User talk:BLongley/Archives/Archive03

Cover scans

On cover art, I wish there was somewhere I felt comfortable about uploading scans to. I know some people use the Amazon customer images, and so far amazon has not complained about this, but Amazon's own TOS says that a person is only permitted to upload iamges to which they "own" the rights. Obviously i don't own any rights to a cover scan. (specifically: "You may only submit Materials to the Service for which you hold all intellectual property rights. In other words, if you submit a digital image to us, you must own all rights to such image or you must have the authorization of the person who does own those rights.") I have a scanner and could and would scan cover art -- but I won't upload to Amazon with that in their ToS -- and I'm not sure I would be comfy uploading to a comemrcial service such as heirs anyway. What would it cost for the ISFDB to have its own site to which scans could be uploaded for the sole or primary purpose of being displayed on ISFDB title pages? -DES ^Talk 18:51, 2 Feb 2008 (CST)

My personal point of view is that if it's MY cover scan, I own the rights to that particular image of something I own. I'd never upload an image that someone else had taken - it would be very easy to steal an image from an ebay or Abebooks or Alibris seller and send it to Amazon and hope Amazon take the consequences, but they can't take the responsibility so put it back on us. I'm fairly happy to upload an image to Amazon, even though I know they may take it down at any moment if they get a complaint: I can send it somewhere else more sensible if they do. Remember, we're HELPING Amazon sell books when we supply them more data: and I think most artists appreciate more Amazon royalties and more fame than worry about us uploading images. I've actually talked to some artists about what I want their art for, and so far have had NO complaints about readable book-cover images. (Getting some great images printed on a T-Shirt is a No-No, it seems, even when the artist won't sell such a T-Shirt commercially. So no "Death on a Motor-Bike" yet.) BLongley 20:21, 2 Feb 2008 (CST)

As for what it would cost ISFDB to have its own image site - not a lot really, if we stick to "fair-use" images. But the potential legal problems don't go away if the ISFDB hosters link to a separate site. We've offered money to move, when TAMU weren't being particularly reliable: it wasn't accepted. And I can understand why: we have a little "respected University-based project status" at the moment. If we lost that - well, I'm happy to host the ISFDB elsewhere, images too, and damn the consequences: but we might lose our programmer in the meantime. BLongley 20:21, 2 Feb 2008 (CST)

Unfortunately, your point of view is simply incorrect, as a matter of law. Owning a book no more gives you the right to scan and distribute the cover, than it gives you the right to scan, OCR, and post the text. Cover images, used to identify the book, in relatively low-res versions, in connection with bibliographic info about the book (as on the ISFDB) or comment about the work (as on Wikipedia) are very probably fair use, in the US. In other countries, they may well not be legal even for those purposes -- the equivalent of "fair use" in the copyright law of most European countries (I don't know much about any others) is significantly more limited than the US concept. Note that if an image can be used under fair use, it is still fair use if soemone else scanned it. Under US copyright law, a person who scans or photographs a flat (2D) image or otherwise makes a "slavish copy" of a work has no copyright in the resulting image at all. (See Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp., the relevant case.] If it is OK to upload an image you scanned, it is exactly as legal to download an image from ebay, Abebooks, Alibris or a library site, and uplaod that (I have doen so in many cases for wikipedia).

As to a separate site, i was thinking of a separate image-only site, not moving the whole ISFDB -- I understand the advantage we get from the TAMU connection. -DES ^Talk 21:32, 2 Feb 2008 (CST)

Oh, "the law" could be used to outlaw many photographs - e.g. can I take a picture of a typical high street without including and infringing upon the trademarked logo of MacDonalds or Starbucks? Can I take such a photograph if it's only for my personal use? If so, is it allowable to let somebody else develop the photograph for me? Under some of the recent legislation (DMCA etc) it could theoretically be possible to get the sale of cameras banned entirely. It's a ridiculous situation at times and the level of "fair use" is left to "common sense" in varying ways across the world. Most people realise the cover of a book is mostly an advertisement for its contents - so IMO giving it more free advertising is usually OK. Providing enough detail to reproduce a cover exactly enough to go round scanned, OCRed, and reprinted contents to produce a pirate copy is NOT OK, again IMO. If I upload an image I've taken I feel I should determine whether it's for my use alone or for others: that's why I don't borrow other people's pictures unless they've consented to it. All images I upload are taken by me, and can be used according to the terms of the site I uploaded them to - mostly the terms are more restrictive than I'd apply myself. Frankly though, the only way to prevent abuse of my images is to NOT upload ones that I don't want used in certain ways - anything available so easily can, and will, be used in any way people like. (That's why there's so few photographs of me on the web.) But the only person that can decide whether they're in the right or the wrong to upload in the first place is you, so do what you feel is right: in the last place the law and maybe a jury will decide! :-/

As to a separate site: I suspect TAMU are happy with links to commercial sites that accept such, they may not be so happy if we link to a site that could be perceived as one solely created to infringe copyright. But I'm not involved in any of the agreement with TAMU so I'm just speculating. BLongley 06:18, 3 Feb 2008 (CST)

Well, as Bill points out, in the end it will be up to the courts to decide what the current laws actually mean (and, at least in the US, whether the laws are constitutional), but it would be nice to know what the courts have already said on the subject before we venture into these unchartered waters :)

I seem to recall that Al looked into these matters a couple of years ago and it looks like David has been involved in these issues as well, perhaps as part of his Wikipedia experience, but at some point we will probably need professional advice before we make any major changes. It would be a shame if we jeopardized the continuing existence of the project because we failed to account for an obscure part of some obscure law. Ahasuerus 11:08, 3 Feb 2008 (CST)

As Ahasuerus says, we may eventually need professional advice. I am not a lawyer, although I have been an interested amateur of law since High School, and had specific interest in copyright law since my long-ago days as a shareware author. I have posted on copyright topics at Wikipedia, and done copyright research for Project Gutenberg. But I am not a lawyer. However, Wikipedia has already hired lawyers and consulted them on this very point, and their conclusion is that a book cover, if used to identify the book, in connection with an article about the book, if presented at a low enough resolution not to be suitable for printing at the size of the original cover as a substitute for the cover (for example on pirated copes of the book), is "fair use" under US law, and that if the server is in the US, US law is what applies. If I were responsible for a site that hosted th3e entire ISFDB, I would not fear the risk of hosting cover images under those terms. What TAMU wants to do is up to them.

My personal objection to uploading to Amazon is not that it would be illegal (I think it would be legal under fair use), but that Amazon's own "Terms and Conditions" (which I quoted above) appear to be more restrictive than the law requires, and seem to prohibit such uploads. Also, i am a bit hesitant precisely because they are a commercial site.

On Bill's comments above, there is case law that a picture that merely incidentally shows trademarked logs and the like, such as a McDonalds sign as part of a street scene, is fair use under US Law. Even a commercial content creator, such as the maker of a commercial movie, does not need to get permission in such cases (although of course they often want to charge the tm owner, as "product placement"). In general, unless an image "specifically focuses" on the copyrighted or trademarked work, its "incidental presence" is going to be fair use.

I am always suspicious of arguments that take the form "it is advertising for them, so it is all right". Such arguments will sometimes influence whether a copyright owner will choose to take action, but are almost always unsound as a matter of copyright law.

Whether we go to another site, either for covers or for the whole DB, obviously depends on various non-technical factors, and I don't propose to decide the issue at this time. As to uploading cover scans, i will not currently do so through Amazon, but I won't advise others not to do so. If anyone is aware of another site that it is OK to link to, and that accepts uploads from the general public, I would be very interested. -DES ^Talk 11:33, 3 Feb 2008 (CST)

Well, you could investigate Flickr's terms. I think the linkback requirement was an inconvenience that could be worked around, either by coding changes or HTML in our notes. And there's some very good images there already, e.g. I'd never have seen this if it wasn't for Flickr. BLongley 13:07, 3 Feb 2008 (CST)

Have you considered buying some cheap hosting to host the images? For example, Lunarpages offer 1.5 Tb (yes, 1,500 Gb) of storage and 15Tb of bandwidth for $6.99/month. Even at 50K per image and 100,000 images (=5Gb), it should be plenty for our purposes. Now that broadband connections are common and rewritable DVDs cost $0.30, weekly backups shouldn't be too much of an issue either. If we can legally grab a copy of all images that we currently link to at Amazon.com/uk, it would be easy to write a script to download all of them, upload them to the new server and then change the URLs. Ahasuerus 14:26, 3 Feb 2008 (CST)

We link to a lot of images there, and although I'm happy to give permission for my scans to also be hosted on an ISFDB image server, I'd feel distinctly uncomfortable about just copying anyone else's. After all, when you upload to Amazon they at least CREDIT you. I don't agree with the "if it's alright to upload an image, it's ok to download someone else's of the same thing and use that" - I feel someone's scans of something they own are morally their property. Yes, we may be both trying to copy something that's 100% somebody else's intellectual property, for similar purposes - but I do make a distinction between MY scans, Marc Kupper's scans, Jim Gardner's scans, etc. (Remember, I may have copyright on the creases on MY edition! ;-) )

Having said that, it would only take a dozen permissions or so to get 80-90% of the best Customer images from Amazon - I particularly wouldn't touch the Amazon-owned ones though, I see too many pictures overlaid with "Copyrighted Material" watermarks to not be sure they're looking for people "stealing" "their" property. But if we could talk to Jim Gardner, Terran Trader, Bronwyn Easton, etc then we could start a very useful library. Of course, we have to consider what we would do when people start linking to OUR site as the best source? BLongley 15:00, 3 Feb 2008 (CST)

Legally, if it a scan of something that the scanner does not own the rights to, and which is either in the public domain (as a very few covers are) or being used under fair use (as most covers would be) it deosn't matter who the scanner is. Morally, different people might very legitimately differ. I have fairly frequently downloaded cover images from Amazon, and uploded them to Wikipedia for articles about the relevant books -- for example that is where pretty much all the cover images on books of the Patrick O'Brian Aubrey/Maturin series came from, and i don't think i did anything morally questionable there. Others might disagree. For scans made by identifiable individuals, I think it would be at least polite to give credit, and I see no reason not to do so. Getting cooperation from people known to have done cover scans for the ISFDB in the past seems only sensible, if such a project is to go foreward. There is still the question about how TAMU would feel, of course. -DES ^Talk 15:16, 3 Feb 2008 (CST)

I could probaly get a site even cheaper than that, if it was just for my own images. If it was for all images from amazon, I/we could do it, but would something of that scope bother the people at TAMU, as Bill suuggestsd above? -DES ^Talk 14:50, 3 Feb 2008 (CST)

Flicker is possible, but their terms are a little ambigious for stuff that can be posted legally only under fair use -- it is hard to make it publicly available, bur ONLY in connection with the bibliograhy, as preoeprly should be done. Besides Yahoo (who owns Flickr) has a bad rep for deleting things without warning or appeal if there is any complaint. -DES ^Talk 14:53, 3 Feb 2008 (CST)

Another thought - we could certainly store OUR images on a central FTP (i.e. NON-WEB server), with each of us specifying which other sites or category of sites they can be copied too if and when a hosting site decides to take them down. And has anyone actually ASKED Wikipedia nicely if we can use their images? We could simply donate a load there if they say yes. BLongley 15:06, 3 Feb 2008 (CST)

Wikipedia's policy is pretty clear, and they have been asked about it by multiple sites in the past. Deep linking to iamges, so that when a page on another site is dispalyed it displays an image hosted on a wikimedia server, is a no-no. They are concerned about bandwidth issues, and that is a "Foundation Level Policy" and will not be easily changed. Anyone, however, may copy any wikipedia images (subject to the GFDL or creative commons licesne which a particular image may be under) and host it on a separate site. Images that wikipedia uses only iunder a calim of fair use may also be copied, but the reuser does so at his or her own risk, as whether something is fair use or not depends on the context and manner of use. Wkipedia has been trying HARD to get rid of as many "fair use" images as possible -- any uplaoded image that has a "fair use" license tag must justify this based on use on Wikipedia itself, and they are getting stricter about this. Basically, unless there is an article about a book on wikipedia they won't host a cover scan, and if there is such an article, and it gets deleted, so will the image. -DES ^Talk 15:25, 3 Feb 2008 (CST)

Last time I looked, there was a consideration of the possibility of other Wiki Projects being allowed use of the images - and I suspect that the various different language versions of Wikipedia are actually often using the same images, with permission? Even if the ISFDB database doesn't qualify, the ISFDB Wiki might? The question remains, has anyone actually asked?

I'd still prefer a central site for OUR use of OUR scans, though. BLongley 15:51, 3 Feb 2008 (CST)

The various Wikipedia editions, and other wikimedia projects, share iamges that are on the wikimedia Commons. But the commons, unlike the English language wikipedia, absolutely prohibits "fair use" images. One could ask, of course, if the English language wikipedia site would permit deep linking by the ISFDB or it wiki. Perhaps things have changed enough recently that the answer would be different. (One issue is that we use Creative commons "by Attribution" licencing, while Wikipedia uses the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). These have simialr effects, but ar technically incompatible, which has been an issue before on wikipedia, in sharing with CC-licensed wikis. To answer your question very directly, I have not specifically asked about deep linking for the ISFDB, nor am i aware of anyone who has specifically done so. I am willign to do so, if you like. I will be quite surprised if the answer is yes, but the worst they can say is "no". -DES ^Talk 16:28, 3 Feb 2008 (CST)

I guess only Al can say if he's asked, and whether you should ask. I think that's me palming off the problem on other people. ;-) BLongley 17:08, 3 Feb 2008 (CST)

I can see how "borrowing" images uploaded to Amazon.com and other places by other people can be seen as immoral even if it's not technically illegal. Of course, we may not need other people's images since we have so many books among the active editors, but scanning them would take a great deal of time. I wouldn't mind scanning mine if I were sure that the scans are properly backed up and won't disappear the way Amazon images tend to disappear (or at least move to places unknown). However, I won't have the time to work on scanning until (a) I am done entering the ASCII (well, OK, Unicode) component of my collection in the ISFDB and (b) until I have a lot of free time on my hands, which probably means after I retire. Ahasuerus 22:25, 3 Feb 2008 (CST)

(Unindent) Still, on a related but slightly different topic: do you think me hosting and posting small sections of a cover as I did here are going to cause any problems for ISFDB, or me? I've just added some potentially helpful info about signatures that again comes under "Fair Use" discussion. BLongley 17:08, 3 Feb 2008 (CST)

That is IMO obvious fair use and should cause no problems for anyone. -DES ^Talk 17:16, 3 Feb 2008 (CST)

BTW, just to clarify the nature of our relationship with TAMU, they are our gracious hosts and we we have a mutually beneficial relationship with them, but that's about it. Back when Al put ISFDB v. 0.0.0.1 online (early 1996?), he used his personal Web space on Geocities or Erols and, of course, he exceeded his bandwidth allowance within the first 72 hours. Eventually, Al settled on TAMU, which has been a reasonably good hosts considering how much we pay them (i.e. $0), but there have been sporadic issues with their software, hardware, infrastructure, etc. Things have been fairly stable the last few months, but Al handles all negotiations with TAMU and I don't know what's going on behind the scenes. If and when we run into significant legal and/or technical issues and the minuses of the relationship begin to outweigh the pluses, there is nothing stopping us from moving to another host. Ahasuerus 22:37, 3 Feb 2008 (CST)

While I'm not a lawyer it's my understanding that from a copyright and fair use perspective that scans fall under the same laws as photographs. I could take a photo of a McDonald's restaurant sign as part of an article about a city's sign ordinance. I own the copyright to the photograph. My use of McDonald's trademarked image falls under fair use. The same holds true for a book cover scan. When I scan a book cover then I own the copyright to the scan but as it's entirely of someone's copyright work (the painting) plus the publishers trademarks (many covers have the publisher logo) I can only publish "my" work (the scan) in a fair-use context which would be discussions about that publication. I personally believe it's a bit of a stretch to use a publication image with an article about the story but so far that seems to be "ok" on Wikipedia

I do not believe it's ok to take a cover image from AbeBooks or some other site and to claim it's "mine" by uploading it to Amazon. The copyright for that scan belongs to the book seller and their image of the book falls under fair use as it's a photograph of something they are selling. Marc Kupper (talk) 00:44, 4 Feb 2008 (CST)

From a fair use perspective you are corect, but from a copyright perspective scans are different from photos. Specifically, in Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. the court ruled that scans and other exact "slavish" copies are not copyrightable at all, because there is no originality to them, and US copyright law absolutely requires originality. It doesn't amtter how much work a person puts into a scan (or a photo of a painting or other 2D work of art), if nothing "original" is created, then there is no copyright at all in the scan. A photo is an original work because creative decisions on composition, framing, angle, lighting, etc go into each photo. For the same reason, photos of scluptue get copyrights. Note that the rule is different in the UK, and quite possibly in other countries.

