User talk:Anniemod

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Hi, as the help for entering the date of publications explicitly says to use the publication date stated within a book [For books, to identify the publication date, try to find a statement (often on the verso of the title page) that says something like "Published in June 2001"], it seems that the date should be changed to 2016-05-00, for your verified publication. Christian Stonecreek 13:36, 12 January 2022 (EST)

No - that date is correct and has a valid secondary source. The book stays as it is. Thanks. If you would like to argue this, please open a discussion about not allowing secondary sources to date books. Annie 13:41, 12 January 2022 (EST)

Two variant questions for "The Very Best of Barry N. Malzberg"

Hi Annie. I'm reading my way through "The Very Best of Barry N. Malzberg". Aside from the issue of needing to update the existing ebook and also add new ebooks for the new ISBN numbers (discussed separately), I have discovered that two of the stories that are currently listed as first published in this book were actually previously published under different names. (There could be more stories like this in here)

1. "The Wooden Grenade" (http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1624243) is listed as first published in this book. The Acknowledgements/copyright info in the book notes that it was first published as "The Sense of the Fire" in Escapade, July 1967. "The Sense of the Fire" (http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?97954) is listed in ISFDB as first published in Escapade in July 1967, and then reprinted in two editions of Malzberg's "Out from Ganymede" (1974). I have checked with Willem H, the last primary verifier for "Out From Ganymede", and it is the same text as the one I am reading. There is no doubt this is the same story. Next is the question of which is the canonical title? This story has apparently been published 3 times only, first 2 as "The Sense of the Fire" and then reprinted in "The Very Best of..." as "The Wooden Grenade". I lean towards making "The Wooden Grenade" the canonical title, as I assume that Barry N. Malzberg participated in choosing the titles for "The Very Best of". I'd appreciate your opinion and guidance. ThanksDave888 12:42, 13 January 2022 (EST)

As a rule - we always use the FIRST used title unless another title is better known/prevalent. Someone changes a title in a single publication does not make it so usually. The old title is used twice (that we know of), the new one only once - I'd use the original title as the canonical here if I was doing the variant. Annie 13:00, 13 January 2022 (EST)

2. "The Shores of Suitability" (http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1624250) is listed as first published in this book. The Acknowledgements/copyright info here state that it was first published in Omni, June 1982. Omni, June 1982 features a story currently titled "Last Word (Omni, June 1982" (http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1225970). I checked Internet Archive, and it is the same story and it is correctly titled "Last Word" in the magazine. I lean towards making the title in "The Very Best of..." the canonical title, as I assume again that Barry N. Malzberg chose that title. Once again, I'd appreciate your opinion and guidance. 3. Needless to say, these will both need to be varianted. ThanksDave888 12:42, 13 January 2022 (EST)

Same answer. The idea of the rule exception allowing a later title to become the canonical is to make sure that a story that was published once under 1 name and then 10 times under another do not get stuck under the original name. These two should stay with their original titles IMO - the author and/or an editor may have renamed them later but the new name is in a single publication. IF that ever changes, we can always reverse the direction but my basic rule is to keep it simple - don't use the exception from the rules unless it is really overwhelming. Hope that makes sense. :) Annie 13:00, 13 January 2022 (EST)

That all makes sense to me. I'll take care of this. Thanks.Dave888 14:33, 13 January 2022 (EST)

A question on "The Prentice Hall Anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy"

Hi Annie.

I just acquired, for eventual reading, another one of the giant (doorstop) anthologies of 20th century SF and fantasy, "The Prentice Hall Anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy", originally appearing in 2000. (http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?36482) I have not checked in detail, but it sure appears the TOC for the two current ISFDB editions are the same, and perhaps one was cloned from the other (I can't tell).

As is now my habit, I reviewed the TOC and contents to our ISFDB entries and found a few possible discrepancies. These discrepancies include the following: 1. "The Gray Wolf", George McDonald, p 208, (http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?923573) does not show up in either TOC. It is in both the TOC and the body of the book in my tp version. 2. "Introduction....", P 1, does not show up in either TOC. It is in my copy in both TOC and the body of the book. 3. A. E. van Vogt's "The Weapons Shop" is listed as such in my copy, both TOC and body of the book and in the copyright info, which does match original publication in Astounding. It is listed as "The Weapon Shop" in the two current editions in ISFDB. I suspect this was a typo by someone on data entry, but could be wrong. 4. A number of the page numbers for stories are off by 1 page in my TOC and body of the book, vs the two ISFDB editions. I am not sure what is going on here. My first suspicion is that whoever did the original ISFDB TOC was perhaps using the page the story title appeared on, and not the page the author bio is on for the story that immediately proceeds the title, which is how the TOC in my paper version is put together. 5. Although minor, the "Index" and "Credits" (detailed copyright info) are not listed in either current ISFDB TOC, nor in the Notes. I assume these should be added to the Notes.

I do have two questions for you.

A. What would be the appropriate ISFDB standard practice for page number of the start of a story - location of actual title, or location of the author bio before the story? B. The two existing editions have primary verifiers, with Markwood for the 2000 edition and MLB for the 2003. They both appear to be still active. The same questions apply to both. I assume I should reach out to both of them - please confirm.

Best wishes.Dave888 19:42, 20 January 2022 (EST)

Yep, talk to both PVs on that one - you can post one the page of one of them and then link to it on the page of the other one so the discussion stays in one place (especially if you are asking about the same elements).

• "The Gray Wolf", George McDonald - check with the PVs. Won't be the first time someone missed a story in a big anthology.
• Introduction: Same as the above
• A. E. van Vogt's "The Weapons Shop" - ditto
• Pages - I hate this question :) It comes down to "what is the contents here"?. I'd argue that you have a combo of an essay and story - we just do not index the essays because they are too short. We allow only one exception to the general rule of "The number of the page on which the content begins" - an illustration preceding the contents. But that help page needs clarification for cases like this one and where the story has a title page ahead of its text and all kinds of things like that... :) Adding that to the list of things we need to discuss...
• Notes - yes. Not mandatory but I like adding them so it is clear we did not miss them

Let me know if I missed something or if something does not make sense. Annie 17:49, 21 January 2022 (EST)

Annie, that all makes sense. On the page numbers, given that it's currently an edge case, I will start by confirming with the PVs where their page numbers came from. Assuming it is what I suspect (the other, less likely by possible situation would be an actual change in page number for a different printing by 1 page for some stories, which is possible), I propose to make a note of this on the Notes page for those stories, and not change the actual page numbers in the TOC. Depending upon how you look at it, it is probably not wrong. Let me know if you have more thoughts on this. Best wishes and thanks.Dave888 11:47, 23 January 2022 (EST)

Notes are always a good thing. Talking with the other PVs too :) So sounds like a good plan. Annie 13:55, 23 January 2022 (EST)

Annie, edits going along well here after input and concurrence from MLB and Markwood (both do not have a copy available, so they told me to go forward). One more question. I have confirmed that the title for the A. E. van Vogt is really "The Weapons Shop", the variant title, and not the original "The Weapon Shop". I think I have confused myself on how to deal with this. I can see myself either a) editing the title listed in the TOC to the correct title, assuming that the DB will attach to the right title record, or delete the TOC entry and re-import the correct title. Let me know if I am missing something. Thanks.Dave888 18:05, 1 February 2022 (EST)

"Remove title" to remove the wrong title from the publication and then Import to import the correct one. DO NOT correct the title inside of the publication (even if it appears that you can - if we do not have another publication with the parent because noone added the original yet, it will look as if you can edit it but that will cause issues because it will change the title record of the parent to be the same as the variant and will lose us the parent's title. Just adding/editing a title will never merge it with its other references - if you just add a title, then you will need to merge later on. :) Annie 18:47, 1 February 2022 (EST)

Thanks. I was leaning that way, but wanted to be sure I had not confused myself into doing it the hard way. Will do, and I'll take note of this for the future.Dave888 19:42, 1 February 2022 (EST)

Annie, thanks for all your help. I think this is done for both versions of the anthology.Dave888 14:12, 2 February 2022 (EST)

Anytime :) Annie 17:13, 2 February 2022 (EST)

Hurray for Titan!

Ever seen anything like this before?

[1] (Screengrab, as I imagine you won't be able to properly see that Amazon UK page without a VPN)

Kobo GB does have it available to purchase and download now, as does Google Play Books, so I'm inclined to forget I saw that preorder date... ErsatzCulture 14:31, 21 January 2022 (EST)

Oh yes - that's one of Amazon's weirdnesses sometimes - rarely but happens now and then making me scratch my head. Usually means that the book is out but Amazon will get copies a bit later for one reason or another - or something like that. Second source to confirm one of those dates and all is good. :) Annie 14:55, 21 January 2022 (EST)

I'm now very glad I didn't make a statement on the discussion about pub dates asserting that I'd never seen any issues with vendors reporting ebook dates...

I've submitted edits to correct the tp and ebook pubs, but could you have a look at the audiobook on Amazon.com? There are no (UK) audio listings for this on Kobo or Google Play, nor on B&N (although I dunno if they do audio downloads?), and whilst Amazon UK has Dec 14th, which matches the US tp and ebook, I'd rather get confirmation from a second source, esp. for a messy case like this. Thanks ErsatzCulture 17:18, 21 January 2022 (EST)

If the date does not get rescheduled, they tend to be ok. When they start moving... I play "follow the clues and whack-a-mole". It settles down once the book is out - but in the meantime, it can be a bit... funny. :)

Well, it is on Audible UK :) And Apple have it... here. Not all books are available on Google Play - I usually check the big 4 for audiobooks in English: Audible (US and/or UK - different records), Google Play, Kobo and Apple. Some books are exclusive to one of them. Some are excluded from one or more of them. It's... annoying. And there is another platform gearing up which never shares with Amazon/Audible which I never need to worry about with Fixer because all from Fixer is Amazon's first so they never show up - but if someone wants to chase them...

