The Reading Vent & Rant Thread

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by DNSB

One of my favourite comments on sex scenes:

If the sex scene doesn’t make you want to do it—whatever it is they’re doing—it hasn’t been written right.—SLOAN WILSON

Humorous, but probably not true.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Humorous, but probably not true.

I'm asexual. Sex scenes don't make me want to do it because I'm just not interested in the first place. Does this mean that every author is terrible at it?

[Quoth]

Which is more fun?
Eating a fresh cheese sandwich or reading about one?

Though the most memorable fictional cheese sandwich might be in Harry Harrison's "Make Room, Make Room", but you wouldn't have felt the urge to eat one.

There are picnics and midnight feasts in some Enid Blyton books that were published during WWII & post WWII rationing. Cruel or memorable? My Granddaughter organised a midnight feast once after reading one of the Blyton school stories. However while there was chocolate cake, there was only a symbolic unopened can of fish standing in for the sardines in the story.

Of course you can have food in sex scenes. One book involved caviar (someone had torn out four pages, so it must have been detailed, and another involved chocolate spread). Do we reckon these authors test their sex scenes, with um, a real partner?

[Renate]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Which is more fun?
Eating a fresh cheese sandwich or reading about one?

Fresh cheese? Ew.

I'll have a Gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of Burgundy, please.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Renate

I'll have a Gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of Burgundy, please.

Ewww to both.

[ownedbycats]

Seeing the main character's name misspelled in a fanfic summary is bad enough. But seeing it misspelled in two different ways? I am passing.

[Quoth]

Captain Jon Luke Packard.
If you are going to do your own spelling it needs to be consistent?

[Colonel Cathcart]

Why aren't ebook tags much more richer, comparable to those of music files? language, original language, published, original published year, translator, awards (multiple instances of that tag, potentially). Wouldn't it be great if a properly tagged book library could be sorted by author and original published date or could generate a collection of the books that won or were short listed, say, for a Booker?

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by Colonel Cathcart

Why aren't ebook tags much more richer, comparable to those of music files? language, original language, published, original published year, translator, awards (multiple instances of that tag, potentially). Wouldn't it be great if a properly tagged book library could be sorted by author and original published date or could generate a collection of the books that won or were short listed, say, for a Booker?

Open Packaging Format 2.0.1 (which is used in EPUB2) and EPUB 3.2 (and the draft for 3.3) both use the DCMI.

EDIT: I'm not sure if Amazon formats also use DCMI. Google was no help.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Colonel Cathcart

Why aren't ebook tags much more richer, comparable to those of music files? language, original language, published, original published year, translator, awards (multiple instances of that tag, potentially). Wouldn't it be great if a properly tagged book library could be sorted by author and original published date or could generate a collection of the books that won or were short listed, say, for a Booker?

Personally I'm not at all interested in any of those things. I only use a handful of genre tags in my Calibre library and that's it. I don't even tag subgenres. And all default tags get deleted immediately.

Basically I'm only interested in the story inside the book, not in any other book-related stuff.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

EDIT: I'm not sure if Amazon formats also use DCMI. Google was no help.

No. Amazon does their own thing as always. See https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/MOBI#EXTH_Header

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Colonel Cathcart

Why aren't ebook tags much more richer, comparable to those of music files? language, original language, published, original published year, translator, awards (multiple instances of that tag, potentially). Wouldn't it be great if a properly tagged book library could be sorted by author and original published date or could generate a collection of the books that won or were short listed, say, for a Booker?

You can, of course, do all that yourself for the books in your own calibre library.

But there's no incentive for the publishers to include all that info in an ebook's metadata. It won't increase sales, and it costs money to add the data and check it's correct.

Now if someone could come up with way of fingerprinting ebooks, so that the contents could be uniquely identified, as can be done with, for example, CDs, perhaps someone could come up with an equivalent of CDDB or MusicBrainz - a crowd-source repository of accurate metadata.

[Colonel Cathcart]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

You can, of course, do all that yourself for the books in your own calibre library.

But there's no incentive for the publishers to include all that info in an ebook's metadata. It won't increase sales, and it costs money to add the data and check it's correct.

Now if someone could come up with way of fingerprinting ebooks, so that the contents could be uniquely identified, as can be done with, for example, CDs, perhaps someone could come up with an equivalent of CDDB or MusicBrainz - a crowd-source repository of accurate metadata.

That would be solving one part of the problem. There other is ereader support. Just yesterday I finished reading a book and decided which of Michael Chabon's novels I should read next. I have a few of them, and thought (they're not a series) I'll start with the one that was published earliest. That took way to many clicks to figure out on my device.

In the end, I settled on Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.

[Apache]

Originally Posted by Colonel Cathcart

That would be solving one part of the problem. There other is ereader support. Just yesterday I finished reading a book and decided which of Michael Chabon's novels I should read next. I have a few of them, and thought (they're not a series) I'll start with the one that was published earliest. That took way to many clicks to figure out on my device.

In the end, I settled on Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.

Use Fantastic Fiction. They list non-series books by date published.
Apache

[Colonel Cathcart]

Originally Posted by Apache

Use Fantastic Fiction. They list non-series books by date published.
Apache

Sure, that might work for Michael Chabon, but will not work for אברהם ב. יהושע.