The court in Bridgeman wrote "There is little doubt that many photographs, probably the overwhelming majority, reflect at least the modest amount of originality required for copyright protection. "Elements of originality . . . may include posing the subjects, lighting, angle, selection of film and camera, evoking the desired expression, and almost any other variant involved." But "slavish copying," although doubtless requiring technical skill and effort, does not qualify." and it quoted a previouis opnion that said "...a person who makes a photograph merely by placing a drawing or painting on the glass of a photocopying machine and pressing the button gets no copyright at all;" the court wrote further that "Most photographs are "original" in one if not more of the three respects set out in the treatise and therefore are copyrightable. Plaintiff's problem here is that it seeks protection for the exception that proves the rule: photographs of existing two-dimensional articles (in this case works of art), each of which reproduces the article in the photographic medium as precisely as technology permits. Its transparencies stand in the same relation to the original works of art as a photocopy stands to a page of typescript..." and "In this case, plaintiff by its own admission has labored to create "slavish copies" of public domain works of art. While it may be assumed that this required both skill and effort, there was no spark of originality -- indeed, the point of the exercise was to reproduce the underlying works with absolute fidelity. Copyright is not available in these circumstances."

In short you can't take an image from Amazon or ABR books and claim it is "yours" -- it isn't. But it didn't and doesn't belong to Amazon or AbeBooks either. The only copyrights belong to the artist and/or the book publisher (depending on their contract). Amazon uses it under fair use (unless the publiser has granted amazon a licence), and if you use it, it must also be under fair use, and whether you scanned it yourself or copied an image from amazon makes no difference at all, legally. -DES ^Talk 01:27, 4 Feb 2008 (CST)

That makes perfect sense though I wonder of there's some legal wiggle room as my copies are not "as precisely as technology permits" but rather are deliberately scaled down to 400 pixels though "as precisely as technology permits" within that constraint. In other words, I hit the "reduce" button first to compose the image and then "copy."

Outside sites

(I inserted an additional sub-section here so that further comments don't need to edit the entire discussion above.-DES ^Talk 14:25, 4 Feb 2008 (CST) )

In looking at Amazon's language for "Share your own customer images"[1][2] it appears that they are asking for images that the uploaders own and there's a checkbox for the uploader that says "I own the image." However, inspection shows that 99% of the customer image uploaders for book covers would would not own those images. There is one person that takes a photo of the book sitting on their keyboard and I'll assume that's passes the standard for copyrightable and they own the image.

It looks like to be completely squeaky clean about this ISFDB would need it's own image storage and that the images would ONLY be available from the publication and author records that reference them. Marc Kupper (talk) 03:45, 4 Feb 2008 (CST)

I am a little uncomfortable about hosting cover images on a separate site. The problem is that, by itself, the image is NOT fair use. If I write an article, or have a bibliographic record, or are selling the book, then I can include the book cover scan as part of that web page. I'd own the copyright to the whole thing and my use of the cover falls under fair use.

For example, ONEMTOM1973 is an ISFDB publication record that links to a cover image on my web site. In this instance the image falls under "fair use" but if you click on it you get taken to the image itself and now it's no longer "fair use" as it's not being used to accompany an article one of the other fair use contexts. What I probably should do is to create a bibliography page on my site that includes this cover as an illustration. Then someone inspecting my site will see that the image falls under fair use. I know you can't get from the image to my article but I would at least be able to demonstrate that I am using the image to illustrate my article rather than the much weaker "someone over there called ISFB is using the image to illustrate their article." Marc Kupper (talk) 00:44, 4 Feb 2008 (CST)

You are absolutely correct there. The only way to make this fully legal would be to so design the outside site that it would only display if the user is coming directly from the proper ISFDB page, perhaps by testing the "referrer" parameter. -DES ^Talk 01:27, 4 Feb 2008 (CST)

Well, when we link to Amazon images we're not linking to WWW.Amazon.com, we're linking to, for instance, g-ecx.images-amazon.com. There's probably some wiggle-room in 'server' versus 'site' versus 'domain' - but we certainly can and do bypass Amazon's fair use justification, although I think we're replacing it with our own. And as we're now (thankfully!) separating isfdb.org from tamu.edu URLs again, presumably we can direct images.isfdb.org to whatever server we like? BLongley 13:45, 4 Feb 2008 (CST)

By the way, I've noticed that some of the Amazon URLs that stop working seem to be just a minor reshuffle between g-ecx and g-ec1 or g-ec2 - the rest of the URL remains the same. I think Amazon are load-balancing or something like that - which seems to confirm the theory that separate image-servers are useful in some way. BLongley 13:45, 4 Feb 2008 (CST)

Yes, in that case, a user won't normally see the image without either going through amazon's page about the book, or an IFSDB page about the book, so it is at least arguably fair use in either case. But if I set up www.SF-Covers.org (say) with the intent of hosting covers just for the ISFDB, but it was easy for someone to get directly to the cover pages (perhaps via a google search) and those pages did not have any page about the book, then that display would perhaps not be fair use, if it were challenged.-DES ^Talk 14:25, 4 Feb 2008 (CST)

BTW - when I wrote "I am a little uncomfortable about hosting cover images on a separate site" I meant a site like flikr which is where the thread above was headed. I have no problems with an images.isfdb.org, particularly if that site does not offer browsing of the images. As ISFDB's lawyers probably get paid less than Amazon's I'd also want to have the extra step of images.isfdb.org checking the referrer setting and only allowing image fetches from isfdb.org. That way we can establish that the images are only for fair-use illustrations of ISFDB's bibliographic records. Marc Kupper (talk) 03:49, 5 Feb 2008 (CST)

Canadian Prices

I had been putting Canadian prices in the notes until I ran across one in the price field (which shows up on the publication listing). It looked good so I started. I'll switch back - no problem.

I am curious though - living in Canada I'm used to seeing two prices. Do the U.S. printings have a Canadian price that no one else bothers to enter or are they different printings? It's one reason why I like to search our URLs for cover images.

Yes, the US editors like to make their editions look more important... ;-) There's been similar for UK editions too, where I might have to enter prices for the UK, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Malta, etc... this has been a fairly US-centric place for a while and it's only comparatively recently that we've noticed that recording multiple prices might help us stop getting duplicates entered now that we have Australian and Canadian Editors. BLongley 16:16, 16 Feb 2008 (CST)

So - if there's no Canadian price - do I add it to the existing publication (assuming unverified) or create a new one? Holmesd 16:24, 16 Feb 2008 (CST)

It depends how sure you are if it's the same edition or not - if you're lucky there's some clear cover-art image that confirms both are shown. (I rarely get so lucky, British pubs have prices on the BACK cover. :-( ) If in doubt, a separate entry with lots of notes is probably safest. If there's an original Verifier ask them to add the Canadian price if it has one. I think we're often duplicating the same book several times over, with each person adding the price they paid for it - but deduplicating later is better than missing an edition, I think. BLongley 16:36, 16 Feb 2008 (CST)

By the way, I'd like to have 'replied' to your comment on my talk page, but I didn't know if you were notified and would look at the response. I had to check out a MediaWiki tutorial to find out where your equivalent to my 'my talk' page was. There's a whole new culture in wikis that's too fluid for a brain raised on mainframes. -- Holmesd 15:59, 16 Feb 2008 (CST)

I'd notice, as I added your page to my "Watch-List": although normally I look at ALL "recent changes" and don't need it. Don't worry, I started on mainframes too, and and get by - although even after a a year here I still can't search well! Wiki-talk is a pain at times... :-( BLongley 16:16, 16 Feb 2008 (CST)

Oh, and it's OK if we talk on your page OR mine by me - I'll read both. What we don't tend to like is conversations to be split over both, it's a pain to follow. BLongley 16:22, 16 Feb 2008 (CST)

I've had some experience with these issues, so if you have and questions about a book and it's intended currency let me know. The books to watch out for are DAW(starting in late 1978-84),Del Rey(late 1978-1988), and Ace. If you have a look at Jack L. Chalker's page and click on some of the diffent publications you can see how I've recorded these diffences. I'm also Canadian. :-)Kraang 20:23, 16 Feb 2008 (CST)

Let me follow | Demons of the Dancing Gods as an example - you verified it and I have a copy to hand. You list a Canadian price C$3.75 and state it is printed in Canada in the Notes. The publisher is Ballantine Del Rey (Canada). Presumably the pricing is due to the printed in Canada. The copyright page has "A Del Rey Book", "Published by Ballantine Books", "Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto." So the Candian publisher is Random House. But the Del Rey Books crest and Ballantine name are on the cover / spine. The back cover says that the cover is printed in the United States, which is where the crest/name come from, but also the price. So if the Ballantine is US, why isn't the price? (Rhetorical question, I think).

I'll agree that your approach is reasonable. However, if someone had entered this without seeing the "Printed in Canada", the interpretation would have changed - you'd have a U.S. price and no Canada in the publisher, and I'd be thinking that my version was different. Unless I missed the "Printed in Canada" too.

An interesting case was [| Into the Out Of] by Alan Dean Foster. The book has two ISBNs, two prices and is printed in the United States. Is this a 'Canadian' version, or is it the same book as published in the United States? (I think this puts me back to my original question). How do I record enough to avoid these questions in the future? My policy has been to put much of the printing and pricing in the notes, and let whoever cares figure it out. If there's an unverified copy that matches, but is 'missing' information, I'll add it. Otherwise I'll create a new publication. -- Holmesd 23:54, 16 Feb 2008 (CST)

The original ISFDB design concentrated on Titles (novels, stories, etc) and the way they interacted with Authors, Awards, etc., so Publications level data was not as carefully scrutinized as it is now. UK editions were easy to spot because of numerous differences in format, cover art, prices, etc, but little distinction was made between US, Canadian and US/Canadian editions simply because we didn't know any better at first :) Ahasuerus 21:29, 16 Feb 2008 (CST)

I doubt UK editions were as easy to spot as you think - yes, they may have been printed there, but again the UK printed a lot of Canadian, Australian, Irish, Maltese, South African, etc editions - in fact, usually missing out ONLY the US from the English-speaking market! If I was starting to enter my books now, I'd be demanding 5 or 6 price fields per pub.... BLongley 03:47, 17 Feb 2008 (CST)

It's entirely possible that we failed to distinguish many UK editions from UK/Oz editions 10 years ago, but at least we could immediately tell that they were not US editions, something that wasn't the case with Canadian editions :) Ahasuerus 15:52, 17 Feb 2008 (CST)

Is the price field significant (e.g. are we tracking prices) or is it simply a marker for different publications? It is a good marker, as price is one of the things that publishers are most likely to change between printings. If it is just a marker, the price should be a text field in whatever units are displayed - so $ could be U.S., Canadian or Australian and allowing as many prices as listed. -- Holmesd 13:49, 17 Feb 2008 (CST)

It depends what you mean by "tracking". Many of us can spot a bad year/price combination for our own special area of knowledge, so it's good to know the common prices at a particular date. We actually record books at the printing level though, where maybe NOTHING changes but the printing number, so we don't depend on the price to distinguish printings or editions. The price currently IS a text field (kept short so we discourage people from trying to put multiple ones in it, maybe?), but we can just about work with it programmatically if there's only one price in it. If we stored multiple prices - much less chance of being able to use it. I couldn't have created this crib sheet for instance. (And I wish I knew a better place to store it...) I guess the thinking was that it would be "obvious" which was the main price and that everyone else knew they were getting an imported copy - I'm sure that's no longer true, if it ever was in the first place. BLongley 14:32, 17 Feb 2008 (CST)

In some cases the price field can be very important. Many Scribner's juveniles had nothing readily identifiable to distinguish the first edition from subsequent printings but price; many 1960s paperback publishers put even less disambiguating information in their books, but price was always there to bail us out. Of course, there are other publishers like SFBC, who don't use prices, but that's a whole different headache :) Ahasuerus 15:52, 17 Feb 2008 (CST)

Don't get me wrong - price IS useful, it's just not always ENOUGH. Still, as you're chatting here, Ahasuerus, can you think of a good place to put the prices crib sheet? Maybe you can extend it a bit? (E.g. other countries, earlier or later dates?) I think Marc wanted a version by publisher... that might fit in with current activity. OK, I know - it'll go on the "To Do list". ;-) BLongley 16:37, 17 Feb 2008 (CST)

An excellent guess! :) I will have access to my collection for the next couple of days, so once I am done answering various questions about my Verified pubs, I will try to enter a few obscure pulps before I resume my wanderings some time around Wednesday, at which point I will have more time to think about extending the price cheatsheet. One thing that comes to mind, though, is that publishers tend to stop printing prices when inflation exceeds a certain threshold. That's why you won't find them on Israeli books published in the late 1970s/early 1980s and Russian books published after ca. 1991. Ahasuerus 16:56, 17 Feb 2008 (CST)

I don't think Israeli and Russian publications are a major concern here yet. Canada and Australia are the countries that come to mind as needing a cheat-sheet (not for the Canadian and Australian editors, who should check/confirm/laugh-at whatever we suggest, but for those of us Moderators doing "Sanity checks" on submissions). Or have I forgotten a New Zealand or South African editor? BLongley 17:16, 17 Feb 2008 (CST)

Actually, pre-decimal British prices are a bit of a nightmare, so leave those. BLongley 17:16, 17 Feb 2008 (CST)

Cover images - in the meantime

Until you determine what you want to do about cover images and the legal implications - I've been scanning my covers in anticipation of your coming to some conclusion. From a contributor's perspective - if you want them, you can have them. You can track that I loaded them, and when and I'll link them to the ISFDB entry if you want (rather than the other way around). When you've got the legal stuff figured out - then you can display them. But I'd like you to take the images now. Next year I'll probably be cataloging my puzzle collection and have gotten rid of the books. (This should have been in a more general area, but this is where I found the discussion so it's in your talk B). Holmesd 16:32, 16 Feb 2008 (CST)