Add to that that Blackstone's audiobooks can be missing from their site (like this one) - they MAY appear at one point but... it is one of those weird things. Unless they also have the physical disks. Then it gets easier. :)

I fixed this audiobook. Annie 17:48, 21 January 2022 (EST)

Cyrillic vs transliterated titles

Back at the Asimov and I've a question. As I run across some Russian titles in sources (e.g. OCLC), they only have transliterated titles, such as "Kratkaja istorija chimii: razvitie idej i predstavlenij v chimii". Based on other editions, I'm guessing this is "Краткая история химии: Развитие идей и представлений в химии" but it is a guess, may not always be available and is putting 'words' into the sources mouth (I do credit them carefully). Would it be acceptable to just put in the transliterated title as the Pub Title for these unverified publications? (Where both forms exist from one or more sources, I'll put them both in.). ../Doug H 14:15, 25 January 2022 (EST)

How about running them by me before adding them? If you put them latinized, they will ping on a report anyway so I will fix them when I get around to that report but I am around most days and I will be happy to transliterate back. This one is indeed "Краткая история химии: Развитие идей и представлений в химии". :) Annie 14:20, 25 January 2022 (EST)

Luces del norte

I was just going to post to Community Portal asking for anyone with Spanish skills to confirm that edit was indeed correct... ErsatzCulture 16:25, 26 January 2022 (EST)

Already caught it and doing a surgery on it :) Annie 16:26, 26 January 2022 (EST)

Thanks - I'm spending more time than I'd like trying to sort out a load of missing UK pubs of this trilogy, all of which have annoyingly inconsistent details across the vendor sites, and I didn't want to burn even more effort on versions in a language I don't know at all ;-) ErsatzCulture 16:34, 26 January 2022 (EST)

My Spanish is... non-existent but I am good at chasing data in it occasionally. All sorted - as much as possible for a 1997 publication anyway :) Annie 16:36, 26 January 2022 (EST)

Title Regularization

It seems that the Talk page is the sole repository of rules, rather than the page. Which doesn't really matter, since the only link is to the Talk page and it's buried in an archive. Less of a skeleton and more of a dust bunny (accreting material but hiding in the shadows). ../Doug H 15:36, 27 January 2022 (EST)

A few attempts to get people to contribute failed on deaf ears so... I am letting it lie calm for a bit before I try again. :) The basic rule is - ask a language speaker and "most languages are not English and use Sentence case and not Title case" and if you are not sure, post in Community. :) Annie 15:40, 27 January 2022 (EST)

Gwendy's Final Task

I see you've just worked on the US pub of this. A couple of comments/questions:

• The UK pubs are advertised in various places as the third in a trilogy, and that's also how it's listed on Goodreads. I asked the PV's of the (allegedly) earlier stories if they had any thoughts/objections re. putting them in a subseries of "Castle Rock". I've yet to hear back here or here, so I'd held off submitting the UK pubs for the time being. Do you have any thoughts?
• I'm bemused the Cemetery Dance pub is claiming to be "World's 1st Edition" when the UK pub has the same pub date - I dunno if that statement might need qualifying in our note? (FWIW, it looks like there's AU/Commonwealth export edition, but not until a week later.) ErsatzCulture 14:34, 28 January 2022 (EST)

Amazon.com claims it, it is my only source so... no clarification needed. And as both are on the same date, it is kinda correct so I left it there. :) I saw your note - I think we need to pull the 3 Gwendies in their own subseries under Castle Rock but I put it on my todo list for now - trying to make some inroads into the Fixer's queues after all the delays in the last months. Both of the PVs are not around much so I will give them time. Annie 14:42, 28 January 2022 (EST)

OK, thanks. I've just submitted the UK hc, will do the ebook after the weekend when I've resynced with the next database dump. ErsatzCulture 16:39, 28 January 2022 (EST)

Approved and have fun. I'll probably have all February known titles in the system by mid-next week. :) Annie 16:51, 28 January 2022 (EST)

Are these different titles?

Under A for Asimov - Fantlab entries 653, 622 and 138926 have the same titles, but different translators - I think. Which makes them different TITLE records, nyet? I think I can avoid the 'unknown' translator if I assume a match to the same publisher's earlier and later editions. ../Doug H 15:35, 31 January 2022 (EST)

Different title records because of the different translators, yes. Careful with the translator names - don't copy from the linked pages (as these are not in the nominative: they are З. Гельман, В. Абашкин and Ольга Стихова (or О. Стихова if you prefer but using just the initial is the Fantlab policy; the books more often than not have the full names) respectively). If you click on the title record, you get this which also tells you that they are the same book in English. Annie 15:46, 31 January 2022 (EST)

Spite

So after several days or weeks of some of my edits sitting there without anyone touching them, now you suddenly feel the need to reject 3 of them and ask me an unnecessary question about the 4th? Wouldn't have anything to do with our earlier discussion about SFE, would it (which turned out to be a discovery by me, that none of the mods here were apparently aware of, that covers on SFE are actually usable now without uploading)? I do hundreds of these edits a week, so I'll try to recall for you now the specifics of these 4: 1) The Skin of the Soul cover already has a HC cover on ISFDB which someone uploaded that is very bright and clear, while the TP cover was just taken from Amazon and has a note about some confusion with the cover, so after finding that OL has copies of both the TP and the PB from Pocket I replaced both of those covers; the Pocket cover was better than the old one here, and the TP cover is obviously taken from an actual copy someone added to Archive.org and thus that's how the cover actually looks; whether you like the old one better is irrelevant, so please un-reject and use the cover from the actual copy. 2) Why would I ask PV's about the Swann note when it isn't actually in the book? Someone obviously had info they felt was important about the shoddy typesetting and unrelated cover of this edition of Will-o-the-Wisp and added it to Wikipedia; I thought people here would like to know in case they read the book and wonder why the cover has nothing to do with the content. If you don't want people to know about it that's on you. 3) John Richards has many Corgi covers on ISFDB and the signature looks the same as the 1 "Richards" cover on ISFDB, so unless there was some other artist named Richards doing 1950's Corgi covers who signed their name exactly the same way it's obvious who it really is. Now that you made me look at this again, I've discovered that the 1960 Corgi edition, with a different cover, also has "Richards" on the lower left corner, even though "Bluesman" wrote a note here saying there's no visible signature, so John Richards actually did at least 2 Corgi covers for this title. 4) The Tomorrow Log essay is only in 1 later edition of Meisha Merlin on ISFDB but wasn't imported into the original; I think that's why I did that, but it's been so long I can't remember. I think I've answered everything, so now it's up to you what to do about all these various things. Also, MagicUnk has been holding The Bus for days now; you 2 had a discussion about it, with you saying it's not genre, which begs the question of why it's still here. --Username 19:28, 4 February 2022 (EST)

I found them on the board, I processed them. That's how it works. That's it. Me helping you today about your question about SFE has nothing to do with any of these (none of these were SFE covers). Stop looking for conspiracies everywhere - people really do not care about you as much as you think they do and noone is trying to get you or whatever you think may be happening around the site. The reason why these were not processed earlier is most likely because people wanted to let someone else look at them because they wanted a second set of eyes before rejecting.

1) The cover you were proposing to add is worse than the one we have already. No point replacing a better cover with a worse one. Both ARE the same cover - and unless you have the book, you cannot say which lightning makes it look closer to reality - so we keep the one which is clearer.

2) It is called common courtesy. And the note implies things about what is IN the book - so get someone with the book to verify that what Wikipedia says is correct before adding the note.

3) Even if it is this Richards, if the credit in the book was "Richards", that's what we record and then we variant. And we do need a proof that it is his - the signature explanation will be enough to establish that but that will mean a variant, not replacing the name in the book - we record AS CREDITED. If your implication is that the credit is only by signature, then we will use the canonical name but a better note needs to be added explaining the attribution.

4) Then find a proof and/or add a note explaining why the essay is added here. As it is, I will have to reject that one as well.

The Bus is moderated by another moderator and you can ask him about it. You can also just submit the deletion. Not everyone is here 24/7 or works the queue every day - we are all volunteers. Annie 19:38, 4 February 2022 (EST)

Oh yes, that makes perfect sense; you're editing almost every day but just happened to notice 4 of my edits, 1 of which was sitting there for 3 weeks, on the same day that I disagreed with you about SFE's policies; yeah, right. As far as thinking people here care about me, this is the internet; nobody can see me or knows anything about me, so why you think I think total strangers on a virtual website care is bizarre bordering on paranoia. As for my edits, often images on OL don't match the actual cover on the Archive.org copy, but in this case they're exactly the same, with the back cover also having the same shadowy tint appropriate to a horror collection, so that is how the actual book looks. The editor who uploaded the beautiful HC cover took care of that edition, and I took care of the TP. You thinking some random cover from Amazon is better than an actual copy's cover makes no sense, but whatever. The Swann note is correct because that cover has nothing to do with the novel, which is readable in the 2 Fantastic issues on Archive.org where it first appeared, but I'll let that one go since anyone reading Wikipedia can find the note. The Richards thing is hilarious, since I've probably seen thousands of records here where countless editors entered the artist's name based on a signature on the cover regardless of whether the artist is credited anywhere in the book. These old PB's very often didn't have credits for artists and so a signature is often the only proof there is of who did the art. You thinking a cover artist can't be entered because they're not explicitly mentioned in the book is ridiculous. Also, the fact that I just discovered Richards did a new cover for the later Corgi edition, notwithstanding previous editor's note who apparently didn't see the signature on the cover in exactly the same spot as the one on the old cover, is a good find, and I suggest you don't let it go to waste. The Tomorrow Log thing is so unimportant I really don't care if it's rejected. As for The Bus, MagicUnk approved some of my edits recently and so is obviously around, so I think they just forgot about it. I'll just let it sit there until they finally remember to delete it, assuming they know that's what they're supposed to do based on your assertion that it doesn't really belong here in the first place. Whatever personal problems you're having, I'm not your scapegoat. All the edits and important discoveries I've made here over the last year plus, and you only seem to pop up when you can find something of mine to reject. --Username 20:30, 4 February 2022 (EST)

You are an interesting person - you complain when your edits are not handled, then you complain when they are handled. Yes, I did just notice them because they were between entries I am working on and because I looked for records which had been missed. Normal practice. Things get missed, skipped over and so on - moderators can skip entries they do not want to handle for one reason or another and those need to get handled sooner or later.

