of Calibre on a 600 ebook library, it matched my experience (Maybe Baen and TOR provide their metadata to Amazon?).

It was not a 'random' download. It was a purposed download, with the intent of adding metadata which was blank. My experience misled me about the download behaviour. After reading your reply, I discovered that the bulk download of metadata has a (previously unused) configure option where I can exclude individual fields from the download - which addresses the problem I caused/experienced. Mea Culpa.

2) Again, I tried to follow your suggestion. I tried to add the comments column to the book list, but could not find any example that allowed me to do this. I added a custom column, but could not find a way to insert a <newline> into the data (necessary if you are to record a list of fifteen books).

I could not prove that it was impossible to display book information over multiple lines,but was unable to find any document that made the statement that "columns in the book list never take up more than a single line". My only experience on that front is from "Polish books - Insert book jacket" where the comments text does spread over multiple lines. I generalised. Mea Culpa.

Being unable to positively determine the single-line limitation, I reverted to my profession as a business analyst. (To both my enjoyment, and to my regret, over the years I have migrated from programmer to systems analyst to business analyst, ever retreating from the writing of code.) I thought from the end-user viewpoint, and started from a user requirement of the three reasons for anthology information I stated. I then looked at the Calibre GUI, and thought how it could support those needs. My conclusion was that I would need multi-line display (to list 15 stories), and (unless I wanted to abandon book jackets) it would have to use a custom column. I did not prove that multi-line display was possible or impossible, but concluded that with single line display, the user would have to repeatedly enter the edit metadata screen, to see the comments field (apparently the only field with multi-line display), and considered the usability.

At the start of my emigration/retirement plan, I had consulted with the borough librarian primarily on the important issues involved in physically shipping books 6,000 miles, but also discussed library software and anthology recording. I used this discussion to develop my requirements for library recording. Before settling on Calibre for an integrated paper/ebook library solution, I had already determined an ugly, but usable, work-round for anthology data.

Calibre could record anthology data by setting up a second Calibre library, solely for anthologies. In the main library, use a tag "Anthology" to indicate inclusion in the anthology library. In the anthology library, each anthology book is represented by a series (Naming the series as "Editor - Title") You then create book records in this series for each book in the anthology, with author being story author, title being story title, and Series sequence being the order in which the story occurs in the anthology.

Ugly, and suffers from deficiencies. (No metadata download, all data has to be manually entered. The use of the series name is ugly. As far as I know, there is no integrated author names across two libraries) However the this approach does offer all stories by a given author, and all stories in a given anthology in an intuitive way for a Calibre user. The stories are not listed with non-anthologies (unless Calibre can integrate Catalogues across two distinct libraries - Not yet investigated) but it would allow me to compare what I own with the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction or an online bibliography.

[theducks]

All Metadata Downloads have field options PER SOURCE.
Cover options have (use) Priority by source

Spend some time reading back threads in this section. There are dozens of ideas.

Your job is to pick the one that suits your desires.
I use a couple of custom columns with Grouped Searches defined , EPUB splt Plugin for others.

[kovidgoyal]

1) Download metadata for an individual book *once*, before you do any manual metadata editing. Then dont download metadata for that book again.

2) Put your multiple authors in the comments field, where they will appear in the book details panel, one below the other and not appear in the book list.

I fail to see how this scheme does not meet any of your requirements. It allows multiple authors to be displayed conveninetly, in the book details panel, and searched for conveniently, by searching for the author name (which by default also searches the comments field). The only thing it does not do is allow you to find books by the author by clicking on the author name in the Tag Browser, as that only searches the authors field.

[BetterRed]

@Cynosarges - FWIW - perhaps you can get closer to what you want via the use of custom long text columns, which:

• can be edited via F2 from the book list,
• have a Column heading property, which can be one of No heading, Show heading above the text, Show heading to the side of the text
• have an Interpret this column as: property, which can be one of HTML, Short text like a title, Plain text, Plain text formatted using markdown

The Column heading and Interpret this column as: properties are recent enhancements that I have found to be more than a little useful - a boon in fact. But I do not do much direct downloading of metadata - most of my 'books' are non-commercial documents.

BR