I'll never be the answerer of the legal problems! I just dump all my images at Amazon (preferably the US site as it updates in minutes at most, rather than next working day for Amazon UK - but I'll add UK images there if the US doesn't know about them). I'm prepared to re-upload to images.isfdb.org if we get it, or an equivalent. If you're not keeping the books then a) I'm happy to look after the images in the meantime and b) happy to look after some books permanently! What do you intend to do with them? BLongley 16:47, 16 Feb 2008 (CST)

Images - how do you want them? They're 624 x 1036 jpg files so far, reasonably small and clear - 150 dpi I think. I've been putting them in folders by author. I can email or ftp. I can zip in many formats. It's an ongoing project - do you want them once I'm done, in batches or piecemeal? What about relating to publications (this is why I was reluctant to upload to Amazon - an image is only half the story)? I wondered about scanning the back cover / copyright / title pages. Also, I'll likely scan the one's I'm keeping. Want those too? Holmesd 17:12, 16 Feb 2008 (CST)

I can wait - I can FTP from your place if desired, not got a place to FTP TO yet. If you're not keeping them and we haven't got all the data here, and it's not available on the web already, then back cover, copyright and title pages to go with cover-art would be good. BLongley 18:01, 16 Feb 2008 (CST)

You've got the data - that's why you're always fixing up my submissions. The question is - will you know which publication goes with which cover? Holmesd 19:28, 16 Feb 2008 (CST)

I've finished scanning my culls. I've a spreadsheet with all names organized by author (540-ish) but only 300 entered on the site so far. For those entered, I have a link to the ISFDB page, the ISBN and the current image link. The covers take up about 138 MB and I'm thinking surface mail of a CD is easier than setting up an ftp site and uploading. I've registered my email if you care to send me an address, or you can suggest alternatives. I can mail the list once I've posted the rest of my books, but will include the partial one on the CD. --Holmesd 22:31, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

Disposal - check the web for general availability and price. I'm getting rid of them because I don't think I'll ever read (e.g. have part 2 and never found part 1) or re-read them (If I can't remember it 20 years later, I can do without it). I'll take the bulk to a local used bookstore en masse and try to negotiate for anything worth real money or take the ebay route. If you've any advice, feel free to offer, it's your page. Holmesd 17:12, 16 Feb 2008 (CST)

I'm always interested in paperback oddities not easily available here: please feel free to send me a list of any SF you want to lose that isn't readily available on the web already. BLongley 18:01, 16 Feb 2008 (CST)

Dragonseye

Bill for Dragonseye[3]you have the publisher as Del Rey but a search of the ISBN comes back as Tandem Library (publishes for libraries). It would appear that this is a separately produced book with a library binding. The "0-345.." ISBN does come back with a Del Rey book. I think the credited publisher should be Tandem Library, what do you think? Thanks :-)Kraang 15:37, 18 Feb 2008 (CST)

There's no mention of Tandem on the publication. I suspect all Tandem (if that's really who did it) just took a late (remaindered?) del Rey paperback and slapped some harder covers on it, the back cover of which includes a new ISBN. Hmmm.... as it's a book I don't think I'll keep, I'm tempted to investigate with some disassembly required... if there's a normal paperback inside I might yet keep it. Does "rebinding" count as "publication"? I recall I asked about the unusual format here. BLongley 16:48, 18 Feb 2008 (CST)

The publisher use to be "Sagebrush Education Resources" until it changed it name, and all the links to book sellers list the publisher as "Tandem" or "Sagebrush".Kraang 17:03, 18 Feb 2008 (CST)

Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions

In your verified Smoke and Mirrors I see 263 • Cold Colours • (1990) • shortstory by Neil Gaiman. Isn't it a poem? --Roglo 16:16, 18 Feb 2008 (CST)

That a bit too philosophical for me - it doesn't rhyme, doesn't scan, but as it's got too many Carriage Returns in the typesetting it might be counted that way. Feel free to change it. (But NOT the spelling of the title - I'm sure there will be an Americanised version out there at some point, but it's definitely got the right number of "U"s in my edition - except on contents page, as noted.) BLongley 17:11, 18 Feb 2008 (CST)

Actually, check the introduction: in mine it says "For The Time Out Book of London Short Stories I reformatted it as prose and left a lot of readers very puzzled". So I guess it's both, and I may have just accepted a categorisation already here? I must admit that although I read this fairly recently I skipped most of the poems, I prefer to HEAR poetry rather than guess how it should be presented from the typesetting. BLongley 17:21, 18 Feb 2008 (CST)

In mine it also says: It didn't seem to be a short story or a novel, so I tried it as a poem and it did just fine. So I'll change it to POEM. --Roglo 11:00, 19 Feb 2008 (CST)

Yes, that's the line before. It seems we have the same introduction. It's properly worth a note on the title though, in case we get 'The Time Out Book of London Short Stories' arriving later. BLongley 13:00, 19 Feb 2008 (CST)

And Reading the Entrails: A Rondel IMHO is a poem, too. May I change it? --Roglo 11:45, 19 Feb 2008 (CST)

Yes, that's definitely poem, not sure why I entered it as essay. BLongley 13:00, 19 Feb 2008 (CST)

(And is it 'Short Fictions' in the subtitle? I have Headline Feature edition (2000) with Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions without 's' but with the same Color/Colour inconsistency. Just checking if I'll have to make it a variant). --Roglo 16:16, 18 Feb 2008 (CST)

Yes, it is "Short Fictions". I think this is a case of small "corrections" creeping in as it goes through printings - "Review" is actually an imprint of Headline too. It'll be interesting to see where and when the changes arrived. (If people don't clone too lazily.) BLongley 17:11, 18 Feb 2008 (CST)

Thanks! My copy is 3rd printing (undated) of this one with higher price, so no 100% sureness as to the s in 2000. --Roglo 11:00, 19 Feb 2008 (CST)

The Towers of Toron

A few minutes ago I approved Don Erikson's addition of the price information and a Notes change in this Verified pub. I thought he was changing his own pub, but it turns out that you are the verifier. (We really need that yellow warning changed to include the name of the verifier!)

Yes, or at least a quick link to go check it then press 'back' - or is that dangerous in some browsers? BLongley 12:51, 19 Feb 2008 (CST)

In IE 6.0 and below you may lose any Javascript contents on the first page, e.g. anything added via "Add Title/Author", but that shouldn't be a problem in the approval screen. But adding the verifier's name is such a simple change that I'd think it would be the most obvious solution. Ahasuerus 20:41, 19 Feb 2008 (CST)

Your original note was:

This seems to have been published for export only, as there's no UK Price. Prices that ARE listed: Australia 80c South Africa RO.60 New Zealand 65c East Africa 6/00

The note as modified by Don is:

Price on cover. This seems to have been published for export only, as there's no UK Price. Prices that ARE listed: Australia 80c South Africa RO.60 New Zealand 65c East Africa 6/00

The Amazon image that we link to does show "5/-" as the price (in the corner), so I wonder if your copy may be missing that corner or perhaps the image is different from what you have? Ahasuerus 18:42, 18 Feb 2008 (CST)

Well spotted - but that actually IS my cover! It's the replacement for the price-clipped one that I originally entered that I thought was an export version, I obviously didn't read the notes when I added the artwork eventually. (If it's from the Amazon UK site I have to do a second pass days later to add the artwork as they take so long to approve publication of images, so typically I've done everything BAR artwork by then and I don't really check for updates on the second pass.) BLongley 12:51, 19 Feb 2008 (CST)

Ah, I see! I guess it's a part of the price that we pay for not having our own image server... Ahasuerus 20:41, 19 Feb 2008 (CST)

BTW - Dave Wands of Fantastic Fiction e-mailed me about giving ISFDB permission to post images to his server. I thought that was "well known" here but have not been keeping up on all the threads. I have an invitation code but as Dave is still beta testing editor mode (allowing people other than himself to edit his db) I don't think he wants the invitation code widely published. E-mail me and I'll get you set up. Marc Kupper (talk) 00:41, 28 Feb 2008 (CST)

No, I didn't know anything about posting there, only using images from there. I'll drop you a line. BLongley 12:52, 28 Feb 2008 (CST)

Numbered lists in the wiki

There was a comment of mine (part of the canonical publisher names thread) which was in the form of a wiki numbered list. You inserted point-by-point responses, and in the process broke the numbering. It is easy to keep the numbering intact once you know how. i have adjusted this for the comment in question, and I have created some brief comments on numbered lists in the wiki at Help:Wiki-numbered lists. -DES ^Talk 11:03, 20 Feb 2008 (CST)

OK, I think I see - keep the same number of colons as the person that started the list, then '#:' for the reply? I'm pretty sure I've never seen that before, but then nobody seems to really use Wiki right on the transient pages. Thanks for the pointers! BLongley 14:17, 20 Feb 2008 (CST)

Yes, that is more or less it, that preserves the comments as part of the numbered sequence, so the next one where the last character in the opening string is a number is formatted with the proper number. Note also that any blank line restarts numbering. 15:50, 20 Feb 2008 (CST)

Yeah, shame about that - sometimes adding spacing is the only way to make it clear where the new stuff in a long entry is. Any ideas on that? BLongley 15:56, 20 Feb 2008 (CST)

At a guess, putting a couple of "br" (each inside "<>") in should do it. (I know there's a way to make it ignore the things so I could put them in as examples, but I can't remember what it is. I thought some kind of quotes, but no.)

DES, thank you very much for putting that together. I've figured out a little of this by experimenting, but most of that I'd never have gotten by myself.
-- Dave (davecat) 16:19, 20 Feb 2008 (CST)

You are welcome -- I learned this over at wikipedia. You can display wiki code and have it not execute by putting it between nowiki tags: <br> displays a br tag and <nowiki> displays the nowiki tag itself. You can also use code tags (like this) to emphasize that soemthing is source code or otherwise literal. The preview can be used to test the effects of wiki coding. Once you see the patterns the indents with colons, numbered lists with # characters, and bulleted listes with * characters work pretty much the same. -DES ^Talk 17:15, 20 Feb 2008 (CST)

ISFDB Moderator e-mail

I don't have your e-mail handy but would like to add you to the isfdb.moderators followed by at gmail.com mail distribution account. It's very low traffic and mainly gets used when ISFDB is down or when people get blocked out of ISFDB. If you don't mind being added to the distribution then please contact me via http://marc.kupper.googlepages.com/contact and I'll add you to the gmail account's forwarding rules. Thank you. Marc Kupper (talk) 04:21, 21 Feb 2008 (CST)

Publisher/Imprint?

Bill are you using the Publisher/Imprint with no spaces? I've also left this question on Michaels page. I've been doing it the other way around but would be happy to switch. Thanks!Kraang 22:45, 23 Feb 2008 (CST)

Looking back at my past mistakes, "Imprint (Publisher)" seems common but usually just "Imprint". BLongley 06:16, 24 Feb 2008 (CST)

Publisher namespace

I have just moved all the publisher pages (except for a few cases that require a mod's assistance) to the "Publisher" namespace, as per discussions on the communtity portal. Please create new publisher pages in the Publisher namespace. -DES ^Talk 09:35, 24 Feb 2008 (CST)

I wish you'd waited till Al's changes were in place, you're making me click many more times. :-/ Oh well, let's hope he's got some free time soon.

In the meantime, can you please tell me how to set up the redirect pages? BLongley 09:52, 24 Feb 2008 (CST)

When a page is moved from one name to another, a redirect is created authomatically. To create a redirect page manually, the first and only line of the page should be

#REDIRECT [[link here]]

with the words "link here" replaced with the name of the target of the redirection.

I'm sorry if I caused a problem, the discussion here seemed to indicate that this should be done at once. -DES ^Talk 11:33, 24 Feb 2008 (CST)

It's not a huge problem, it's just that the ISFDB software links publishers to the "ISFDB" namespace on the Wiki side. Hopefully, Al will change his code shortly and we will be on the same page again :) Ahasuerus 11:41, 24 Feb 2008 (CST)

"the ISFDB software links publishers to the "ISFDB" namespace on the Wiki side." Where is this done? I'm only aware of "Publishers" on the home page which links to http://www.isfdb.org/printseries.html though ideally it should link to http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/index.php/ISFDB_Publishers or maybe that should be moved to Publishers to better act as a home to the publisher namespace. Marc Kupper (talk) 00:35, 28 Feb 2008 (CST)

There is a "Wiki link" at the top of each publisher's page, e.g. it's at the top of the "Princeton University - Bibliography" page. Ahasuerus 01:34, 28 Feb 2008 (CST)

Erewhon Revisited

Re: the 1901 J. Cape edition of Erewhon Revisited, I suspect that the OCLC record is based on the copyright date, presumably the only date found on the copyright page of the "J. Cape" edition. Would you say that we should change the publication date to 0000-00-00 and add a Note to this pub? Ahasuerus 14:54, 27 Feb 2008 (CST)

I was going to see if I could spot if it was more likely to be the 1925 (Shrewsbury) or 1926 (Traveller's Library) edition, but I'm running out of time tonight. OK, I'm not really, but "Torchwood" has started. ;-)

You know my aversion to '0000-00-00" but feel free to take over. I'm not going to resolve it tonight, but hopefully the Traveller's Library resource I found will help - no ideas on "Shrewsbury" yet. BLongley 15:07, 27 Feb 2008 (CST)

There is no hurry and, besides, you are already digging in that direction, so I'll leave it in your capable hands :) You know how to access the full OCLC/FirstSearch engine that lets you do publisher searches and such, right? Ahasuerus 23:10, 27 Feb 2008 (CST)

I. Asimov: A Memoir

Re: the 6th printing of the 1995-02-00 edition of I. Asimov: A Memoir, was it really published the same month as the first printing? Granted, Asimov was a popular author, but that's a lot of printings in one month even for him :) Ahasuerus 23:10, 27 Feb 2008 (CST)

Probably not, but that's probably the only date on the pub. I'll check it when I find it - it's not in with the fiction, so presumably my cleaner has created a "biography" section somewhere. BLongley 12:49, 28 Feb 2008 (CST)

Note that I verifed a 2nd printing, and the price is a dollar lower. It is a pain in the neck when printings do not carry explicit dates. -DES ^Talk 14:29, 28 Feb 2008 (CST)

I see you're confident it's still a 1995 edition, but give no month - what's the source for that? BLongley 14:37, 28 Feb 2008 (CST)

Book is not to hand at the moment, but I think there was an indication on the copyright page -- there is also the fact that the price is the same as the verified first printing, which at least implies a fairly short delay. i will however, recheck. It may be that this will have to be changed to 0000-00-00 -- this is the sort of case where a date-range would be of great value. -DES ^Talk 14:53, 28 Feb 2008 (CST)

Book rechecked. Two sources. First, the book contains a "Tenth Anniversery 1995" promotion for Spectra's SF line. Second, i used the origianl cash register reciept as a book mark, and it is dated december 1995. Obviously the book may have been printed prior to december, but I doubt it was printed after I bought it. Notes duly added to publication record. -DES ^Talk 20:00, 29 Feb 2008 (CST)