You disagreed with me in the SFE discussion? I did not notice that there was a disagreement there - not sure where you saw disagreement but whatever rocks your boat, that's fine. Although even if there was a disagreement, it would not have meant anything about any other submission or conversation. As I said - stop looking for conspiracies and what's not.

• Just as a FYI: The policy in question is in the help page: "The URL entered in this field should always point directly to the image, not to the Web page that contains the image. If the external site hosting the image requires you to link to the Web page that contains the image (e.g. SFE3 -- see below), then append the "pipe" character ("|") and the Web page's URL at the end of the URL of the image.". If the software needs an update to remind people of it, it needs an update but editors are supposed to read and follow the help pages. Which is why Ahasuerus is now checking with SFE to see what we need to change - the policy, the software, the warning or a combination of them. We may need to fix all the covers you added not following the policy at some point - if SFE still require that format, all of the covers you added without it, even if there was no warning will need to be fixed by someone (or replaced by covers from elsewhere).

As for the rest - you have your explanations on what was wrong with these, you can follow the advice on what needs to be done or ignore it but they cannot be accepted in the form you submitted them. Annie 20:43, 4 February 2022 (EST)

PS: Editing every day and moderating the queue every day are two very different things. Dealing with the passed over and delayed submissions in the queue is a third thing altogether sometimes. Moderators are editors first - and we all work on our own projects as well. And even when working the queue, easy and clear and well-documented submissions are always handled faster. Annie 20:56, 4 February 2022 (EST)

As always, these arguments are very boring and I could have done dozens of new edits in the time it's taken to check into your rejections and then respond here, so I'll end with these comments: the Skin of the Soul cover you rejected is what the actual print cover looks like and should have been accepted, the Swann note from Wikipedia is correct on both the typesetting issue and the unrelated cover and should have been accepted, the Richards cover is by John Richards and should have been accepted and the other Richards cover I discovered just now should also be entered as such, the Tomorrow Log essay should have been imported into the original edition where it first appeared, and The Bus should have been deleted right after you told the mod who held it that it doesn't belong on ISFDB. The way things are now, anyone searching will find an overly bright facsimile of the original Skin cover, will be confused when the Swann book they're reading has nothing to do with the cover of the book and has a synopsis inside that doesn't belong there, people searching for John Richards SF covers will not find 2 of them, the Tomorrow Log essay will continue to have a slightly wrong date, and people who stumbled on The Bus' ISFDB record will wonder why it was ever entered here in the first place when it's not a genre book. As for SFE, my accidentally finding out that SFE covers are now usable is something that none of you moderators had a clue about, obviously, and I wonder how long it would have taken for someone else to find that out or if anyone would ever have known about it without my help. You're welcome, everyone. Now back to what I do best. --Username 23:35, 4 February 2022 (EST)

Requesting feedback

Please see here. Thanks! ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 17:21, 8 February 2022 (EST)

Posted. :) Annie 17:35, 8 February 2022 (EST)

Quick question

Annie, I need your advice regarding this message. I hesitate to create the canonical parent when I think the attribution is incorrect. Should I just keep monitoring and wait for a response? I know I can't change the attribution in a PV'd publiccation without the verifier or a moderator's agreement. John Scifibones 15:15, 9 February 2022 (EST)

Create the parent - we can deal with the variant attribution later and sort out the rest of the issues once that is in place. The PV will show up from somewhere - he tends to show up occasionally or we will change it the standard way. The big question is what is on the title page - the contents page shows Kamei as a translator. But none of them precludes getting the author page sorted out. Annie 16:02, 9 February 2022 (EST)

The Collected Works of Philip K. Dick - A question

Hi Annie.

I hope life is treating you well.

I was recently made aware of a new edition of "The Collected Works of Philip K. Dick" on Amazon for Kindle. https://www.amazon.com/Collected-Stories-Philip-K-Dick-ebook/dp/B09QZXVHBC?fbclid=IwAR10aT86YsrFSQ7EcgCy1MTE7nwbWBOF7FIkwuXdUjCn0yEDAYrRYr_XWBo

I and my friends suspect this is not a legal, licensed copy. There is no publisher listed on Amazon, no copyright page and no ISBN. Much of the contents of the original 1987 Underwood-Miller edition (http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?22461) are present, but there are a few stories and introductions that are not. I did buy a copy, to make the comparison and to read it eventually.

I would appreciate your thoughts on this subject.

Best wishes. Dave888 12:21, 10 February 2022 (EST)

Hi, I may add some of my thoughts as well: I'd think it is a legal publication, because anybody using Amazon as a letout most likely will have to take legal action against his person if there's no license. The fact that there are some items missing IMO also points into this direction, as the licenses for their publication may not have been assigned. Stonecreek 12:35, 10 February 2022 (EST)

Maybe. But it is irrelevant for us really. Annie 12:56, 10 February 2022 (EST)

It does not matter if it is legal/authorized or not - if it exists, we catalog it. And we do not add any notes about what we think about its legality. :) Not having an ISBN is not a problem - if the only venue to sell it is either Amazon or your own store, you don't really need ISBN. And ISBNs are paid for so why pay for it if you do not need it? :)

And that cover looks like a (bad) digitization of the Citadel Twilight editions (look at the top left corner of the cover) so you may want to check if the contents match them to see if it is the same edition really or someone took scissors to them - that may explain the differences (possibly)). Annie 12:56, 10 February 2022 (EST)

Annie and Stonecreek, my thanks to both of you. I appreciate your input, on a situation I have not encountered before. I have done a careful evaluation of the body of stories in the ebook against the 1987 Underwood-Miller TOC. Volumes 2 and 4 appear to be identical to the Underwood-Miller. Volumes 1, 3 and 5 have various differences, which I will reflect in a ebook 2022 version. I'll probably clone the existing volumes and then edit the ones that need it. I will not speculate on whether it is a licensed, legal publication or not. One more question - I don't see a publisher listed. Does that mean, for ISFDB, that Amazon is the publisher, or do we just omit any publisher? Thanks again.

Dave888 13:43, 10 February 2022 (EST)

Either leave the Publisher field empty OR add the author name as the publisher OR even use "Citadel Twilight" and note that the publisher is assigned based on the cover and is not mentioned anywhere else. I'd probably leave it empty if I was adding it (or use Citadel Twilight with notes). Amazon is not really the publisher - they would be the "printer" if these were printed :) Annie 13:54, 10 February 2022 (EST)

Thanks. I think I'll leave it empty and observe the cover states "Citadel Twilight" in the Notes.Dave888 14:09, 10 February 2022 (EST)

As of yesterday, this Kindle e-book had disappeared from the Amazon website. Apparently, it was up there for just over 3 weeks. I will put this on hold until I can confirm it is actually available again. Interestingly enough, it has not disappeared from my Kindle.Dave888 11:56, 12 February 2022 (EST)

If you have it, it existed. So it is eligible to be added. Annie 13:39, 12 February 2022 (EST)

Got it. Will add it. Thanks.Dave888 18:08, 12 February 2022 (EST).

Hi Annie. Two related questions.

First, "The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick" as I have on Kindle ebook is a single Kindle document/file. Each of 5 Volumes are labeled as "The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick Vol.X", with X from 1 to 5, where 1 has the mostly the contents of "Beyond Lies the Wub", etc. This suggests to me that I need to title the overall book as "The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volumes 1 - 5". I see that there is a Series this should be part of, "The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick". (http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?22461). Within this top level series, there is also a title record "The Collected stories of Philip K. Dick, Volumes I-V", a title record "created to handle the reviews and awards given to the five-volume collection as a singular work. The individual volumes were published separately and each have their own title record and publication records." Do you have any further insights into how to title the new volume combining all 5 volumes? Another possibility would be something like "The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick 2022".

You name it whatever the TITLE page says the title is - and if there is no title page, you use what the cover says. If all it says is "The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick"/"The Collected Works of Philip K. Dick", that's the name you use. You do not invent "Volume 1-5" or "2022" or "Imaginary subtitle noone has ever seen in print" unless the title page (or the cover at the lack of a title page) has it. Specifically crafted titles for awards (which do not have books under that name) are not related to actually having a book... If you have a book, you NEVER invent a title - you record what the book says. Everything else is commentary and can go into the notes. Annie 19:50, 17 February 2022 (EST)

/Got it. Will do. Sorry to create problems where there are none.Dave888 22:56, 20 February 2022 (EST)

No worries. It can get a bit weird sometimes. Annie 23:28, 20 February 2022 (EST)

Second, I think the most likely approach to creating the new book for all 5 volumes will be to import them from the individual 1987 Underwood-Miller Volumes, making corrective edits after the import for each of the 5. Each of these volumes within the book is somewhat like a chapter or Section of the overall book. There is no content to the chapter or Section designator, other than the title. I assume I can create each Section title before importing the contents, or am I missing something here?

Thanks.Dave888 19:20, 17 February 2022 (EST)

You do not need a contents page in the book you are holding - you are supposed to check all stories where they start, not what a contents page says - and add the stories. :)

Create a section title as what? ISFDB records does not have sections and you cannot just create an entity that does not exist just so the UI looks how you want it to look. The only thing you can do eventually is to import the Collection titles (the ones from the original "Citadel Twilight" editions which were used to create this one) - import the collection title (if it is the correct title, if it is not, add "The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick Vol.X" collection in the book and then variant that up to the proper one; then import the contents under it and so on, numbering properly so all stays ordered. Now - that will determine the type of your book - if you only import the stories, it will be a collection; if you import/add the collection objects, it will be an omnibus.

And I will ask you again - why are you still looking at the Underwood-Miller editions when this is OBVIOUSLY based on the "Citadel Twilight" one? Start from the "Citadel Twilight" ones, import from them - chances are that you will have almost nothing to edit after that (unlike the case when you use the incorrect source edition). With reprints, working from the edition that actually was reprinted makes your life a lot easier.Annie 19:50, 17 February 2022 (EST)

Got it. Two things here. 1) Yes, I will mention the 5 volumes in the Notes, treating them like Sections. 2) I checked the contents of my version vs. the 1990/1991 Citadel Twilight edition, the 2011/12 Subterranean version (first 3 books), the 2012 Gollanz/Orion version (book 5), and the 2016 Citadel/Kensington version (book 4). None of these editions match the complete 2022 version. Book 1 and 3 best matches the Subterranean, Book 2 and 4 best match the Underwood-Miller, and Book 5 best matches the Citadel-Twilight. I will import the contents for each, and then complete the necessary editing, as most of these "books" have content that will still need to be edited, deleted or added to match my version. Thanks.Dave888 22:56, 20 February 2022 (EST)

The one I checked was close to the CT version and they used their cover - but if the contents do not match, we do the best we can. :) although if they are not the same, then is it really a reprint of them all or just a new collection? Whatever you do, add notes. :) Annie 23:28, 20 February 2022 (EST)

I have a spreadsheet that I used to compare the contents of the various editions above. Even the existing editions are not identical overall, although they range in the 95 to 99% the same. For me, given the similarity to the other editions, I do think it is a new edition of the same collection, and not a new collection. I will use the Notes to document a lot of this, trying to hit a balance between precise and helpful and yet not nauseating in detail. Thanks for all your help in getting there on this. I'll reach out if I have problems.Dave888 11:10, 21 February 2022 (EST)

Hi. I think I'm down to one last thing on "The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick" 2022 e-book (http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?883425). My kindle copy uses a slightly edited version of the cover of the 1990 collection, "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" (Citadel Twilight, http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?359083). The only difference I see is that the 1990 "We Can Remember It For You" cover includes "Copyrighted Material" in white font at the top and bottom against a black background; this 2022 version has those phrases removed, but appears to be identical otherwise. It's clearly the same cover by Norris Burroughs, other than those two edits. As the file/edition is no longer on Amazon, that source for the cover is not available. I have produced a copy of that original covered edited to match the 2022 version. Is it acceptable to add this as the cover, or should I just skip this? My thanks for all the help.Dave888 20:06, 8 March 2022 (EST)

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck... The "Copyrighted Material" is probably an Amazon artifact - I doubt the actual cover has it anyway on the 1990 book. But for the 2022 one - if you have a cover which looks like the cover you see when you open the book, upload it - regardless of how you assembled it. Annie 20:09, 8 March 2022 (EST)

The Past Is Red

Hi Annie

I just started listening to the audiobook of Catherynne M. Valente's "The Past Is Red" where you have verified the hardcover edition. I had made a point of reading the earlier Garbagetown story "The Future Is Blue" before I started. I was surprised that the audiobook starts with the earlier story labeling it "Part 1, The Future is Blue". Later it has "Part 2, The Past is Red". If the hardcover is similarly structured, I think we may actually be a collection of two stories. If it isn't, I can split out the audiobook into a separate title as a collection. Could you take a look at your copy and let me know if it has both stories and if you agree? Thanks for checking. --Ron ~ Rtrace^Talk 07:48, 13 February 2022 (EST)

I don’t have the book anymore but it is the same structure. I am not sure if we should consider it a collection - the earlier story is supposed to be a part of the new one I think (which is why I left it as a single novella with the note on the title level already there explaining the relationship). If you think going to a collection is a better idea, go ahead but please let’s add proper notes explaining why. :) Annie 13:40, 13 February 2022 (EST)

The Four Thousand, The Eight Hundred

Hi Annie. Submitter wants to change note in a book you PV[2].Kraang 17:32, 13 February 2022 (EST)

I have no idea where this book is (in the middle of a library reorganization so I think I know which box it may be in but who knows) so check if Willem has his copy handy? I'm fine with the change though - the edition is the unsigned one anyway - no clue why I put Signature instead of Limitation in there... :) Annie 18:07, 13 February 2022 (EST)

Was unfamiliar with the term. Ok. Thanks!Kraang 20:10, 13 February 2022 (EST)

Seven Seas / Mo Xiang Tong Xiu pubs

I'll submit this tomorrow once I've processed my scraped data, but is this publisher/author one that Fixer isn't picking up? I think the 3 books from them that came out late last year were submitted by a human editor, and whilst there are a bunch of other pubs that have come via Fixer, it looks like Ahasuerus processed them, not you?

FWIW, I believe those first few books made one or more of the NPD/BookScan top 10 bestseller lists, and were also at the top of the top forthcoming list for some reason... ErsatzCulture 19:25, 13 February 2022 (EST)

Light novels are Ahasuerus's department - I claim an allergy to them (kinda - he just knows the publishers there a lot better than I do so he handles them) and I only process their later editions, audiobooks and so on if any get missed - so talk to him about this publisher :) Annie 19:28, 13 February 2022 (EST)

Люди как боги / Humans as Gods

Hello Annie, can you help me to clear the first part of Snegows series Люди как боги? The novel was first published in an anthology in 1966 under the title Галактическая разведка, in 1971 the novel was published as omnibus with the second part of the series Вторжение в Персей.

I don't know how to handle the German omnibuses, the first one have two novels and the second one have three novels. Many thanks Henna 12:41, 14 February 2022 (EST)

They will stay separate - we don’t variant omnibuses with different contents. I’ll untangle them. Annie 13:33, 14 February 2022 (EST)

Unlike novels, we do not create original language parents for omnibuses that we are not sure came out in that form in the original language (or collections and anthologies) - we just variant with the proper name of the author to get them to the correct page but leave the language and title as is - see how I did it here. If the 2-volume one ever shows up in Russian, we will connect it but in the meantime, it stays in German. :) I will add a 3-novels Russian omnibus (as that one exists) and see what else I can find out and if a 2 novels one does exist somewhere). Annie 13:52, 14 February 2022 (EST)

Hello Annie, I think the Russian edition in 1971 is the omnibus with the two novels look here. Thanks for your help Henna 14:31, 14 February 2022 (EST)

Still working on this one from 1966. :) But yes - that is next on my list :) Annie 14:34, 14 February 2022 (EST)

That one was added, I will add some more editions later. The second novel actually came out under a different name initially so need to add yet another big anthology for it. :) Annie 14:58, 14 February 2022 (EST)

Hello Annie, I want add the newest editions of the complete omnibus in German. Should I wait or go on? Many thanks for your help Henna 12:41, 16 February 2022 (EST)

Go ahead - the Russian titles are already there - I am just adding more Russian editions between other things :) Annie 12:43, 16 February 2022 (EST)

Neda Miranda Blazevic-Krietzman

Hi! I’ve just added this juvenile The Dragonheads: And the Mystery of the Twelve Magical Eggs by Neda Miranda Blazevic-Krietzman, her only fantasy, who is Croatian. As you’re the only one who might know, has she ever published any others in this series, and what was the original title of this novel? MLB

As far as I know, she writes in German, Croatian and English - so that may be the original really - it was published after she had moved to the States and after she had been a professor in English for more than a decade. I don't think that her early novels are genre and most of her other work is poetry but I will look again at them. Thanks for pinging me!

PS: And you had ISBN13 as BN number again - I removed it. Please keep an eye for that - you want a BN number only if it is not the ISBN. :) Annie 23:40, 15 February 2022 (EST)

Still so much to learn. **Sigh** I'll try to keep my eyes (ꙨᴥꙨ) open. MLB 03:18, 16 February 2022 (EST)

City of Saints and Madmen

Is there a way to determine if this one [3], was actually released?. The ASIN and Audible ASIN have different data and show a release date of January 2022. If the first was never released, I will just change the data. If it was, I can clone another pub record. John Scifibones 18:39, 17 February 2022 (EST)

Fixed. Pre-release loading can be sometimes dicey - and that one was on my list of delayed ones that need fixing. Blackstone had a bit of a mix-up of their omnibus edition (which they cancelled last time I checked) and their novel one (this one), changing dates a few times. Annie 18:47, 17 February 2022 (EST)

PS: The three disks editions are coming in April... eventually. This is the 3rd reschedule for them that I know of. :) Annie 18:50, 17 February 2022 (EST)

At the Caligula Hotel and Other Poems

Would you mind reviewing At the Caligula Hotel and Other Poems when you have some free time. There were a few twists regarding relationships to other works. Locus was the primary source. I also used the author's site.