This is why I was so supportive of the effort to keep First-Printing Date + Printing number for so long. When all but the First Printing get lumped in with possibly dozens of '0000-00-00' later printings, we're lost. I don't create previous printings from later edition's info unless they're few and spread apart as I could easily make the presentation unusable (e.g. entering 20-30 prior editions with no price, guessed pages, suspected imprint and probable ISBN easily destroys the usefulness of a page) but I may have to, to stop the march of the Unknown dates. :-( I know keeping the First Printing date for all later printings causes problems (e.g. my own price cheat-sheet for instance) but it at least mostly kept "editions" together. But there seems to be no work on making presentation better, or adding proper printing number support, and there is on standardising publishers (so the publishers with printing numbers added will have to go). Using the day part of the date field seems to clash with some other people's work as well - although I'm not sure the editors that had special knowledge of exact day of publication are active any more. (Actually, that's not quite true - I DO know the exact date of publication of a few books - e.g. most of the later Harry Potter Books - and I'm active. And even today I entered a book I know the exact official publication date for (as World Book Day is coming round again) - but as I received it today and it's not published till next Month that's obviously not accurate.) BLongley 16:37, 28 Feb 2008 (CST)

Printing Date is probably the biggest frustration I have here, so any work toward resolving that is good. But I can't even get people to agree on some things I consider to be No-Brainers: e.g. we have a field to put a catalog number in, which links well to lots of booksellers if you put an ISBN in (thanks to programming support), and is nearly useless as anything but a note if you put anything else in. But can I persuade people to put a working ISBN in there when we have it, and the non-working or non-ISBN field in notes instead? It seems not. (OK, I persuaded some, but the "Don't knows" seem to outnumber us and I'm not that keen to go over-ride verifiers.) I'm still not sure if I'll eventually leave here through 1: frustration or 2: boredom or 3: death but there are times I suspect 1 will cause 3. BLongley 16:37, 28 Feb 2008 (CST)

Well you've persuaded me on the catalog number issue, anyway. I think that Printign Number is high on Al's priority list -- I don't see how we can really deal with it without software changes. Date ranges in some form (and associated date sorting) would also help a lot on this issue, but I haven't seen any comments from Al on that yet. (If a verified publication already had both a working ISBN and a catalog number listed, I don't see that switching what is lsited in each field is interfearing with a verifier's legit function, any more that correcting a misspelling of "edition" in a note would be.) -DES ^Talk 16:45, 28 Feb 2008 (CST)

I'll take small victories at times. If I seem to get too heated about a current issue, remind me that the "Authors that only exist due to Reviews" (while not completed) has led to an non-contentious suggested improvement that I can go work on for a bit without controversy (and entering Reviews of non-dead-tree items as Essay finally allows ME in as an official Author!) BLongley 17:05, 28 Feb 2008 (CST)

Missing publisher pages

Creation of publisher pages to replace any of the temporarily missing (due to the new namespaces) pages will cause problems reclaiming the old pages. Please be careful not to create pages for publishers (or authors, or magazines) unless you are sure that there was not a page existi,g by the same name as of yeasterday. See ISFDB:Community Portal#Namespace problem for more detail. -DES ^Talk 17:07, 1 Mar 2008 (CST)

I'm not touching any page I'm aware existed previously, till this mess has been sorted out. If creating ANY new Publisher pages will cause problems, let me know. But I'm holding off from adding anything already researched but awaiting a final new page till someone can explain the problems with Pseudo and Real namespaces, or better still, just sort them out and tell us non-Wiki-experts when it's safe again. BLongley 18:44, 1 Mar 2008 (CST)

Unless I am badly mistaken, adding pages that did not exist previously will do no harm at all. I would not hesitate to do so. You can check if a page existed previously using Special:Allpages -- if it is listed there, it existed previously. -DES ^Talk 19:00, 1 Mar 2008 (CST)

Short explanation. The wiki has an internal table listing the "namespaces" that are active -- each has a number and a name/tag. any page whose name starts with the tag of an active namespece is stored in that namespace, and wiki-links to it include the namespace number in their internal form. Pages whose name starts with a tag and a colon where the tag does not match one of the currently active namespaces are stored in namespace 0, the "main" or "article" namespace. Such pages are said to from a pesudo-namespace, because in many ways they can be treated as a namespce, but the internal wiki code does not recognize them. If a namespace is later created that matches existign pages in a pesudo-namespace, when a user tries to display or edit the old page, the wiki software now looks for a page with teh internal number of the now-active namespace, doesn't find it, and reports the page asa not existing. It is in limbo, with no way to get to it though the normnal wiki interface. To fix this, either a) a script has to be run that updates things behind the screen (said script is provided by mediawiki) or b) the new namespace must be made made inaactive (commented out), all pages in the pesudo-namespace(s) moved to new names that don't conflict with the new namespace(s), then the namespace is reactived, and the pages moved back, which will put them into the new, true, namespace so that the wiki software will find them. I hope that is clearer. -DES ^Talk 19:00, 1 Mar 2008 (CST)

I understand that in the IT way. If it was a work problem, I'd probably read up on it, try it out on a local example, and tell T-Systems how to fix it rather than wait a week for them to figure it out for themselves. This isn't work though, and I'm going to be a comparatively sympathetic user - it's broke, I can wait for it to be fixed, and will take advice on what not to mess with in the mean-time. BLongley 19:32, 1 Mar 2008 (CST)

Fine. In any case, the operational answer is: The cause is known, the fix is known, it involves some actiosn by Al, and possibly some tedious moves by me or another editor if he has reason not to use the acript provided by MediaWiki. The ball is now in his court. Even if pages are created that match names that existed foremrly, the worst result is the need for manual page merging, much like fixing a cut&paste page move -- nothing should be lost. In short, "Don't Panic". -DES ^Talk 20:19, 1 Mar 2008 (CST)

Analog October 1976

I am making changes to add additional content to this magazine that you verified. It will take another pass through the magazine before I am done. At that time, please review the changes to ensure you agree with them. Thx, rbh (Bob) 22:04, 17 Mar 2008 (CDT)

Publishers pages

Nice work in the Publishers area, Bill! :) Just to be on the safe side, let me expand on the question that I posted above back in February. Are you familiar with the full FirstSearch OCLC interface at http://www.zblibrary.org/cgi-bin/Webscript.exe?zbpl.scr ? It's very handy when working with publishers. For example, if you come across Code Red on Starship Englisia, you may think "Hm, Elgin, IL: Chariot Books, an obscure Illinois-based publisher; I wonder what else they may have done SF-wise that we are missing?" If you follow the link above and search on the book's ISBN, you will get to its OCLC record. If you click on "Advanced option", you will see "Publisher: Chariot Books" and "Science Fiction" as search option. If you check both boxes and click on "Search", you will get a list of all books (7, in this case) published by Chariot Books that are also marked as "science fiction" in the OCLC catalog.

Also, if you select just "Publisher: Chariot Books", you will get a list of 650 books published by this publisher, which is admittedly hard to navigate. However, you can then select "Limit" at the top and it will let you select from a list based on the author, year, language and, most importantly, "Subject Headings". If you expand "Subject Headings" and click on "Show Remaining Subjects", you will see all subjects that are responsible for at least 2% of the publisher's output, which, in this case, includes "Fantasy" (and "Fairy Tales"). You can then follow these links to the appropriate subsets.

Once you get familiar with this interface, you will realize that every time you go to a new page, it contains the boundaries imposed by your search at the top of the page, e.g. "su= "fantasy." and (pb= "Chariot Books"). You can then access the "Searching" option at the very top of the page and play with different permutations. HTH! :) Ahasuerus 13:29, 29 Mar 2008 (CDT)

Ta muchly, I don't recall using that interface. I'm working the other way round at the moment though: looking at what we have and using the ISBN and Publisher searches (plus some SQL on my local copy) to spot inconsistencies, decide (possibly temporary) canonical names, and standardize a few (filling in simple missing details from OCLC or Publisher's sites or Amazon as I pass through). You may have noticed there's no actual consistency of content on the new pages - it's just what I thought of interest/use at the time, to save hunting for it again later. No doubt it'll settle down eventually and someone can write Templates or suchlike when we know what we want and where. Feel free to butt in on any of them with any info you feel worth adding - or start linking them: I know I'm being lazy on creating links BACK from the Wiki, and am leaving a lot of imprints unconnected to parents for now. Partly as I've no idea where we're going with those yet - if Al creates Publisher Parents like we have with Series, a lot of those would be redundant: and I don't know if we're going to get links to Publisher websites and Wikipedia entries like we do with Authors and Titles. Still, I'll just keep dumping the data for now. BLongley 13:54, 29 Mar 2008 (CDT)

Sounds like a reasonable plan for now! I haven't been particularly active on the Publishers front lately due to other commitments, but I figured I should at least share my knowledge of the tools that are out there. Perhaps we could repost my summary in a more readily accessible place where other editors could find it? Ahasuerus 14:47, 29 Mar 2008 (CDT)

I'm not sure where people look for General tools. I think the UK IPO Search is a neat tool too, for instance, but that's hidden away on the Publishers page. Expand Sources of Bibliographic Information again? (We'll need to decide what to do with the publisher website links there anyway, I could flood that section or assume that it'll be replaced with links from each publisher at some point.) BLongley 14:58, 29 Mar 2008 (CDT)

Publishers list

Bill at the moment there's no publishers directory, can you run me of a list and send it to me direct via email? I only ask this because I've been unable to the get download thing to work for me. The one person I knew that did programming for a living set it up on my machine, but I've been unable to get anything useful out of it. It either gives me useless results or buggers my computer. Thanks :-)Kraang 19:08, 7 Apr 2008 (CDT)

No problem. I've just updated from the latest backup so I'll make it Publisher ID, Name, Count of Pubs for that Publisher - the last column I think is useful when you're trying to standardise on one name, even if it isn't the one you want to end up with - hopefully we'll get to edit the name eventually. For example, even if we decided "Ace Books" is preferable to "Ace", it's easier to correct 220 "Ace Books" to "Ace" and then rename the publisher than convert 4,500 "Ace" to "Ace Books"! (Yes, that is the leading publisher right now.) BLongley 15:02, 8 Apr 2008 (CDT)

Bill can you send me a new publishers list, the last list had 9424 publishers and I'd like to see how thing have changed in the last two and a half weeks. Thanks!Kraang 01:09, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Only down to 9,361. :-/ Let me know if the email didn't get through - I only noticed after sending that it came from my anti-spam address. BLongley 18:39, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

It arrived from some guy called "Junkmail". Is this your new name? Kraang 22:57, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

No, a very OLD one, at an ISP I no longer use. I set it as a default address when I used to post to USENET - not really applicable anymore as I have my own domain now, and create new email addresses at will for any organization that demands one: so if they're abused, I know a) who leaked it and b) who to redirect the spam to. BLongley 23:27, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

I should have tagged the names that I fixed as I went along, which is what I'll do from now on. As for the number this is about what I had expected. The most I would expect in the near future would be a 10% decrease. I'll probably have you send me another one at the end of May, in the meantime I'll try and find someone that knows how to make the download work for me. The one that was done for me about a year and a half ago runs in Access and I've found it very useful. Thanks.Kraang 22:57, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm sure I COULD make at least SOME of the ISFDB backup data work in Access. I just wouldn't want to encourage use of such! I do plan to create a subset for use on my PDA, which will help me avoid duplicates a bit more often when I get out and buy books in person again. That's probably going to be "Pocket Excel" format, but when I've got myself sorted it should be fairly easy to do other versions. BLongley 23:27, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Down to 9,044 as of now. I suspect there's another 500 fairly easy ones to fix, then there's all the "(nth printing)" ones that will remove a few more (when we get printing number support), then the HARD work starts and we have to go talk to people about their publications. But I think I'll treat myself to a night off when we get below the 9,000 mark. BLongley 22:53, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

320+ thats pretty good. My original estimate of 10% or about 950 was fairly close.Kraang 02:44, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

(Unidented)Bill can you send me a new list, the last list had just over 9300 names and there is now 8500. I'm starting to run into ones you or I have done already. Thanks!Kraang 01:23, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

Pohl & Williamson's Undersea Quest

I've dated your verified copy of the Mayflower paperback of this title with info from OCLC. Amazon.co.uk and two abebooks.com dealers also give the date as 1970. Couldn't find the cover scan though. Was this one that fell through the cracks? MHHutchins 21:19, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

MANY fell through the cracks - at the time I verified that I think I was still frustrated with Amazon UK's slow approval process so didn't submit as many scans as I do now (as I can be checking Amazon UK and US while it scans, OCLC while I upload and publish - who said men can't multi-task?) and probably wasn't confident that Amazon would let me adjust the data on the crap US record I usually have to attach older British pub covers to anyway. Or maybe I was just ashamed of the state of the book - look at that scribble in the top right of the cover. How does the entry look now? (The ISFDB one - the Amazon.com one will still look crap for a day or so I think.) BLongley 21:46, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

BTW, are those Worldcat/OCLC links proven stable? If so we might want to bug AL for a field for OCLC numbers on pubs... or at least I'd add a Firefox macro to format the HTML for me. I'm adding a lot of OCLC references to pubs I don't own but have researched to the extent that I'd be unhappy to delete them, but can't quickly find a good source for further info. BLongley 21:46, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

I think they're stable. (Or it could be wishful thinking.) I copy and paste the URL from OCLC into the notes, only occasionally linking by HTML (written from scratch). Having a field which automatically links to the OCLC record would be wonderful. MHHutchins 22:50, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

And strangely, I receive ONE query here about a book I own on a day that I (unusually) only acquire ONE new book to add - and they're both underwater stories. I hope that's not an Omen - I've had enough water problems recently! BLongley 21:55, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

AND earlier today I Tuck-verified and linked the 1956 SFBC selections which included this title! MHHutchins 22:50, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

"Drip, drip, drop Little April shower"... this is a particularly bad April here and goes more like "tap, tappity-tap, rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-TAT, major April Hail-Storm". That seems to be saved for the weekends mostly though. I dress up for scraping the ice and snow off the car each weekday morning and then suffer over-heating during the day as the sun comes out and says "What cold weather? I didn't see any cold weather, I'm nice and warm!" I blame Global Warming, Global Cooling, a forthcoming Ice-Age, El Nino, and sheer perversity of the British Climate. And Squirrels. BLongley 23:14, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

The Editor!!!