• Look at Fragment of a Longer Poem, if you follow the link and read the title note, makes me think it should be a collection, not a novel
• Several titles are 'associated' with other titles, are my title notes adaquate? [4], [5], and [6]

I don't think there are any typos, he says hopefully. I really apppreciate it. John Scifibones 15:22, 18 February 2022 (EST)

A few notes:

• That's... complicated. The "publish in part and stitch together" had been a normal way to build a lot of novels. In some there is literally no connection material. In some there is enough to make it a real novel. We generally go by the consensus except in cases like Foundation where the original stories are obvious and we wanted to connect them. If you think it must change, talk to the PVs (a lot of there are active) and make your case although I think that keeping it as a novel makes more sense.
• Related how? I'd expand the note with an explanation for the relation (same world? same style? same something) and/or replace the word related with associated or something else that speaks of connection but not relationship - it allowed more vagueness that way I think.
• What is "Associational collection"? I read poetry (not only genre) and I am not sure I had met that term... which does not mean it does not exist but even Google does not help so... huh? If it was there before you started editing - is it coming from OCLC? From the work? :)

Hope that helps. It can stay as it is - don't get me wrong - it looks fine. But we have a lot of non-native speakers (yours truly including) and making things less ambiguous for them is always a good idea. Annie 15:40, 18 February 2022 (EST)

Associated collection, came from Locus, it's new to me as well. If associated is more vague than related, I'll opt for that and change the notes. As far as collection vs novel, I saw that a couple moderators have PV'd editions. If I come across more information, I'll post a thread on the Community Portal. Thanks again, John Scifibones 16:10, 18 February 2022 (EST)

Self-approval

There's many reasons you might want me to clean up my own messes. ../Doug H 15:50, 19 February 2022 (EST)

Ha. I can ask you to do that while approving your submissions. If I did not think you will be ok on your own, I would not have asked you if you want to self-approve OR supported you when you did. Plus everyone will still be here if you need a hand. :) Annie 15:57, 19 February 2022 (EST)

On the task assigned to me.

Star Date 2022/02/19: Lowly Ensign MLB was contacted by Commander Annie Yotova of the “Starship ISFDB” and assigned the mundane task of cleaning up numerous mistakes made by an anonymous crewmember to the data of the Starship. Ensign MLB is now reporting back that all the glitches have now been corrected with the hope that this will help the “Starship ISFDB” run smoother in its journey into the future…and BEYOND. MLB 04:42, 20 February 2022 (EST)

Forgive my snarkiness, just having a little fun. Job done. MLB 04:42, 20 February 2022 (EST)

Well, it made me smile :) Annie 14:26, 20 February 2022 (EST)

Osama

Osama is probably on your follow-up list. I updated the information. I see no reference to additional stories on the W. F. Howes website. However, I left your note and the incomplete tempate to be cleared at your leisure. John Scifibones 17:28, 20 February 2022 (EST)

Somewhere on a list. I’ll check it again in the morning. Thanks. Annie 23:29, 20 February 2022 (EST)

The Last Flight of Dr. Ain - A Question

Hi Annie. I recently became aware that Tiptree's "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain" (http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?52116) was heavily edited for it's 2nd appearance, in the 1974 "SF: Author's Choice 4" anthology edited by Harry Harrison.

This led me to wonder and research whether all the reprints after 1974 used this revised text or not.

These anthologies/collections all use the 1974 revision: "Warm Worlds and Otherwise" (2nd edition), "Galaxy: Thirty Year's of Innovative Science Fiction", "Yesterday's Tomorrows", "The Road to Science Fiction #4: From Here to Forever", "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever", "The Prentice Hall Anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy", "The Vintage Book of American Women Writers", and "Women of Futures Past". I checked the text to determine this, all from first editions except for "Warm Worlds and Otherwise".

"The Future is Female" used the original 1969 Galaxy version, both as noted in the acknowledgements and per the text.

I did not check any of the foreign language publications. I also did not check all of the subsequent editions of these books.

I was hoping that I might be able to state in the Notes that all versions after 1974 were the 1974 version (heavily revised). That is not true.

I am rather thinking I should just add a note to each version that I am sure of to indicate it contains the 1974 heavily revised version or the original 1969 version. Do you have a better idea? What are your thoughts on dealing with subsequent editions - I sure don't have multiple editions of these.

Thanks.Dave888 11:43, 22 February 2022 (EST)

Let me look into these a bit more in a bit. I really dislike "heavily revised" stories... :) Annie 18:02, 22 February 2022 (EST)

Thanks. It was more than just punctuation, but not a complete rewrite. Sentences and paragraphs have been moved around and changed in structure, while apparently retaining the overall story, characters and meaning. Without more information (I have not read the biography to see if there is anything there), I can only assume that Tiptree did not like the original version and wanted it to be better.Dave888 19:09, 22 February 2022 (EST)

Yeah. But when authors do that, translations tracking becomes a nightmare. In a perfect world, every text will have one version in the original language... in the real world, that is very rarely the case. :) Which is why I really dislike these cases.

All you can mention is which editions carry which text in the title notes. Add a note on the publication level if you want but I'd also add it in the title note ("The XXXX edition (1983), YYYY edition (1987) and ... uses the revised text" or words to that effect). That way if someone is interested, they don't need to check every pub record... ;) Annie 19:14, 22 February 2022 (EST)

Thanks. One more clarification - sorry if I'm slow here today. Do I need to verify that all editions of "Warm Worlds and Otherwise" have the same version, or is that a legitimate assumption to make?Dave888 19:51, 22 February 2022 (EST)

Nope, unless you have a source or you eyeball all of them, there is a chance that some may be different... so I would not add a note saying that all of them use that text. All you can do is to list the ones you know to be using the text. Annie 20:02, 22 February 2022 (EST)

Got it. Thanks.Dave888 21:22, 22 February 2022 (EST)

We never invent information - we need a source or at least an explanation which we can spell out. You can put something like "Most likely all later editions use the updated text (verified for XXX, YYY, ZZZ)". That ensures that it is clear that we do not have enough information to make the call but based on the usual practice, it probably is the case. Unless I have to make a call (decide if something is a novella or novel or genre/non-genre, I tend not to add a lot of notes based on "most likely". But YMMV :) Annie 21:25, 22 February 2022 (EST)

Thanks. My next step is to contact primary verifiers for the works/editions I have not been able to personally view, and see if I can pin down some of those. I'll let you know, etc.Dave888 13:36, 23 February 2022 (EST)

Have fun :) Annie 13:37, 23 February 2022 (EST)

Cleanup Report Question

I thought I'd tackle 'Awards linked to Uncommon Title Types' from the cleanup report. Most of the list are awards attached to to a Chapbook as opposed to the content title. Even art based awards should attach to the cover art title or interior art title. Are there any exceptions? Thanks John Scifibones 18:41, 22 February 2022 (EST)

Extremely rarely if an award category is for a specific edition and not for the text/art. I don't think we have any of those on the books in English but there may be a special case somewhere. But the majority of these need moving - that's why the report was added (it is a relatively late report). But if someone looks weird, leave it on the list or feel free to ping me (or post in CP if you prefer) for a second opinion. Annie 18:55, 22 February 2022 (EST)

Advice Requested

Annie, Would you mind weighing in on this - Status Update? Here are my posts to the individuals involved Elizabeth_Hardy and Morganmike. John Scifibones 13:14, 25 February 2022 (EST)

I was just looking at that one. :) Let me look through all the threads and see where we are. Annie 13:16, 25 February 2022 (EST)

Opinion, please

Hi Annie! I'm considering asking for self-approver status. Is it too soon? Most of what I'm adding to the queue is simple updates but intermittently there are multi-step processes that are stretching across several days with my having to wait for step-by-step approval. I know I'm pretty new compared to some of the people who have just been given that status but I'm willing to do my part to keep the queue shorter. :) Thanks! Phil 16:41, 25 February 2022 (EST)

I think it is a bit too early -- not because of the time component as a whole but because you had been venturing into the more involved parts of the DB (variants for example) for only a few months (and not at all in others) and most of your updates are from the same type (which is fine - but it does not help figure out if you are anywhere near understanding the DB). And I really want to see much better moderator notes from you: "Added notes" is useless unless the field was empty before that - you can see that clearly based on which field is updated. If you are self-approving, that is the same as not having a moderator note -- someone finding the update later or in their "changed verified" won't know what you had changed unless they go tracking back and if we even have the oldest updates - at least under moderation you have a second set of eyes to make sure you did not lose something. You had been doing better in that regard lately but you asked for an opinion. :)

Of course, if you decide to apply, there may be enough people to support to carry it. So you decide - I just think you need a bit more time. Annie 16:53, 25 February 2022 (EST)

Thanks for the honest response. I'll wait. As for the added moderator notes detail, do you want things like "added printing detail", "added cover artist attribution", etc? It's easier to add things if I know what you are looking for. :) Phil 17:11, 25 February 2022 (EST)

Well, see my moderator note here for an example. No need to be as verbose but... 'added notes (printer key, art credit, updated blah blah)' is a lot more useful than just 'added notes'. Look at the screen after the approval. For that specific book, the original note is visible here (it works backwards - as long as we have an edit touching the same field - which we don't for all old books). If I had only added "added notes" and you were one of the other PVs, would you know which notes were added and you may want to recheck (or not) or ask questions about (I've also left a note for the active PV but that is kinda away from the book so... repetition never hurts). And if you find that in a few years, would you know who to ask for details? The histories are a side effect of the approval system - that is why we do not have "previous state" so writing moderator notes is a good way to workaround that. :) Annie 17:38, 25 February 2022 (EST)

Thank you. I'll make my notes more extensive from now on. This helped a lot! Phil 17:47, 25 February 2022 (EST)

Jodi Taylor Long Shadows ASIN

Quick favour/sanity check: is B08NJK2TMZ still a valid ASIN for this on Amazon.com? Amazon UK currently has B08MTFV3VQ - and 404s on the other ASIN - and I'd never scraped Amazon's page for it around the time it came out, so I'm not sure whether it's a case of different ASINs in different territories, or something that's changed at some point. I imagine it's the former, but I'm not sure what Hachette UK imprints do for stuff like this. (GR lists both ASINs, FWIW.