I see you currently have a submission on hold for AndyHat where he is attempting to do a pseudonym thing for The Editor. Our current policy is in many ways a throwback to earlier stf mags where editorial attributions were a bit dicey. You might want to get some further input but I think allowing it in this case might be justified. I know Davecat is doing it for JWC and I did it recently for some Damon Knight book reviews in If - some of Knight's book reviews from the magazine were later published under his name.--swfritter 01:16, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

I think Marc Kupper beat me to it. BLongley 13:34, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Russell's Great Explosion

I've place a note on your verified copy of this title indicating that Tuck dates its publication incorrectly. MHHutchins 16:41, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

OK. To be fair, he wasn't FAR out as it's only January of the next year. BLongley 18:39, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

You have to admit though, we have to have found a few mistakes in Tuck. Otherwise one might believe the man wasn't human! MHHutchins 19:20, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

I think he just stumbled upon an early printout of the ISFDB thrown backwards through a time-rift... ;-) BLongley 19:27, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

If you're up to "Russell" now, how long before we can use the database to generate the New Revised Edition of the "The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy through 1968", by Donald H. Tuck and the ISFDB? BLongley 19:27, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Heavens, no! I'm not up to the "R"s. I've not even finished the "B"s. I was linking the 1962 selections of the SFBC, and as I tend to do, anytime I'm working on a title, I check sources for all pubs of that title. As I say in my to-do list, I don't expect to have finished reconciling Tuck with the ISFDB before the end of the next decade! MHHutchins 20:15, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

How about "Tuck's Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Revised Edition, Volume 1: A-B" next year then? ;-) BLongley 20:21, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

It may not even be an error but rather a different way of recording publication dates since there is a pretty good chance that a "1964-01-00" book first appeared on the stands well before Christmas 1963! But fear not, Tuck was human since he confused William Tenn (aka Philip Klass) and Philip (Julian) Klass the UFO-logist :) Ahasuerus 19:33, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, WE mix-up people all the time... today I separated the "John Thomas" titles by John Thomas Sladek from the other one, but don't know enough about the other "John Thomas" to do more. And Don Erikson pointed me at "Richard Foster" the Kendell Foster Crossen pseudonym, but he seems unlikely to have written "The Complete Guide to Middle Earth" too. BLongley 19:43, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

wiki codes

I have responded at some length on User talk:Davecat, and more briefly on the Community portal. If there are specific things you are confued about or want to know how to do with wiki code, please let me know. I have added a good deal to our editing help over the past couple of months, but if there are topics that should be covered better, please do mention them. -DES ^Talk 14:18, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Looks very useful, thanks! BLongley 18:42, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Forest in the Sky by Laumer

In your verified pub and hopefully still at hand. In the original magazine appearance it is "Forest in the Sky" but everywhere else, including the American edition of the above pub, it seems to be "The Forest in the Sky". Hope you don't have to run down to the used book store where you possibly traded it in.--swfritter 20:43, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

No, I don't have to run down to a used book store - I move my Primary Verifications to Primary Transient if I intend to dispose of them. Although I seem to have 90% of those still, as I try to swap them rather than sell them and rarely move more than 3 or 4 a week. The difficulty was finding where my cleaner put it - I have new bookshelves for Anthologies now, thanks to her, but her idea of how Anthologies should be organized doesn't match mine. I'm pretty sure she puts most of the Anthology Series together by series but how the Series then get sorted is a mystery: and as I don't have the first 'IF' Reader it was a bit tricky to find. (Top shelf, to the right, between the Orbit Science Fiction Yearbooks and the Continuum series, if you can spot the pattern I can't.) BLongley 21:24, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Anyway, to answer your question - there's definitely no "The" prefix. I've updated the pub to confirm that and moan about THREE Title pages and no Contents page - although the latter might be a blessing if it makes people check books as diligently as the Magazine editors do their magazines. BLongley 21:24, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! Although now I will have to decide which is the variant title and bug some other people.--swfritter 22:27, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Seein' as how Ahasuerus verified a 'The' version I think I can be pretty sure that entry is correct.--swfritter 22:33, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Ask anyway - Ahasuerus isn't perfect. Better than most for sure, but I've spotted mistakes in his entries (nine-digit ISBNs?), and we've jointly found mistakes in Contento entries, and Mike Hutchins and myself have found errors in Tuck, and Don Erikson seems to have found a new unreported error in Clute/Nicholls... challenge everything that seems wrong, I'd say. We owe a lot to Al and Ahasuerus for starting ISFDB, but I would be very unhappy if we started to make certain entries "unquestionably correct". BLongley 23:08, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Perfection would be nice, but I doubt any of us will be getting there any time soon. However, I see 3 separate OCLC records all concurring that the story appeared as "The Forest in the Sky" in Retief: Emissary to the Stars, so that's encouraging. Better yet, I should be able to double check my copy tomorrow night. Ahasuerus 23:42, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

As Laumer is an Ahasuerus speciality (I think) it shouldn't be a problem for him to add a "yes, it really IS that way" comment - eventually, when he's reunited with collection and has nothing better to do, etc. BLongley 23:08, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

I guess I'll have to pretend to be the resident Laumer expert until somebody else with a better grasp of his work shows up. I did read all of his pre-stroke works at one point or another and probably struggled through most of his post-stroke books, although I have tried to erase that experience from my memory (argh, I think Zone Yellow is trying to re-surface!). Worse, I have done comparative analysis of the original stories and the butchered post-stroke versions as they were published by Baen in the 1980s and lived to tell the tale. Ahasuerus 23:42, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

In the meantime, feel free to bug me about MY mistakes - I may not have had as much time to make them but we've ALL got newbie mistakes somewhere. I just made mine last year and Al and Ahasuerus made theirs last Century. BLongley 23:08, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, our original "newbie mistakes" were somewhat different, e.g. it took us some time to realize that we really needed to separate Titles from Publications :)

Hm, and now I see that the 1986 Baen edition of the book, which was verified by Lorenzr, is missing "An Excerpt from Retief & the Warlords (Excerpt)", perhaps legitimately so. Let me saunter over and ask him to double check... Ahasuerus 23:42, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

"The" confirmed in "The Forest in the Sky" in Retief: Emissary to the Stars (expanded 1979 edition). Ahasuerus 17:53, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Verification question

When you get a chance would you please look at ISFDB:Community Portal#John D. Clark, as one of your verified pubs is in question. Thanks. -DES ^Talk 02:40, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Answered, but it's opened a new can of worms and we'll need a Startling Stories check now. BLongley 18:46, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

James White's All Judg[e]ment Fled

Bill, check out the first two pubs of this title. They appear to be the same edition (both verified) but with different spellings of the title. Thanks. MHHutchins 18:22, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Fixed. It seems they didn't correct the spelling till later, if at all. BLongley 19:05, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

G. C. Edmondson

For what it's worth, the blurbs/mini-bios found in a number of G. C. Edmondson's books give diverging accounts of his youth. Some of these mini-bios were apparently written in jest, so I assume that he was just having fun with his readers. Ahasuerus 20:10, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

It could be worth recording those, as the Wikipedia references are a bit shaky. Stellar also mentions studying medicine in Vienna and becoming a translator for the U. S. Navy - which vaguely match "interest in medicine" and "U.S. Marine Corps" and "six languages" seen elsewhere. BLongley 20:25, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Sure, I can pull out a bunch of his books (I own all of his Titles, but not all of the associated Publications) when I have access to my collection on the 17th. It shouldn't be too hard to summarize various versions of his bio. Ahasuerus 21:05, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

My copy of the Ace first printing of The Ship that Sailed the Time Stream has

G. C. Edmondson: Jose Mario Garry Ordonez Edmonson y Cotton was born of Manx parentage in Stevens County, Washington, in a log cabin and weaned on maple syrup in 1922. Other sources insist on a birthday at least 15 years prior and a probable Scots origin from a family established some four generations in Livingstone, Guatemala. The Scots is probably a euphemism for some other Celtic breed since the one unpurchased birth certificate available hints at Belfast.

After cluttering up his mind for a year at the University of Southern California, Edmondson returned to his older and less fraudulent profession of smithing. A marginal man, he is one of the few remaining who can skin mule or missile.

He has been anthologized by Boucher and Conklin among others. Most of his stuff's appeared in Fantasy and Science Fiction though he's also appeared in Astounding and other s-f magazines. Non-s-f appearances range from Saturday Evening Post through Argosy down to Popular Mechanics and Trail-R-News.

He reads Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, German and Latin. Makes a stab at Greek, can ask for a drink in Yiddish and several Slavic languages. Could read Siwash and Chinook if anyone wrote them. At present learning Yaqui so he can converse with his more conservative in-laws.

None of the others I have have a bio. Dana Carson 08:06, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, Dana, that's precisely what I had in mind when I mentioned that some of the bios were "apparently written in jest". I'll try post the rest of them on the 17th. Ahasuerus 20:08, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

"Uller Uprising"

When you get a chance, could you please take a look at the Note that I have put together for John D. Clark's "Introduction (The Petrified Planet)"? Would you agree that it will be easier to explain this text's convoluted history in one Note as opposed to having it spread across multiple records? If so, do you think we should add this essay to the 1983 Uller Uprising and remove the two separate "Dr. John D. Clark" essay that are currently listed in this pub? Ahasuerus 02:42, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

The note is fine by me, as are the replacements of the two essays by one: the attribution in 1983 should stay as "Dr. John D. Clark" though and another variant created. BLongley 20:55, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Not addressed to me, but I like this note and agree with this proposed course of action. A minor nit, perhaps the note should also mention the Project Gutenberg edition (transcribed from the 1983 Ace pb) -DES ^Talk 03:07, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

That's a good point, we should probably clarify which version of the text is reproduced by PG. And please feel free to jump in on all and any Talk pages discussions, we all do :) Ahasuerus 03:16, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

First phase done, after the changes to the Ace and PG pubs are approved I can make the vt link. The pub-level notes on the PG edition already mention its source edition, do we need more documentation than that? -DES ^Talk 21:25, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

I have made a few more changes to the Note field in the main Title record to make it look prettier and I think we are getting there. All submissions have been approved except the last one. The intent seems to be to set up a VT for "The Silicone World" by "Dr. John D. Clark", but that Title has no publications associated with it. Wouldn't we want to simply delete it? Ahasuerus 22:50, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Since it did appear under the title "The Silicone World", albeit as by Pratt, I thought this would make sure that it would be found if someone was searching for that title. But it could be deleted if that seems better. Probably there are no external sources linking to the title record. I just added a note to the variant linked from the Ace and PG eds pointing a reader at the long note in the parent title record. -DES ^Talk 23:15, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

A publication-less Title can be suggestive of a number of "problem" scenarios, all of them requiring a correction of some sort. Most often it means that we don't know where the Title has appeared, in which case the "corrective action" is to find and enter the missing publications. The second most common scenario is that the publication-less Title is a clone (or a misspelling) of another Title in the database, in which case the two should be merged. Then there are Title records that are simply in error, usually due to data entry or data acquisition problems, and should be deleted. Finally, there are occasional pub-less Titles that have been announced but never published, e.g. Melanie Rawn's The Diviner’s Key (except that the latter has three phantom publications associated with it). Due to all of these issues, publication-less Titles are usually a big red flag and I wouldn't recommend creating them on purpose. We have enough issues with publication-enabled Titles as it is :) Ahasuerus 23:33, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Point noted, I have submitted a delete for this title. -DES ^Talk 23:43, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, I have processed both submissions and we seem to be finally done with this cranky essay :) Ahasuerus 23:48, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

The Dying Earth

Please look at ISFDB:Community Portal#The Dying Earth if you have a chance. I want to change this work from a Novel to a Collection, and you verified one of it's pubs. -DES ^Talk 15:48, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Answered. If you want my info on the Tales of the Dying Earth Omnibus, ask for it soon as it's on the "To Go" pile rather than the "To Be Read" pile. Ok, the TG pile is actually two boxes, and the TBR pile is probably three book-CASES, but you know what I mean. BLongley 21:37, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

The entry looks fairly complete and is double verified. Not sure what additional info would be wanted, but there is no doubt something obvious I am missing, there always is. -DES ^Talk 21:54, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

lazy Magazine editors?

I think it might more appropriate to say - Sometimes the magazine editors, after spending an hour or more entering complex data for a single magazine, forget to indicate those fairly occasionally incidents when a substantial part of a story is continued later in the magazine but luckily they respond very quickly when someone has a question about a magazine they have verified.--swfritter 23:30, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

Did you miss the Smiley? Or is there really a move towards "recording continuations of entries on other pages" I shouldn't have joked about? (It may not be a common problem in the sort of magazines you're entering, but it definitely is in later ones.) "Responding very quickly" is an admirable attribute in all verifiers, but I think we're all mortal (apart from Dissembler, maybe) and the actuarial tables say I've only got 15 more years and then my entries HAVE to stand for themselves, or someone else has taken them over. I offer you my sincere apologies if you feel I've criticized you and the other magazine editors for laziness - I actually think the opposite is true, you're generally all more detail-oriented than I am and therefore busier. (Which doesn't mean I wouldn't mind some ego-boo for dealing with Anthologies or Collections where I track back to original publications of titles in non-genre magazines - but praise is rare here.) BLongley 00:23, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

"Stories continued on other pages" have been an intermittent bibliographic headache since the dawn of genre pulps in the 1920s and we have occasionally discussed the perils of deriving the "Storylen" value from the page count. As far as smileys go, unfortunately, they don't always work as well as traditional smiles (and other kinds of Internet-disabled body language) do, so eventually somebody is liable is to misunderstand the intent -- as you said, most of us are only human. And although actuarial tables are a useful tool when dealing with statistically significant numbers of people, I would be careful when predicting an individual's future: what were the chances that a guy who first broke into print in 1928 would still be winning awards in the 21st century? :) Ahasuerus 01:14, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Add five for exercising regularly, and another five for lean body mass, and another five for having a sunny disposition - then subtract 20 for being an ISFDb editor. By that actuarial tables I am long gone. As to smiley faces. Every time I got an email from a manager that included a smiley face I knew I was in deep trouble.--swfritter 02:42, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Um. I guess I missed whatever this item was a response to. When stories are continued elsewhere in the same issue, is there something I should be doing to indicate this? The period of Analog I've been working with recently does this with depressing regularity. And the editorials have done it pretty much forever. And, for that matter, things like "The Analytical Laboratory" & "In Times to Come", while often falling at the end of a story, sometimes interrupt one, so that the TOC (or our page numbering) is a bad guide to story length.
For that matter, things like advertisements (which we don't record at all) & illustrations (whose sizes vary widely) also contribute to making story-length determination very chancy.
But, again, if I should be putting in a note about story continuations or something like that, someone please tell me. Thanks. -- Dave (davecat) 13:50, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

See ISFDB:Community Portal#Collections in Omnibuses for the original context. -DES ^Talk 15:40, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Thank you. I'd missed that one. And have things to say (but if you've started a thing in rules&standards it'll probably be there). Dave (davecat) 16:36, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

You might find this one interesting. Laumer has two short stories starting on facing pages. The first one continues on the page after the first page of the second story and the second story continues on the page after the ending of the first story.--swfritter 17:50, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Certainly worth the notes you added there - without, it'd look like one was a misclassified introduction or poem or something: there's not many single-page Shortfiction entries here. Although that reminds me, I've got another reason for us keeping Comics out now: I recall one where the Good Guy's story was on all the left-hand pages and the Bad Guy's was on the right-hand pages, and they were titled differently as both were precursor stories to the next issue's meeting. Too many of those and it would be worse than dividing up Piers Anthony's Photon/Phaze books by genre of each chapter... BLongley 19:30, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Proposed change to a verified pub of yours

In thius submission User:Rhschu wants to add a note to your verified Starseed that it is a first printing by numberline. See User talk:Rhschu#Starseed. Please check whether this is correct for your verifed copy. Feel free to approve or reject. If you reject, please add a note in hopes of getting this editor to look at his wiki page. -DES ^Talk 16:58, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

It's correct. BLongley 17:53, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Cover images

You had expressed an interest in cover images and books. I have no ftp site but would be willing to send a CD with images. The directory could be emailed, it lists the books available. Can you contact me via email to exchange privates? I've turned on email through this site. Holmesd 01:37, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Two verified records of the same pub, perhaps?

Bill, take a look at the two verified records of this title published by Panther. Yours is more complete, with cover art and extras at the end, but otherwise the two are identical with one further exception. You use the pre-decimal UK pricing [6/-] and Unapersson uses the decimal pricing [£0.30]. I believe there was a transition period when both appeared on pubs. Unapersson hasn't been around awhile, so I won't get as rapid as response from him/her (I can't help it, but if you use a female character as a pseudonym, I automatically assume you're female. Call me a chauvinist.) I don't want to delete someone else's verifed copy. What's your take on the subject? Thanks. MHHutchins 19:04, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

My take is "I don't want to delete someone else's verified copy - particularly a Mod's". ;-) I thought I'd asked him about it before but I don't see such a question on his talk page now: maybe a case of me forgetting "This is only a Preview!". Anyway, I've added ALL the price info on my copy so it should be OK to ask him whether his "£0.30" was the main price listed (in which case he probably has a later printing) or if his is identical to mine, in which case the inferior version should be deleted. (I think such a suggestion should come from someone with no bias, otherwise of course I'd delete his rather than mine.) BLongley 19:45, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

I tend to go by the first mentioned UK price for books of that era, although you could argue that any book published before 15th February 1971 (Decimal Day) should be in old currency and any published after in new: but in practice we were preparing for it from 1968 and still occasionally listed old prices until 1973/4 for the people that really didn't get it. I'm just glad that so far I've never had to use a price with a half-penny in it - although I SHOULD need to. Decimalisation did lead to some massive price-gouging in the book trade: in 1971 the standard book price of "2/6" often became "25p" for the next printing. I know I often deliberately hunted down pre-decimal editions to avoid paying double for an identical book. :-/ BLongley 19:45, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Publishers list

Bill when you have a chance can you create that list(publisher lists with ISBN prefixes and year ranges as well as the number-of-pubs for each)and email it to me. Also whats the current pub count? Thanks.Kraang 23:48, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Emailed - let me know if there's any problem with it. It's ONLY for pubs with 10-digit ISBNs, broken down by 5 digit prefix. BLongley 19:55, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

We're down to 8916 Publishers now. (You can actually find this from the ISFDB itself: just search for a publisher of '%' and see what number turns up in the 'A search for "%" found NNNN matches (limit 300)' message at the top of the results.) If you actually meant publication count rather than publisher, we've just passed 123,456. BLongley 19:55, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

The file turned up and I meant the publishers count, thanks for the tip on how to find it.Kraang 03:58, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Speaking of publishers, I see that a few Wiki pages say things like "It is now a part of the XYZ company". Since the ISFDB has been around for about 13 years and may well be around 13 years from now, it is probably safer to rephrase these comments to read "As of 2008, it is a part ..." :) Also, we will want to consider when we want to use the Wiki to enter publisher information and when we want to use the new Publisher-specific Notes field in the database.

By the time I consider any of the Wiki pages even NEAR complete, I'm sure they all WILL have changed again! As for when to use the Wiki and when to use Notes - well, as there's no Publisher & Imprint Hierarchy capability in the database ("yet", hopefully) I have to do that in the Wiki. I'm only really using the notes for dead-end publishers, but I am filling in Wikipedia and Web-pages in the database WHEN I get to a probably-canonical name - which isn't as often as I'd hoped yet. BLongley 17:32, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

P.S. No G. C. Edmondson yet since I will be off to the airport in the next 50 minutes or so. It looks very likely that I will be spending all of July with my collection, though, at which point I should be able to catch up on my verifications :-) Ahasuerus 17:11, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Review links to pubs

Bill, I think we should go ahead and approve those submissions in which you link reviews to pubs. Whether or not there's an exact match between the title as published in the review and the title recorded in the ISFDB, it's rather clear that the review refers to a specific title (not necessarily a specific pub). I think that's the whole point about Al giving us the power to link review to pub. We don't (and, IMHO, shouldn't) create variants of a title simply because there exists a review that doesn't EXACTLY match the title as published. I'm interested to hear if you have any argument with this view. I suspect that you agree otherwise you wouldn't have gone to the trouble of submitting those edits, but held off on approving them in case someone should come along later and create variants (God, I hope not!) MHHutchins 14:53, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Look closer - I didn't leave them because the Titles mismatched, but because the AUTHORS mismatched. Here Al said "the authors aren't of much value if the names are mangled" and I tend to agree - but the reviewees aren't really mine to correct in the pub itself. If people now want to leave the pubs with reviews as stated, then I want the stray authors created ONLY from reviews to be set up as pseudonyms, as when you come across an empty author in the author directory there's no way to find why it's there. But so far nobody's voting for fixing reviewees (I suspect that's Al's intention but it's not clearly stated) or leaving them and creating pseudonyms: I just don't want to leave them stuck halfway between those options. (That's why I created "Authors that only exist due to reviews".) Do you have a preference? BLongley 17:57, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

I have been happily linking non-exact-match titles when the reviewee matches the right author, but I'm not sure about linking them to pseudonyms, see this question. BLongley 17:57, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Oh, there is one other type I left: "A Spectrer is Haunting Texas" is surely either "Specter" or "Spectre"? There I suspect the review could be cleaned up. BLongley 18:15, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Whether the differences be author or title, I don't feel that variants should be created. For instance, there was a work reviewed by "E. Hoffman Price" in one of my verified pubs. I corrected the review record to the correct author's name "E. Hoffmann Price". It made the author record and summary page for the single-n Price disappear, as there are no pubs actually published in that name. Let's take your first submission as an example. The Universe Makers has never been published as by "Donald Wollheim", regardless of what the review states (whether it be an editor input error or reviewer error.) By approving this submission, you're only linking this review with the publication under review. You're not even changing the title record of the review (though I'd do it if I were the original verifier of the magazine in which the review appeared.) MHHutchins 20:01, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Not the best example, as we already have the "Donald Wollheim" pseudonym set up. (See below DES's comment for a better one.) I'm not that bothered about Title discrepancies - ones that look like typos can usefully be queried, most are just ones where the reviewer includes a series name as well, or adds a series number or such - not important, and I've let dozens of those through. BLongley 21:49, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

My feeling is that the review record should record what was present in the review. Formerly we had to correct to canonical author and title to make the lexical link work. Now we can instead simply link to the correct title (as I understand it reviews cannot link to a specific pub) no matter what name was used in the review itself. The only problem comes when the review is used as a source to create the initial publication record. Then if the title is incorrect or the author's name is misspelled, we will want to correct it in the pub record (not in the review), but this is no different from any other case where a record is constructed from secondary data -- when we can determine what the actual state of the published work was, we correct the record. As for variant reviews, the only reason i see for those now is when the reviewer used a non-canonical form of his or her name -- then we want a vt to put all the reviews onto the primary page for that author, just as we would for an essay, story, or novel published under a non-canonical name. Am I missing something here? I'm about to go off and do a little experimenting. -DES ^Talk 20:46, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

A better example of my concern is probably this one. Have a look at the Author page for "Dr. E. E. Smith" and see if you can get any use out of it. The usual "Click on Titles" solution will NOT help. An Advanced Author search gets you to the same page. Advanced Title and Pub searches by that name just hammer the database. It's THAT sort of problem I want to avoid. BLongley 21:49, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

I suspect (but have no evidence yet) that pseudonymous reviewees don't display correctly if we don't have the reviewed pub with exactly the right title AND pseudonym - but Al may have done a better clean-up than I expected. I do know there was a problem with pseudonymous Reviewers though - see here. One of the reviews lost its reviewee. BLongley 21:49, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Anyway, glad to see there's some discussion at last, I just wish it was where it was supposed to be rather than my talk-page! As I said originally "feel free to approve or reject those, but please explain the reasoning" - from what you've both said here, it seems Mike favours fixing the reviewee, and DES wants it left alone? BLongley 21:49, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

I just did a little testing, and I'm rethinking the above. More exactly, the above as what I think we would do in an ideal world, but...

Take a look at {{P|264574}. In this test publication, you will find a review of Test Novel by Test_Author. However, in the review, the author has been identified as Testy_Author, this may be a typo in the review, or a pesud not actually used on the particular pub in question. This creates an empty author record for "Testy Author", which is probably a bad idea, unless we already have this variant recorded as a pesud. Note that the empty author record is created even though the review is properly linked to the title that shows the correct author name.

Given the above test, i now think that we need to alter author names recorded on reviews to match the name on the actual title being reviewed, unless the name used in the review is a variant we already have on file (presumably because works were in fact published under it). In any case, we ought to link reviews to the proper title records whenever possible. The name of the reviewer ought to be recorded as printed at the head of the review or review column. If this is not the canonical name of the individual, then a variant record should be set up to put the review on the proper summery author page.

What do the rest of you think about this? -DES ^Talk 21:26, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Will look, but Edit conflicts here are making it a pain to do anything at the moment. BLongley 21:49, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

OK, had a quick look and added the extra complication of this review: see where the reviewee (Book Author) is lost? We have several of those to fix still (and Al has to fix the "Make This Title a Variant Title or Pseudonymous Work" code at some point too before we get more). BLongley 21:55, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

And now it looks like "Mike favours fixing the reviewee, and DES wants it left alone IF it's a pseudonym already, or corrected otherwise."? BLongley 22:02, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

I am going to copy this to the community portal, and respond there, This is too general and too important to be left on an individual's talk page. -DES ^Talk 22:07, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Ta muchly! BLongley 22:13, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Archive request

BTW, I notice you created some nice archives for Kraang earlier - would you mind doing the same for me? It's beginning to get annoyingly long even for my tastes/broadband speed. BLongley 22:13, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Will do -DES ^Talk 22:49, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks - I think you've taught me enough to do it myself, but I get attached to some posts and having another neutral observer doing it means I can't get too sentimental about entries. I look at something and think "I should follow up on that post" but probably never will. It's like some of my books - there's many books I will probably never read as they're too big to hold during a nice long bath, but they're SO highly recommended I just can't get rid of them... BLongley 23:01, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Done.

Note that when i archive, i never delete anything. I simply move it to an archive page. I pretty much always move sections intact, and for a user talk page, pretty much always move contiguous groups of sections together. I usually try to stop just before the first thread start in a month or a year, and to put 30-40 sections on an archive page. There is nothing preventing your starting a new conversation with a link to an archived section for history/context, if you ever do follow up. -DES ^Talk 23:07, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Oh, I know that archiving doesn't mean deletion - to carry on the analogy, it's like letting my cleaner move the 7 Peter F. Hamilton paperbacks I have from their current shelf in the dining room (that I've never actually dined in, as I use it for my SF library, Authors C-Z, Media tie-ins excluded) to the spare bedroom (never slept in, used for Non-SF, Media Tie-in SF, comics, and spare computer parts). A perfectly logical move that gives me a foot of shelf-space back even after I've re-introduced the Edmond Hamilton books I can't fit in at the moment: but it disrupts the logical order of my collection and I can never quite bring myself to do it. I know that once I get rid of the unused sofa (yes, the living room has A-B, plus reference books) they WILL all fit, in order: for a few months more anyway. I need to move to a proper library. :-/ BLongley 23:39, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

My cats voted for me and simply shoved the beginning of "A" off the top shelf to claim it. Thus parts of Brian Aldiss through Poul Anderson are arranged on the floor. What's disturbing are the stacks waiting for entry of publication details. When I get books I make an immediate pass to get the title/author but teasing out the details gets backlogged. Marc Kupper (talk) 20:29, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

The Dark Planet

Bill, a recent edit by Don added a cover artist to your verified pub[4]. I have this book, but didn't recognize the artists style of signature.Kraang 01:40, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

I'll take Don's word for it, I hadn't even recognised it as a J! BLongley 17:52, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

The Masks of Time

Does your copy of The Masks of Time have an Introduction dated November 1977 at the end underneath the signature? I have a November-1978 Berkley printing with the introduction. What got my attention is that the copyright on my pub is 1968, 1978 implying that Silverberg wrote the introduction for Berkley. But, if the introduction is in your copy then Berkley has the wrong copyright date and the one appearing in my copy is a reprint. Marc Kupper (talk) 22:26, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

No, there's no introduction in either my "The Masks of Time" or my "Vornan-19". I could probably do with one as I've no idea why the titles switched. Does the essay give a clue? BLongley 23:13, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

Thank you Bill - the introduction essay does not mention Vornan-19 but that is the name of the main character/alien in the story. I can only guess that the publisher picked that title either to fool buyers into thinking it was a "new" story or to use a title more like Silverberg's early pulp work rather than the more "intellectual" The Masks of Time.

The essay talks about how early in his career Silverberg was writing formula driven pulp SF and by the mid-1960s was trying to break out of that and to show people (both editors and readers) that he could do better work. Thorns was the first effort and Masks of Time was the second. While he does not appear care about what critics/readers write about his stories Silverberg is pretty sensitive to this. While Thorns was in the publishing pipeline he was working on Masks but had not gotten feedback on Thorns. Thus Masks is also a break-out novel, though in a different way, as he did not think anyone would notice Thorns. Marc Kupper (talk) 20:19, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the synopsis. I spotted one other interesting fact about the Vornan-19 version, I don't know if you noticed me entering it? That's at least twice I've seen reused covers (more if you count magazine/book crossovers), maybe there should be a special page for such paperback Pelmanism. BLongley 23:46, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

I think it was once rather common. I owned a copy of Three Worlds to Conquer which had a cover reasonably well illustrating a scene from the book. I also had a copy of None But Man (the cover pictured on the linked record) and the cover is the identical image, except that it is flipped around the vertical axis, left<->right. Much the same thing was done with Lunar Activity and Phases, although here since one collection was a sort of updated version of the other, it made more sense. I have seen this done on other books, but don't recall exact instances off-hand. -DES ^Talk 15:54, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

Fantastic Novels

Looks like I can take Sunday off! Since you have changed the Wiki page I assume you have been working on these. Secondary sources or physical mags?--swfritter 20:49, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Famous Fantastic Mysteries? If I changed that Wiki page, it was totally in error! "Fantastic Novels [Magazine]" is where I decided to try some secondary source additions after I came across some covers on Amazon (of all places!). Don't get too excited - it's for fiction content only, although I'm experimenting with (stolen) cover-art too. The chances of me working on primary sources of 1940s and 1950s Pulp magazines are about the same as for me winning the lottery... actually, those chances could be directly related.... BLongley 21:11, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

I don't think I've messed up any existing magazine entries (unless I got some Editor merges wrong) and the additional entries I made are not going to be up to current Magazine standards, but I hope they're accurate enough to be a starting point at least. It's been a good exercise in determining serials versus novels and things like that. Let me know if I've messed anything up. "A. Merritt" would be a good starting point for checks. BLongley 21:11, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Oh, and leave it a few days (don't cheat by looking at the current upload logs) and then see if you can find the relevant artwork. BLongley 21:11, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Fantastic Novels - that's what I meant. I just acquired the complete run. I created the wiki and started entering them a couple of days ago. I think all the issue covers are at Galactic Central. This should save me a little work.--swfritter 22:01, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Go for it then, I couldn't find the last couple. But DO let me know where I messed things up, or added stuff you'd never have thought of (slim chance, but I can hope). I wandered off into pseudonym-fixing and such, and even dragged a couple of "A. Merritt" pubs out for scanning. BLongley 22:41, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

May 1948: The Moon Pool is actually the novella version. I assume Merritt must have expanded it later.--swfritter 16:41, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

Keep in mind that Fantastic Novels and Famous Fantastic Mysteries were notorious butchers, abridging novels left and right, often without notice. Ahasuerus 17:01, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

There actually was a novella version published in 1918. Later publications, including the Amazing serial, actually incorporated this novella plus the novel length "The Conquest of the Moon Pool". One of Bill's favorites - a fixup. With many of these titles now available in Project Gutenberg it would be interesting to do a text comparison - making the assumption the Project Gutenberg titles are not drawn from FNM or FFM. Oh, and thinks for fixing that typo in the TWS grid. I saw it when I was editing and meant to fix it. And Bill was nice enough to complete the FNM wiki and create stubs for me.--swfritter 17:34, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

The Gutenberg "The Moon Pool" is about 99,000 words, according to a quick copy'n'paste'n'word-count. BLongley 19:50, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

The same is also true of "Girl in the Golden Atom" which incorporates a novella of the same name plus "People of the Golden Atom". Of course, to do a real comparison you have to have the original magazine appearances from which FNM and FFM draw their sources. Subsequent book publications could have been expanded.--swfritter 19:21, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

The Gutenberg "Girl in the Golden Atom" is about 97,000 words, according to a quick copy'n'paste'n'word-count. BLongley 19:50, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

July 1948: The Second Deluge should be Complete Novel-Serial and not merged. The short story is a variant - the other publication used middle initial instead of middle name.--swfritter 17:16, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

Year of the Cloud by Wilhelm & Thomas

Can you check to see whether the date you gave on this verified pub is the publication date or the copyright date? The hardcover was published in October 1970 with a SFBC edition in January 1971. I doubt that Playboy published a paperback edition in 1970. Thanks. MHHutchins 16:28, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

The pub only gives copyright date: I haven't found any reference giving anything later though, e.g. Clute/Nicholls, OCLC, Fantastic Fiction, Alibris, Amazon all give 1970 too. BLongley 17:29, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

Thank You!!