Either way, I'll edit the pub to have both ASINs, I'd just like to have an accurate note to explain them. Thanks ErsatzCulture 11:54, 28 February 2022 (EST)

Yes. B08NJK2TMZ is still valid on Amazon.com with $5.99 price. I remember that one - because it was a case where the ASIN worked on both sides for that publisher (and it is one of my authors)... Annie 15:14, 28 February 2022 (EST)

Thanks, have added (and approved ;-) an edit to add the second ASIN with an explanatory note. ErsatzCulture 17:08, 28 February 2022 (EST)

Nophek Gloss excerpts

There are 4 of these in the database; looks like 2 are from transient copies you had, and 2 added by Chris J, based on Locus data (I think). I've just added a UK pub that also had this excerpt, and the text matches the start/end details you entered in the note for one of those records, so I imported it rather than create another title record. Is there any reason not to merge the other 3 records with that one? ErsatzCulture 19:50, 28 February 2022 (EST)

We really do not know if they are the same text and we do NOT merge if we are not sure (I started recording the start/end exactly because of that). I am planning to get the one I did not record that back from the library to clear that in there. Annie 19:52, 28 February 2022 (EST)

Uhm... did you import the correct one? The one I recorded was this one, not the one you imported. They are most likely the same - I plan to verify - but... Annie 19:54, 28 February 2022 (EST)

Argh, no, that was the one I intended, but looks like I copypasted the wrong ID. Too late at night... ErsatzCulture 20:04, 28 February 2022 (EST)

Beneath Nightmare Castle

Hi Annie! I think I have looked at every link I can find on this book. Here is what I have found. The 1st edition (and I have only found one) has at least 7 printings, all have the same ISBN. I have found 1st and 2nd prints with red covers and a 7th print with black. The 1st and 2nd prints went for £1.95 and the 3rd-4th for £2.25. The 7th has £3.99. The Red covers have the #25 on front. The Black 7th printing does not. I have pics of the front & back covers for these 3 editions. The back covers show bar codes with both the 10 & 13 digit ISBN code. All three are the same. However there ia also a 5 digit code next to the main one. The 1st & 2nd have 9000 where the 7th has 90701. All were printed in 1987. All have 256 pages. I find references where these have 400 sections. I think that was what was put as the page number in the data base. The 1st edition was printed Feb 26, 1987. I also found a version on ebay with a Black cover AND a #25 on the front. The listing has no print date and again the bar code is the same, but it is like the Red covers with the 5 digit code of 9000. The original pricing has been covered over with a Black sticker with $3.99. The 1st and 2nd prints show pricing for UK, Aust, NZ and Canada. The 7th only has UK and Canada. Its not possible to tell with the one with the sticker. So the version in the data base shows a 1st or 2nd print Red cover at £1.95. (both covers look alike) The pages should be 256 not 400 (sections). !st printing was again 1987-02-26. Cover artist and interior artist are correct. Besides my 4 ebay links I also have https://fightingfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Beneath_Nightmare_Castle_(book) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Fighting_Fantasy_gamebooks aardvark7 18:19, 1 March 2022 (EST)

Well... if you know that the 7th printing had a different cover - add the 7th printing and add the cover. :) Technically we want all 7 printings - for printed books, we literally want every printing - even if they have the same covers and everything. If the date is unknown, 0000-00-00 to the rescue until we find it. Check if OCLC does not have at least the year for some later printings? Great job untangling that double cover fun. These 9000/90701 sound like a possible club editions but may also be SBNs or who knows? So if ours has the date of the first printing, it is supposed to be for the first printing and we can work from there - adding the others we know about (if you know a date or a price, you can add it as you know it exists. So if you want, compile all you have a submit clones to add the missing printings with the data you have about them?

However... looking at the book - is that a novel/fiction actually? Or is it a game book allowing you to play a game? Annie 18:32, 1 March 2022 (EST)

The book itself is a game as a single-player roll playing gamebook. It is #25 of the Fighting Fantasy titles published by Puffin. Looks like there were around 59 of them. According to fightingfantasy.fandom.com, it was the first book to use the Dragon Cover format that was then used on all of the rest. Wikipedia says "Fighting Fantasy is a series of single-player fantasy roleplay gamebooks created by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. The first volume in the series was published by Puffin in 1982, with the rights to the franchise eventually being purchased by Wizard Books in 2002. The series distinguished itself by featuring a fantasy role-playing element, with the caption on each cover claiming each title was "a Fighting Fantasy gamebook in which YOU are the hero!" The popularity of the series led to the creation of merchandise such as action figures, board games, role-playing game systems, magazines, novels and video games." Going to bed now. aardvark7 22:02, 1 March 2022 (EST)

If it is eligible to be here, then - see above - we want all the printings. :) Annie 00:00, 2 March 2022 (EST)

Are Game books eligible? aardvark7 11:58, 2 March 2022 (EST)

Game books (as in campaigns for games and so on fall under the "Games, game guides and game paraphernalia -- but works of fiction based on games are included" exclusion but these sound like "choose your own" adventures which are technically fiction (and we have a lot of them). Which is what I was trying to figure yesterday so... I think we are fine. So if you want to work on these, have fun :) Annie 13:41, 2 March 2022 (EST)

I have made some changes. On the main book level I changed the date to reflect when it 1st came out and added a synopsis. On the book with the cover attached I have changed the date, page count and have added various info such as number of sections it has. A question, the 1st two printings look alike, same isbn (they all have the same isbn), have the same bronze (red) cover and same cover price. Shouldthey be seperate entries with the only difference being one say 1st printing and the other 2nd printing? aardvark7 14:39, 2 March 2022 (EST)

Yep. For printed books, we record each printing separately even if all they differ in is the "printing" statement or number line and the date (and even if the date is the same - we have cases where the 1st and the 2nd are in the same month with no ability to find a exact date) :) Annie 14:49, 2 March 2022 (EST)

Disambiguating Excerpts

In order to avoid duplicates, I disambiguated The All-Consuming World (excerpt) (Lightspeed, August 2021) and The All-Consuming World (excerpt) (Nightmare Magazine, September 2021). You need both ebooks to determine if they are the same (The only text unavailable on Fantasy, Nightmare, and Lightspeed websites are excerpts). Now I am having second thoughts, is disambiguating with notes better? This is the third time this has come up, thought I better get a second opinion! John Scifibones 17:30, 2 March 2022 (EST)

We use notes for the fiction, not disambiguations in the titles unless there is a good reason to to it differently. :) So add notes if you want to, explaining why these should not be merged yet "Please do not merge with other excerpts unless it is verified that the excerpts are the same text"). Annie 17:33, 2 March 2022 (EST)

Disambiguating Inteviews

There are quite a number of 'Author Spotlight' interviews with duplicate titles. I think the best solution is to put the related story title in a note. Here is an example. While these are not fiction titles, notes still appear the best solution. What do you think? John Scifibones 14:43, 3 March 2022 (EST)

This is the most commonly used method for these. Sorry my question is in two posts. John Scifibones 14:54, 3 March 2022 (EST)

Cross-editing. We use the magazine/book title to differentiate essays (and interviews are really a special case of essays). Why reinvent the wheel? If you look around, we had done it in a quite a few places where it was needed (see these(Lightspeed only -- the rest of the same family will give you even more examples) for example).

That way, we are consistent even if someone does not know the story title (plus the interviews are about more than just that story - and they can give another interview about the same story elsewhere) and new editors can follow our rules. :) Annie 14:56, 3 March 2022 (EST)

That makes sense, Thank you John Scifibones 14:59, 3 March 2022 (EST)

Second opinion requested: New Worlds (2022), magazine or anthology?

This looks to be becoming available now or imminently: https://twitter.com/margolanagan/status/1498894599359967232

It has a listing on Amazon UK, albeit not currently available: NB: the "Aug 2021" date is a complete lie, it wasn't even showing on Amazon or anywhere other than the publisher's site a few days ago.

The publisher's original (?) announcement refers to it as "Issue #1", but I don't see that being referenced anywhere else, and I'm not seeing any signs of later issues being promised.

As such, this feels to me like an anthology rather than a magazine, but as I don't generally dabble in the latter, I'm looking for a second opinion before doing something that might require a bunch of fixing further on down the line.

(This one was only on my radar because the Ken MacLeod story was referenced in his latest novel as being in the same universe/series, and its appearance in this "mag" appears to be a reprint, with the original pub being some student's PhD thesis?!? Which in itself will be a bunch of fun to unpick, I imagine...) Thanks ErsatzCulture 17:30, 3 March 2022 (EST)

Publisher site: "Now PS Publishing, with the enthusiastic endorsement and participation of Moorcock himself, presents the first in a revived New Worlds anthology series." (emphasis mine). Issue 1 is not really excluding it being an anthology. While we don't always go by what the publishers say when it is an obvious impossibility, this one is a well established. That's one of the books that is probably making its way to me at the moment :)

I'd add it as an anthology; it is easy enough to change it if we ever decide otherwise.

It may not be a lie with the August date though - if they had printer issues, they may have not updated Amazon. But it was out and available for shipping last year - I know I got the mail at some point. I can look through the mails to see when that was and I am pretty sure the book will be dated as 2021 when it shows up here - so careful with the "it was only on the publisher site" - the last couple of years were weird that way. Annie 17:42, 3 March 2022 (EST)

Thanks.