Thanks for fixing the links. Sometimes I do real stupid things. When Dragoondelight answers his message sometime in the near future, he wants to work on entering Print-On-Demand information into the db. (We started talking about it in a Yahoo Group that we both belong to, and we've been emailing each other.) Do you have any experience with entering the P-O-D publications?CoachPaul 20:54, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

It's not stupid, we're mostly pretty weak on Wiki Templates I think. There's a few that save time (the "Welcome" one is one I did learn) but some others are no quicker than HTML links, and some (like the Image Templates) just seem to demand MORE work than before. BLongley 21:46, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

As to P-O-D - well, I've adjusted a few and they're a nightmare. Printing Numbers are irrelevant (obviously) so I think I lean toward first availability date and not accept any other editions. But some P-O-D publishers have been taken over so there's a "new" edition from I-Universe or such - we haven't identified these publishers well enough yet to cull any duplicates though. Maybe Dragoondelight has an opinion to share? BLongley 21:46, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Don't know about his opinion, I just know that he seemed distressed that there didn't seem to be any editors here that were actively working on them, and that they might be lost to history. I think that that is a good attitude to have for an Editor here, so when he said that he would come and work on them, I began to point the way. It will be nice to have a new Editor who knows from the start how to use the Wiki. I know it took me about a month before I even found the Wiki, and then another month before I figured out how to do anything here other then read what others wrote here!CoachPaul 22:04, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

If there's ONLY a P-O-D edition available, I'd mostly support inclusion (if it passes all the other tests of actually being SF etc) but wouldn't want to moderate it, or encourage other editions of such. But then I'm somebody that doesn't delete Manga if it's SF Manga, for instance. And am happy with Graphic Novel versions of SF works. Changing the Rules of Acquisition is a big change though! It's easier if Mods support such changes though, on the understanding that it's only here because someone else doesn't want it deleted. I don't delete much (but do for Dups, RPGs, non-SF Manga, picture-books for toddlers, etc) but I don't ADD to those either. BLongley 22:28, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

According to what I read in the current Help Pages, all P-O-D pubs are to be added. (If I am wrong about this, please let me know.) If I were looking for an older edition of a book that was no longer in print by a "regular" publisher, I'd certainly be happy to know that there was a P-O-D edition available.CoachPaul 22:46, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

There is PoD, and then there is PoD. For instance, Wildside Press uses PoD technology pretty much exclusively, but they operate as a regular publishing house with the sole exception that they don't indicate separate printings -- in effect, every book of theirs is a first printing of its edition, although they do occasionally have revised editions. There there are firms like LuLu, which basically are printers supporting people who want to self-publish, which some professional authors do as well as many amateurs. (For Example Sylvia Louise Engdahl's most recent book was self-published.) Then there are vanity presses/scams like PublishAmerica and (to a lesser extent) Author House. I assume that Dragoondelight is intere3sted in the more or less self-published end of things, as I think that actual publishers who use PoD for SF we are covering reasonably well, or at least no worse than other non-huge publishers. -DES ^Talk 02:30, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Back in the Dark Ages (i.e. in the mid-1990s) there was no PoD (of consequence) and our policy was not to include books printed by vanity publishers. However, with the rise of the PoD technology in the early 2000s it became harder and harder to distinguish between pros (or sometimes ex-pros) using PoD outlets and amateurs doing the same. We could have probably come up with a complicated system of eligibility rules, but instead we just gave up and decided to include all PoD books, vanity publications and what have you. The change was put in place in 2005 and was documented in the Rules of Acquisitions in May 2006 when we began beta testing ISFDB-2. The only obvious downside so far has been a modest increase in the number of Author records, but it hasn't been as bad as I once feared.

Having said, it's only natural if some/most editors concentrate on more traditional publishers, but if somebody wants to clean that part of the database up, more power to him/her! :) Ahasuerus 02:59, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Dragoondelight aka. Harry, in particular asked me about Otis Adelbert Kline, someone who is very well represented in the db, but is also well represented by a PoD house too, possibly LuLu, of which none or few of the books are entered in the db as being available PoD. Harry has been having trouble figuring out the Wiki, but I got him reading his Talk Page in under one day, something that took me a month to figure out. Maybe tomorrow, after reading the email I sent him tonight, he'll figure out how to respond.CoachPaul 03:48, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Looking at his recent submissions, I think I'll leave you to deal with him for a bit. I think he's going to need some close guidance on ISFDB editing as well as the Wiki - hopefully he's as quick a learner as you suggest. BLongley 22:15, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Colonists of Space

I noticed in the submission queue that people were avoiding approval of an update to your verified pub Colonists of Space]. I've put it on hold so you can look at it. The main question in my mind is you have the catalog # as RC17 and the editor USer:Dragoondelight is adding a note that mentions R617. I suspect the publication does state R617 as there are AbeBook sellers with that and none with RC17. I suspect you can approve Dragoondelight's update and then re-edit the record to correct the catalog # or to add a note about RC17. Marc Kupper (talk) 19:38, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

The spines a bit cracked, but a bit of probing and a magnifying glass suggests he's right. BLongley 22:36, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

Added cover artist

I added the cover artist to verified copy of Eric Iverson's WEREBLOOD, published by Trojan. My copy was trimmed so you could just make out the top of Boris Vallejo's signature.Don Erikson 18:40, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

I'd forgotten I owned that... I agree, it looks like Boris's work to me too, but I'm damned if I can find any trace of a signature. Whereabouts is it? BLongley 03:49, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

The B of Boris appears exactly 1/4 inch below the hero's heel. The way the cover is trimmed can vary from book to book. My copy has the publisher's logo nearly all the way to the top edge of the cover showing, I believe that it was trimmed a little off center.Don Erikson 18:52, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

There's only an 1/8th of an inch under the heel on mine, so no wonder I didn't see it! BLongley 20:07, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Formatting wiki links, using wiki markup, and style

In connection with the series "The Other Side of the Sky", you mentioned a desire to distinguish between wiki->wiki and wiki->db links. Those links that go via the linking tempaltes we can authomatically format in almost any way we like: how do you think they should be formatted. Links out of the wiki, like this one to Google already show the little "arrow" icon at the right edge of the link, but it is over-subtle IMO. we could specifiy text and/or background color, typestyle, or even add an icon of our own if we wanted.

Using wiki markup for italics makes the wiki code shorter, adn i think the rendering slightly faster, than using html tags.

I think that inserting a link to a subject when it is mentioned in the opening line or sentance of a piece of text is better style than using a separate "back" link, but that is a question of style and preference. -DES ^Talk 23:11, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Well, it doesn't make much sense to me to make the first thing on the page a link back - a return link is the LAST thing that should be presented IMO - you want people to read the page first (or at least part of it).

That assumes that the only way to get to the page is from the ISFDB. (note that such pages may be reachable directly from google.) But my basic thought is that the first time the name appears it should be linked to the db page. I am thinking of the page as a thing-in-itself, I guess. But the other way works also. -DES ^Talk 15:41, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

It's never the ONLY way, of course. And our new Googleability may affect how people arrive here, so I'm beginning to think more about links. Mostly I just press the "back" button myself, but that's not going to work for everyone and I want to direct people to the database. But all links should go somewhere useful. BLongley 21:40, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

A little 'ISFDB' icon would be cool for links into ISFDB, but I'm not sure how much use I'd make of it. As most of the support pages I'm interested in come directly from the ISFDB, a 'Back to ISFDB' link at the end of the page covers most of what I want. So it rather depends on what people want to see in their talk pages and the community pages. BLongley 15:25, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

I noted that in the helpdesk today you used {{A|H._Fox}}. You may not be aware, but not long ago I updated Template:A so that {{A|H. Fox}} gives the same result. Nothing wrong in continuing to use the underscore, but it may be a little more trouble to type, and it is one more thing to remember when copy&pasateing an author's name into a link. -DES ^Talk 20:15, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

I noticed you mentioned you'd updated the template, but as I'd rarely used it before it didn't really matter. I'm still mostly taking the HTML links I can get with two clicks or so and converting to Wiki links. It still isn't any faster (and is usually slower), though I appreciate that if we ever move to a site that ISN'T called ISFDB.org it will help. Still, today I've mixed cross-linked Wiki pages with Wiki pages linking back to ISFDB, with IMAGE links too, and used some of those on talk pages as well, so I'm glad my attempts are noticed. I still have no style, but as I've mixed this topic with the Image use discussions, and use of Bio pages, as well as some stomping on other verifier's pubs, comments are probably due. BLongley 21:02, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

If you don't chose to use the linking templates, that is your choice. Direct URL links give exactly the same result, until/unless we switch domains or the db switches its script URLs, neither likely in the short term. (the wiki code is slightly shorter, but that doesn't matter much.) If you are coming directly from a db page, capturing the URL is about as quick, and if you find it easier, use it. I wouldn't have posted here to say "Use this template". But since I saw that you had chosen to sue it, I wanted to let you know that it could be done with one less step, to save you a tiny bit of trouble.

It's actually one MORE step to remove the underscore from a copy'n'paste link as the ISFDB link includes them, e.g. http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?H._Fox . With names as short as "H. Fox" though, it might have been faster to create the link from scratch - but deleting extra characters is simple. I'm trying to find the fastest way of doing things, and some Wiki stuff is obviously faster ("Welcome" template for instance, although I keep finding myself almost editing the template rather than editing a talk-page) and some is slower. BLongley 22:42, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

I usually copy from the title section of the author page, not the URL, so ther are no underscores. But often i am copying from soemwhere else that jsut has the author's name, so inserting underscores would be a pain. If the underscores are easier for you, leave them, they harm nothing. But this lets me just type say Isaac Asimov without needing to copy from anywhere, if his books are under discussion. -DES ^Talk 03:57, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

You had mentioned a desire to have wiki->db links stand out in some distinctive way. If we agree on who we like them to look (or even if you have an idea and no one objects) I can easily alter the formatting on all links that use the linking templates. Want them purple on a light green background? I can do that (although I hope you don't). Want an "->DB" logo on each one? can do. But only on the links that use the templates. -DES ^Talk 22:05, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

I'm still experimenting - the lack of some DB fields means I have to use the Wiki a bit more than I really want to - so I haven't got a definite opinion on how I'd like them to appear yet. I do want a distinction, but can't say I have a definite opinion on what the distinction should be. I'm aware that such a change could affect a LOT of pages though, the talk ones we use regularly, so maybe you should change the most visible version subtly and see how people like it - or it'll just be you and me dithering over presentation. No Purple or Green for now though: there's enough disagreements here that I don't want to arouse the Drazi. ;-)BLongley 22:42, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Well the nice thing about the templates is that if we try soemthing, and people don't like it, we can change it back, or to somethign else, very easily, and once change will fix it everywhere. Hmm I'll try something subtle, and we'll see what you and others think. -DES ^Talk 23:03, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

I have tried a very light green backgrond, no purple, for the author template only. Here is an example: Jack Vance. What do you think? Too much? -DES ^Talk 23:21, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

It's absolutely hideous. So leave it that way until we inspire a more general discussion where we get something resolved. ;-) BLongley 23:29, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Chacun a son gout I'll leave it as is until further notice -- at least until somenone else comments. I can easily make it any color that html supports. -DES ^Talk 23:49, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

I'm disappointed that people aren't complaining yet. I'm torn between asking if "blink" tags work in templates (and current browsers), or making some sensible suggestions myself. BLongley 23:53, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

the template can put in any code that an HTML span tag supports, which means pretty enarly anything. A blink tag could be used. Which browsers still support such a thing, i don't know. -DES ^Talk 03:57, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

[unindent]...well, I use the Cologne Blue skin for the Wiki and the best I can say is that the green background on authors' names really stands out. It's not "hideous" but it sure does clash with the background. (Not that I'm some sort of fashionista!) In that respect, I suppose, it does the job. :) MHHutchins 05:08, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

I use the default Monobook skin, adn it doesn't seem all that awful to me. That said, the idea is to make it noticable without being overly horrific. I am willing to take any suggestions for color properties, or to remove this aspect. What would you prefer, if anything. -DES ^Talk 14:04, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

The Leading Edge

Note to self: have a look at this sometime. http://mormonlit.lib.byu.edu/lit_work.php?w_id=6250&showall=1

A Hat Full of Sky

Oops, clicked too fast and approved your change to A Hat Full of Sky (series number from 2 to 32) by accident :-( Ahasuerus 16:30, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

No problem, saved me doing it. I'm wondering whether to interfere with it a bit more - applying the Official series numbers to the books makes our Discworld display a bit odd - but it's probably worth separating the younger readers books somehow. BLongley 16:52, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Long series with embedded semi-demi-sub-series are always a pain in the neck. No matter how you slice and dice them, they rarely perfectly reflect the baroque structure that the author had in mind :( Ahasuerus 20:47, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

If the little-used "jvn" category made a difference to display here I'd probably use that - but the Publisher (if not the author) has started to refer to books by number and I think we have to stay with that. Even if it did mean I had to renumber half the omnibuses too. :-/ And given the recent medical news about the author, it may not be long before he numbers "Eric", "Mort" and "Jingo" as "Millennium", "Hand" and "Shrimp". I hope if the Alzheimer's does bite, it does so in style - but hopefully we'll have FUNCTIONAL Dried Frog Pills before that happens. BLongley 21:27, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Timemaster

Are appendix and bibliography important to note at the end of novels? Looking at my copy the appendix:timetraps seems like an essay. The final report section could almost be short fiction for after the story. The bibliography has real documents, but I have never seen one in a novel. I sent Kraang a similar query on appendixes to Exiles at the Well of Souls and Quest for the Well of Souls. I know those could be useful as I have used them to refresh myself on that universe, but should they be noted? I love fact sheets and appendixes personally. Sorry for the pain. Thanks, Harry. --Dragoondelight 19:57, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