Just to add to my cynical comments about when it was/is/will be published:

* When I did a search for the ISBN and/or title and/or authors on either Amazon or Google a few days ago, nothing showed up other than the publisher's site.

* This tweet indicates PS Pub. didn't receive copies from the printer until early/mid Feb. ErsatzCulture 18:03, 3 March 2022 (EST)

And we can document that. But if the book has a date inside of it (PS Publishing are usually very good with dating with month and year) and it is August 2021, we will need to date based on that. :) Annie 18:05, 3 March 2022 (EST)

First version is here - I'll do the rest of the contents tomorrow. I've documented the Macleod story as best I've been able to uncover so far, but whether that counts as a 2016 publication, I dunno - maybe the copyright details of this anthology will shed some more light?

Wasn't sure if/how this might related to the existing New Worlds series, so I've left that to someone more familiar with the arcane history of that mag... ErsatzCulture 18:53, 3 March 2022 (EST)

It is a revival of a type. So we can put an overarching series on top of both or we can just document in the notes. Annie 18:56, 3 March 2022 (EST)

Adam Blade novel->novella conversions

So now that I have self-approval, I feel I've lost the excuse that cleaning these up is too painful :-( Before I embark on this, is there anything I should be aware of beyond what is in Help:How_to_convert_a_novel_to_a_chapbook ? Specifically, I'm thinking of anything that might be more complicated due to having both the Adam Blade and real author/unknown titles?

(I'm probably just going to do the ones that have a single pub to start with, any that might have more than that can wait until later.)

Thanks ErsatzCulture 17:09, 6 March 2022 (EST)

Just don’t forget to convert both the parent and the variant, make a variant for the chapbook where the name of the author matches the name on the story and that all 4 of them need juvenile flags set. :) Annie 18:22, 6 March 2022 (EST)

Thanks. First one hopefully done - I'll check the nightly reports tomorrow to see if I've missed anything. Will try to do one of these a day on average to try to get them cleared... ErsatzCulture 14:16, 7 March 2022 (EST)

I removed your note from here. Amazon's pages number is based on pages with the illustrations (so they usually would match or be close to the paper ones); Kobo's pages mark the text only usually (so theirs tend to be lower, especially on children's books). That's where the page differences come from for most Juvenile records. Adding links to a seller all over the place because of their practices is not really needed. It is obviously not a novel; if you want to use the Kobo number for specifying the length (and selecting the correct length), feel free to do that but that comparison of apples to carrots is confusing for someone who does not know the sites and unnecessary in these notes. Annie 14:53, 7 March 2022 (EST)

Thanks - I'd noticed the weirdly low Kobo page counts before, but hadn't realized that it was due to skipping the illustrations.

I added the note because I was reluctant to commit to a particular SHORTFICTION length. Based on Kobo's word count, it's a novelette, but I'm pretty sure the other Adam Blade books had similar counts, and if I set this one, then I'd feel obliged to convert all the existing novellas to novelettes, at least until I've done the novel->chapbook. ErsatzCulture 19:05, 7 March 2022 (EST)

Yeah, I'd just leave it as Short Fiction usually - unless I am sure in the count :) Some of the later books are longer - well into the 20K words. After adding a few hundred juvenile chapbooks in the last years, that is the only explanation I ever figured out and it tracks - the more illustrated a book is, the bigger the discrepancy. And usually the length of its audible/audio versions will be consistent with the Kobo numbers (when there is an audio version - the 10K words ~~ 1 hour parity (with some deviations upwards for specific books) is consistent). So chances are that they are correct here - but just converting them to short fiction is enough :) Annie 19:10, 7 March 2022 (EST)

Die fliegende Kreissäge

Hello Annie, is this Муравьиныӥ царь correct Bulgarian? In the sources of Die gestohlenen Techmine this is the parent title of Die fliegende Kreissäge. I know the correct parent is Дърворезачка. Maybe Муравьиный царь first published in Bulgarian 1970 is the name of the original collection. Please take a look. Many thanks Henna 14:13, 9 March 2022 (EST)

Nope - that's a Russian title, not a Bulgarian one and it is the correct one for "Die gestohlenen Techmine" original, not for "Die fliegende Kreissäge" one. Maybe they mixed up the Lomm story with the Raditschkow one? I will chase it down. Annie 14:24, 9 March 2022 (EST)

The German translation was taken from Die fliegende Kreissäge und andere merkwürdige Geschichten. The content is:

• Die fliegende Kreissäge (Drworesatschka)
• Der Ziegenbock (Kosel)
• Der Ziegenbart (Kosjata brada)
• Angst (Strach)

Maybe it helps. Thanks Henna 14:46, 9 March 2022 (EST)

Yes but what does this have to do with the Муравьиныӥ царь/Die gestohlenen Techmine story?

I am a bit confused at where the problem is here so let's recap where we are and see what remains to be done.

"Муравьиныӥ царь" is the original title of "Die gestohlenen Techmine" and was published in 1965. We have it so in the DB and it is correct.

"Дърворезачка" is the original title of "Die fliegende Kreissäge". We have it so in the DB and it is correct.

If a book claims that "Муравьиныӥ царь" is the original title of "Die fliegende Kreissäge" or that "Муравьиныӥ царь" was originally published in 1970, the book is wrong and someone mixed up something somewhere while typing it. Now... it is possible that Дърворезачка is from 1970 and someone copied/pasted something wrong - I am still looking for its first publication - I know of a later one in 1984 but it also was published earlier).

Let me know if that helps or if we still have something else to sort out? Annie 15:00, 9 March 2022 (EST)

Hello Annie, sorry for the confusion. Everything is at the right place. This was only a hint for the first German translation in a collection. The collection is maybe a translation of the original collection Dărvorezačka (Дърворезачка). My posting was a hint and not a question. Sorry for the hassle Henna 15:26, 9 March 2022 (EST)

Ah, I see. Nope - not under the title "Муравьиныӥ царь" - as I said, wrong language :) But there may be an anthology somewhere in Russian or in Bulgarian - so I will see what I can find. No hassle at all - I was just confused about the issue. :) Annie 15:38, 9 March 2022 (EST)

Skyward Flight - collection or omnibus?

Just looking at adding the UK pubs for this - one of the trilogy is recorded as a novel (and I think at least one of the others could/should be), so wouldn't that "upgrade" this from collection to omnibus a la Binti? FWIW, Kobo has the UK ebook as 182k words and 672 pages, and the UK print version is reported as 640 pages, same as the US pub, which also implies novel length for (some of) the individual volumes?

I'll definitely defer to your decision on this, but I didn't want to start adding the UK pubs as collections only to (possibly?) create extra work later on if the individual pubs were switched to omnibus. ErsatzCulture 16:20, 9 March 2022 (EST)

I knew you will get to this one sooner or later. :) I am not sure. I added is as a collection because I don't like omnibuses with just one container title but I have it on my list to check the so-called novellas. Sunreach seems to be 49k words/5+ hours on audio which makes it a short novel. Evershore is even worse - 63k words according to Kobo and see my note on the audio length in the title notes - that was always suspiciously long. So maybe we should start there - get the 3 original stories cleared on length and see where that leaves us. Want to try your hand at novella -> novel conversion for a change? Once these are novels, it becomes an obvious omnibus. :) Annie 16:47, 9 March 2022 (EST)

"For a change"? ;-) My very vague recollection is that the third one looked like it also needed changing, but there wasn't as much evidence available at the time, so I was happy to put it out of my mind, especially with the pain on converting the second one. Will have another attempt with the final volume later... ErsatzCulture 12:34, 10 March 2022 (EST)

You had been doing a lot of novel -> novella so for a change, here is an opportunity for the reverse. ;) If I thought you had no idea how, I'd have posted a step by step. Authors and publishers use novella and short novel interchangeably often - regardless of length. We don't. So these crop up occasionally. ;) Annie 12:41, 10 March 2022 (EST)

I checked with one of the authors, and they said the Skyward Flight "novellas" are (in order) about 50k, 60k, and 60k. So, they are all actually short novels. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 14:41, 10 March 2022 (EST)

Yep - between Kobo's e-book lengths and the downloadable Audio formats lengths, they were too long to be even suspect novellas (aka "the too close to call" cases) -- even if Kobo/Audible can be occasionally (and very rarely) hilariously wrong far before publication, the post publication and close to publication values are usually close to reality. Thanks for confirming from another side as well! Annie 14:58, 10 March 2022 (EST)

I've cleaned this one up since it requires some weird juggling of container types and whatnot. It should be all fixed now. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 15:43, 10 March 2022 (EST)

Yeah... I left it because I kinda wanted our new self-approver to try his hand in untangling the whole mess and see the possible issues in that scenario - practice and all that :) But there will be another occasion. Annie 15:47, 10 March 2022 (EST)

Sorry. I can write out the steps I took if that will help. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 15:55, 10 March 2022 (EST)

Naah, don't worry - I am pretty sure he knows what he needs to do - it was really the "put your hands on the thing" and think through the steps more than the steps themselves - as you did mention, it requires some juggling in that direction which is different from the opposite one (which we also see a lot more often). We will find another cluster somewhere sooner or later - it is not like we don't have a lot of them :) Thanks for fixing this one! Annie 16:01, 10 March 2022 (EST)

Thanks also - was preoccupied with catching up with a bunch of recent/imminent UK pubs and - shock horror - actually reading something ;-) ErsatzCulture 18:02, 10 March 2022 (EST)

How long to wait

I'm pretty patient but I've posted multiple requests about making changes on Marc Kupper's talk page but have had no response. I even tried sending him an ISFDB email which also had no response. The oldest request [7] was posted on January 8, the second oldest [8] on January 21, and the third oldest [9] on February 1. I'd really like to make these changes so I can re-shelve the 5 books involved. After so long with no response, would it be wrong to submit theses changes without his concurrence? TIA! Phil 17:55, 11 March 2022 (EST)

The official FAQ: "If you want to change or remove information, please ask the verifier first. If the verifier doesn't respond in a week or so, post a note on the Moderator noticeboard and someone will help you."