The importance will vary depending on who you ask - I must admit when I started here I concentrated on the Speculative Fiction and anything else was unimportant. But the bar keeps getting raised and some people add more and more detail - all good so long as it doesn't scare people off editing entirely, IMO. I think if I did Timemaster now I'd note the Bibliography - it does mention some SF works as well as a lot of scientific papers. The Appendix is written like an essay but is part of the fictional universe: you could even break it down further into the named sections. I wouldn't myself, it's dry and boring stuff mostly. "About the Author" might be useful to someone trying to construct a biography, but also has some more bibliographical stuff. But feel free to add what you are interested in. Me, I'm going to see if I have a cover-scan ready. BLongley 20:13, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Actually, looking at my pub again, it's a third printing not a first. Fixed now. BLongley 20:29, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps the most obvious example of a bibliography in a novel that I recall was at the end of Chriton's Andromeda Strain which has a long list is standard medical-paper format of relevant papers and books (recall that Chriton had been a Medical student not that long before). Many, perhaps most of the papers cited in that are real, but some are clearly in-universe, being written by characters in the novel, and others almost surely are, describing the background of some of the fictional projects and events in the book. This isn't really an essay or a short story -- if we had the "Factious article" type I'd use it for this, failing that I think an essay, with a note. But I would be inclined to list it. -DES ^Talk 20:23, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

The Timemaster Bibliography makes reference to another of Forward's titles and has a Robert A. Heinlein reference: "About the Author" actually has more of Forward's bibliography than the Bibliography does. BLongley 20:29, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Ah, I see. -DES ^Talk 21:01, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Callahan's Secret

User:Tpi has added a cover artist and cover image to your verified pub Callahan's Secret. Correct? -DES ^Talk 16:33, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

It's correct. I can use that for the 1st printing too, I think - it's practically identical apart from the ISBN. BLongley 17:31, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Perry Rhodan

Please look at what I did to accomodate the British issues. Once we get more of them in, I will organize that section by date. rbh (Bob) 19:48, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

So far, so good. Once there's some more contents and variants in place it should be workable. I'm not sure if the chapter titles in the British books match to anything else yet: if so I'll add them. BLongley 20:26, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Pardon my big nose. I have almost all of the Ace printing of Perry Rhodan. I am missing the final one I think. I also have most of the surbscriber issues that followed. I am totally missing the odd four that started the series again in English. Would it help to pump that in and verify? No wish to step on toes. I will get there someday anyway. Thanks, Harry. --Dragoondelight 00:12, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

More data is always good by me! I suggest you work with Bob directly on this though - I've no particular interest in this series but am willing to improve the three entries I have so long as someone else gets to organise it all! ;-) If you're short on British data let me know though - when I see them, they're mostly car-boot sale clearance items and easy to acquire for pennies. BLongley 20:39, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Left note on his site. I have 130 or so of them, but no British. Those covers should be collectors items. Thanks, Harry. --Dragoondelight 13:48, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

James White's The Dream Millennium/Millenium

I've added cover art to your verified copy of this title, made a note about the variant spelling, unmerged it from the original title and created a variant title for it. I was going to add the Michael Joseph hardcover edition, but there's conflicting evidence about how the title is spelled. OCLC titles it The Dream Millennium, but several abebooks.com dealers spell it The Dream Millenium. MHHutchins 03:36, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

I'd forgotten I'd got two of those - thanks! BLongley 18:57, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Changes to verified pub Amazing Stories December 1974

A number of stories were still classified as shortfiction. Greg Benford is credited on the title page of the essay but I left as Gregory since the table of contents and end signature are Gregory. Credited Ted White as author of letter column since he signs the responses with initials that are not likely to be those of anyone else. Publisher is actually Ultimate Publishing Co., Inc. rather than Ultimate Publishing Co. but I will leave that to you to resolve since you are working on publishers.--swfritter 16:28, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

This took me a while to find as I don't recall owning any "Amazing Stories" (link next time please?) I presume you mean Amazing Science Fiction, December 1974. If so, yes, all edits are fine by me, it's much better than I recall leaving it. I won't nitpick over Publisher as there's still several thousand to work on before stepping on other active editor's toes with regularisation issues. Unless you WANT me to nitpick? If so, Arthur D. Hlavaty seems notable enough here to have his letter on page 121 recorded individually, and there IS a cigarette ad between pages 66 and 67... ;-) BLongley 23:47, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

It is between pages 66 and 67 and not included in the page count.--swfritter 16:20, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

OK, just kidding - my cleaner has instructions to 'organise' my few magazines to clear some shelf-space, which means they'll be even less findable next weekend. I never know where she'll find space for such, but she finds it: my best guess is that I'll find myself with a pile of clothes that she 'suggests' I take to a charity shop and my gateway to Narnia becomes filled with paper. Feel free to take over primary verification on this. BLongley 23:47, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

Out of My Mind / Web of Everywhere

Bill, could you please take a look at this submission when you have a chance? I have it on hold, but it has to do with a publication that you verified last year, so you are probably in a better position to pursue it. The pub record that we have on file looks like an omnibus edition of a novel and a collection, but there is no associated Omnibus Title record, just a Collection Title and a Novel Title. Thanks! Ahasuerus 13:44, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

That did look a mess, hopefully it's better now. The book itself looks like it is two paperbacks bound together but I'm not sure if there were two individual May 1980 editions that were put together later (Amazon suggests this joint version is 1982 - or 1970, clearly impossible) or if the May 1980 date is for the joint publication. Hopefully the coverart showing two other covers will help someone clarify. BLongley 19:48, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Henry Treece

Just a quick FYI that your Henry Treece submission lists his date of death as "1966--06-10", which may confusicate the software :) Ahasuerus 02:05, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Actually, it didn't. Clever little thing at times, this software stuff. BLongley 14:34, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

New publishers list

Bill can you send me a new list, the last list had just over 9300 names and there is now 8500. I'm starting to run into ones you or I have done already. Thanks!Kraang 01:23, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

Did you receive it OK? BLongley 06:13, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

List turned up, but I was more interested in the list with one of every publishers name :-) I've found this list with the ISBN's useful for figuring out some of the really messed up publishers names. Thanks!Kraang 23:26, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

Full list sent. BLongley 18:39, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

Have them both now. Thanks!Kraang 22:35, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

Note to self

Raise Roman versus Arabic numerals as being worthy of variants or not like this. (And moan to seller of such a bad condition book.) BLongley 22:29, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

I had a similar question for myself. Take a look at Sisters of Sarronnyn: Sisters of Westwind and you'll see the variants are Sisters of Sarronnyn; Sisters of Westwind and Sisters of Sarronnyn, Sisters of Westwind with the only difference between the three being the punctuation character. In this case I decided to leave the variants in there and in fact am the one that added the comma version.

With your title, yes, I'd make it a variant and those sort of titles I pay extra attention to how it's stated on the cover, spine, and title page to document any discrepancies. As it is, 0-425-04158-1 is II on ISFDB, "2" on Amazon, and the ABeBooks sellers for the ISBN are split 50/50 with none of them offering a cover image. Marc Kupper (talk) 00:11, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Silverberg's Godling, Go Home!

I've added cover art to your verified copy of this title, and added the month of publication (date printed on the top half of the copyright page). MHHutchins 03:38, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the date, I've improved the cover. BLongley 22:58, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

Green Phoenix

Regarding your verified pub.

You reported the date as 1972-10-00. Is this stated? I don't have a copy but spotted it in a book store today and it said just "1972" though I can't remember if it said "First Printing, 1972" or how it was worded. I did see that did does not have a printing number line.

Note - I believe 1972-10 is the correct date but am wondering if I missed an October 1972 somewhere else in the publication. Marc Kupper (talk) 22:37, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

No, I just left the date as it was: I've no idea where the month came from. I've added my now-usual disclaimer about month of publication. It is just "First Printing 1972". BLongley 22:49, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

Ron Goulart's Hawkshaw

Locus #160 (June 3, 1974) gives the publication date for your verified edition of this title as January 1974. Everything in your edition matches the Locus listing, except for the date. I don't think Award actually prints the publication date in their books, only the copyright year. Since the Doubleday edition was published in 1972, I don't think there was an Award edition the same year. MHHutchins 02:53, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, pub updated. BLongley 08:45, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Swann's Green Phoenix

Bill, take a look at the note that I placed on your verified copy of this title. Funny that you have the American edition and I have the UK edition (although both are apparently printed in the US). I chose not to create a new pub record as they are the same pub. MHHutchins 00:57, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

Looks fine. There's many price-stickered for-foreign-sale versions of books around (e.g. this arrived yesterday and I agree those should be the same pub record. (It's why I now add ALL prices to my pubs so that people don't create Australian and Canadian versions separately just in case.) A bit of a pain at times, as there used to be up to eight on a typical British pub. :-/ Still, those are easier to identify the original edition on than typical Pocket books of recent years, for instance. BLongley 09:22, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

Coincidentally, today I discovered this "Canadian edition" of a Tor paperback here. DES verified the "US edition", so could he be the culprit? (Just kidding, David.) MHHutchins 02:14, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

I've never quite been sure of when Canadian editions truly exist: I know there are some with maple leaf emblems on that are obviously different, but I don't know if dual ISBNs indicates a separate version exists or if one pub covers both markets. I know I occasionally see two ISBNs in a pub, covering the hardcover and paperback editions (obviously different) but nowadays I'm used to an ISBN being more-or-less (English-Speaking-)Worldwide. I'll leave it to Kraang to explain. BLongley 15:54, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Star Winds

I've queued some changes additions to your verified STRWNDS801978 for your approval. Marc Kupper (talk) 04:34, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

All fine. BLongley 09:35, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

Jack Vance's The Languages of Pao

I added a record for Jack Gaughan's frontispiece in your verified edition of this title. MHHutchins 20:30, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

And the same for this edition of The Five Gold Bands. MHHutchins 20:34, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Ditto for this edition of The Dirdir. MHHutchins 20:47, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

(Unindent) I think I'll just wait till you've finished then check them all at once, OK? Or just assume you've done them right, those additions aren't that important to me. I know how Kraang felt here now! Perhaps DES can give us all a "I've done this to your verified pub" page or something, where we can state which additions we'd like to be asked about and which we don't... even EDITS we'd like to be asked about and which we don't. For instance, I rarely care about added frontispieces but am happy to check for people that are interested but don't have a copy themselves. I'm currently only interested in Josh Kirby credits I'd missed, anyone else's can be added so long as you're willing to take over verification responsibilities (I'm not possessive over those unless current verifier is unavailable or inaccurate). Interiorart: can be added or clarified, but I'm not going to check every page if someone goes that far. Hmmm.... I don't want us all to spend a lot of time checking things with each other when it's a simple "I don't care about that much detail, feel free to add/change it" answer. But we don't have rules for generally declaring "just add it, don't bother me" versus "It's MY pub, I VERIFIED IT, HOW DARE YOU MESS WITH IT!!!" stuff. BLongley 23:27, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

In the absence of such, please feel free for you to add frontispiece credits to my verified pubs without asking, I trust you to do it right. Or if anyone else I trust wants to put page numbers to something where I just credited "Interiorart" in general, that's fine too. Anything I spell wrong for actual fiction, please let me know. For me, the words are worth a thousand pictures. (I do like SOME graphic novels though!) But if I get the pictures wrong - sorry, it's not that much of a biggie for me. Take over. BLongley 23:27, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

I'm in total agreement with you concerning minor additions to verified pubs. I wish there were a way to say, "Hey, go ahead and add anything I may have overlooked. Just tell me if you're going to change something or think I've made an error." I'm just not sure if we need to follow a protocol that may or may not exist. In any event, I'm finished with the Vance paperbacks. I'm pretty sure that when I started verifying pubs that the addition of interior art credits never occurred to me. Things have become so much more detailed over the past year or so.

Yes, they have become more detailed: so long as I can say "that's too detailed for me, take over if you like" I'm OK with that. Though I'd like it more easily declared than on a pub-by-pub basis. BLongley 00:43, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

About graphic novels, I'm still not happy that they're verboten here. Could it be fear of the slippery slope into other comics and manga that established the parameters? Don't tell anyone, but I've snuck a few in myself. Which reminds me. I have to update the Watchmen compilation. No one can tell me that graphic novel shouldn't be in the ISFDB! MHHutchins 00:20, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

I've added a few myself, defended a few: I don't think a "Graphic Novel" variant of something we'd include anyway should be forbidden any more than we'd exclude an audio version or braille version. "Watchmen" should definitely be in, even before we get the Novelisation of the film (which I think is finally happening?). I shall resist from adding the comics, badges, posters, etc though - yes, I was a major fanboy at the time, but I think I can separate the books from the merchandise. Mostly. ;-) BLongley 00:43, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

On graphic novels, if the novel without the graphics would be IN here, i would not hesitate to enter it with graphics. It is only when "graphic novel" really means "high-end comic", when a significant part of the story line is carried by the graphics, and the "novel" simply wouldn't work without the graphics that I would consider it OUT. I'm not sure if that is where others draw the line or where our "rule" draws it, but that is my view of where it should be. -DES ^Talk 18:12, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Bill wrote, above "Perhaps DES can give us all a "I've done this to your verified pub" page or something, where we can state which additions we'd like to be asked about and which we don't... even EDITS we'd like to be asked about and which we don't.". I assume this was mostly a joke, but it would in fact be easy enough to create such a wiki-page, probably as a sub-page of the talk page, for anyone who wants one. Even a template to indicate what changes you want permission asked for, what you want notification of, and what you just don't care about, if people want. The only downside is you wouldn't get auto-notification the way you do for an edit to your talk page proper, so you'd have to watchlist it, or just manually check it. And it would be yet another page to look at. Given that, if anyone wants such, I'll be happy to help out, but it wouldn't be hard. -DES ^Talk 18:12, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Ah, the lack of auto-notification would be a pain. I guess a notice at the top of my talk-page would be enough - if people read it. BLongley 18:36, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Eight Skilled Gentlemen

Added cover art and a minor update to Eight Skilled Gentlemen. Right cover? Dana Carson 02:27, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, right cover. BLongley 02:38, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Reynolds' Depression or Bust/Dawnman Planet

You were right to be suspicious of the note about publication date in this pub. It's listed in the Books Received (July-September) of Locus #166 (October 23, 1974). The exact month isn't given, but it's safe to say that it was published in 1974. MHHutchins 23:05, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Spooky - while you were writing that, I was verifying this. I removed your comment about pagination being from Tuck and looking suspiciously small - Tuck is in fact correct. I'll compare with the 1974 edition tomorrow, but my bath is ready now. 23:31, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

It appears the same text, the older book was just in smaller print. BLongley 08:14, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

Andre Norton's "Wraiths of Time"

I just added the (presumably) first edition of this title from a listing in Delap's, and noticed that your verified paperback edition has the same date. Could the date on your edition be the copyright date, as it was Fawcett's practice not to place a publication date in their books (or at least those pubs that I have.) MHHutchins 16:12, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

I guess it was copyright date, or Amazon date, or OCLC date: sent off to the wilds of 0000-00-00 for now. BLongley 17:22, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

4th printing added from Melvyl. Since all other fields were the same, I left the cover art URL, although it's possible that the publisher sneakily changed it in between printings. Ahasuerus 14:06, 19 August 2008 (UTC)