Just post on the Moderator board for posterity and submit them with a reference in the moderator note of each submission to both the Moderator board note and the notification on Marc's page and the fact that you did not get a response from the PV. :) Annie 18:10, 11 March 2022 (EST)

The Observer Effect - physical pub with ASIN?

Looking through the newest Locus New Books list, and The Observer Effect was highlighted as not in the database. Turns out that we only have large print and audio pubs, so I'll see about grabbing & submitting data for the regular hc and ebook, but I was a bit surprised that hc has a (non ISBN-10) ASIN. It seems to have come from the Fixer submission, but is that legit and/or something I should be on the watch for when submitting other pubs? ErsatzCulture 13:10, 16 March 2022 (EDT)

ALL paper books with ISBNs starting with 979 have ASINs starting with B because they cannot form ISBN10 which is the base for all searches usually - which means we need to record them - for the same reasons as with ebooks. In addition some of the 978 ones MAY have a B-ASIN (once in a blue ASIN) because Amazon messes up. As you are usually submitting the big UK publishers and they had not ran out of their 978 ISBNs, you probably won't see these much (yet) but if you venture in other directions, you will see a lot of them (all US 978 ranges are now exhausted - assigned/sold to publishers essentially - so any new requests get a 979). Annie 13:25, 16 March 2022 (EDT)

Fixer says that humans wouldn't have this problem if they used hexadecimal numbers -- the only numbers worth bothering with! Ahasuerus 13:32, 16 March 2022 (EDT)

Ah, thanks - I vaguely recall 979s+ASIN being talked about before, but I hadn't spotted this was one. ErsatzCulture 13:43, 16 March 2022 (EDT)

Welcome to the fascinating world of 2022 publishing... Annie 13:52, 16 March 2022 (EDT)

BTW: don't read too much into this "Large Print" from Blackstone. They mark some books that way because it is a little larger font than what they usually use. And sometimes they are real Large Print editions. That may be the only paper edition out there. Publishers can be... weird. Annie 16:39, 16 March 2022 (EDT)

9781665048330 (B&N) is the hc ISBN on the Locus list, and seems to be the one showing on UK retailer sites (along with that 979 one). FWIW, it was also in the Fixer download as of 2022-01-22 (which is the latest copy I've got downloaded), I dunno if there's a reason it hadn't previously come through? ErsatzCulture 17:29, 16 March 2022 (EDT)

If it was in January, it may be on the back burner due to lack of data at the time or because something looked iffy. Or the API did not return data for it on reconciliation. It may also had had weird author/date combo which precluded it from being sorted in Q1. Or something else happened. You do realize that we get roughly 50K new ISBNs/ASINs in a slow month and these are not slow months, right? :) And because of that there are priorities and so on. Look at the export and see what priority is attached to it - that will tell you where it is sitting. Annie 17:42, 16 March 2022 (EDT)

9781665048330 was in Queue 2 as of this morning. I have moved it to Queue 1 and will review other "Queue 2/3" ISBNs by "Blackstone Publishing" to make sure that nothing else got misfiled. Ahasuerus 09:13, 17 March 2022 (EDT)

P.S. Fixer is reporting 2220 ISBNs and 2087 ASINs in Queues 2 and 3. The ISBNs are an eclectic mix of older audio books by major authors, indies, European translations, non-genre classics, etc. The ASINs are mostly obscure indies. I can ask Fixer to move the ISBNs to Queue 1 if desired. Ahasuerus 09:23, 17 March 2022 (EDT)

Being in Q2 explains why I never saw it :) Blackstone had been a mixed bag when theirs shows up on the board - I don't want all 2.2K of these at the same time (capacity and all that). They are not a strictly genre publisher (as Aethon is for example) and a lot of their horror is not ours (and they tag weirdly - or someone in Amazon tags theirs weirdly - so we get non-genre mix-ins). But I suspect we can sort them in Q1 more aggressively going forward and we can work through theirs at some point - they had been picking up paper and ebook editions of a lot more books lately. Annie 14:38, 17 March 2022 (EDT)

Just to close this off, I just added 9781665048330, in case Fixer pushes that through. I'll do the ebook 9781982693701 after I sync with next week's DB dump, if no-one beats me to it in the mean time. ErsatzCulture 18:28, 20 March 2022 (EDT)

If it is already in when Fixer's submissions are posted in the queue, it will be skipped - that's why we cannot use Fixer for later printing of the same ISBN even if Amazon has the data - we get one printing per ISBN from Fixer. If the submission is posted but it is added later, I get the "ISBN already in" warning so I check the case (and for ebooks I always check because we work based on ASINs there and if the ASIN is missing, Fixer will not know not to submit. So we are all good. Annie 18:46, 20 March 2022 (EDT)

The Forest of Forever second opinion

Would you mind checking this conversation? I'd welcome a second opinion. -- JLaTondre (talk) 17:20, 19 March 2022 (EDT)

Posted an opinion. It can go either way but I think there is just one book out there... Annie 16:50, 20 March 2022 (EDT)

Liverpool University Press pub dates

Just added a recent ebook of theirs - annoyingly not available via Amazon or Kobo - and whilst grabbing data for the physical pub, I noticed that the UK sites list March 1st, whereas B&N have April 1st. Any idea if that's usual behaviour for them? Whilst digging around, I saw that a pub from late last year is recorded as a Nov 1st pub, yet all the UK sites have Oct 1st. (I also note that the original Fixer submission says "data from Amazon.com", but it was edited to say "from Amazon UK" - possibly a difference in the listings that wasn't spotted at the time?)

Also, I note that none of the retailers listing a March 1st pub date actually have copies in stock. Given this is a £95 academic text, am I right for suspecting that they probably don't get copies in by default, rather than it being a pub that hasn't hit its due date? I don't usually catch these prior to publication, so I don't know if that's normal practice? (FWIW, the publisher's Twitter acct does say it's out, albeit not until a couple of days after the official date.) Thanks. ErsatzCulture 12:14, 28 March 2022 (EDT)

I usually check the dates for them on their own site -- retailers can be... notoriously weird with academic texts, especially across an ocean. Part of it is how it gets distributed -- the book is out, it just does not show up at regular venues yet more often than not. If it says just Amazon UK, then Amazon UK was showing that date at the time (Fixer will always show Amazon.com as long as the US side has enough info not to send him scrambling to use the UK data). And the "date" portion is usually unclear and comes from retailers. So we document what we can find until we get better dates.Annie 13:27, 28 March 2022 (EDT)

Thanks. Hopefully I've done enough trawling for info on this pub series on Amazon UK today, that I'll get recommender suggestions for their future titles ahead of pub date. (Looks like there's one missing from the end of last year that I now have enough info for to submit shortly.) ErsatzCulture 14:33, 28 March 2022 (EDT)

Check the publisher site for them as well - as I said, they had been finicky :) Annie 14:34, 28 March 2022 (EDT)

Upcoming Ben Aaronovitch short story previously published in Czech?

Apologies if this comes across as based on some ignorant Anglocentric "all Central/Eastern European languages are the same" assumption, but is the Czech language or publishing industry amongst your repertoir?

I finally got around to looking at the Waterstones exclusive editions of the previously discussed "Amongst Our Weapons", and it turns out these have an extra "exclusive" short story. This has now been added, but I thought I'd best double check that it is indeed part of the Rivers of London series before setting that field. Twitter has confirmed as such, but there's also an (unanswered) 2021 tweet to the author indicating that it was previously published. Googling throws up this, which does seem to confirm the prior pub, albeit in (presumably) translated form. Are you able to find out any more? Thanks ErsatzCulture 12:05, 31 March 2022 (EDT)

They are not the same (duh - we even use different alphabets) but they are all kinda in my repertoire - yes :) Let me chase that down - won't be the first time for a translation to come out first. Annie 12:16, 31 March 2022 (EDT)

So... the publisher site claims that "Projekt ROBOT100 se tak stal první českou antologií, do které se podařilo získat originální povídku hvězdy světové fantastiky." ("The project ROBOT100 thus became the first Czech anthology to secure the original publication of a story from a world sf star" - in a very rough translation - sf stands for a word that does not exist in English per se - it is somewhere in between terms - but is there in all Slavic languages). As the Robert Silverberg piece is not a story and Michal Hvorecký is kinda important but not really a world star, that leaves just Aaronovitch. :) No clue if it is a series story - no indication anywhere. I will add the Czech book later and add the connection and all that. Annie 12:28, 31 March 2022 (EDT)

Thanks. I did think to try amazon.cz, but that just seems to be the .de site with a different language, and it didn't know the ISBN. I did find the same argo.cz page after Googling the ISBN, and saw that it has a preview that namechecks Ben Aaronovitch, but I couldn't fathom the exact context, and browser translate tools didn't help.

This author tweet indicates the story is in the same universe. That it also says the story is set in Prague might be an indicator that it was written with the intention of being published in a Czech anthology? ErsatzCulture 12:37, 31 March 2022 (EDT)

Who knows. The introduction is available from the publisher site but it does not have anything about that story. Annie 12:42, 31 March 2022 (EDT)

Googling for the Czech title threw up this GR thread that seems to have been the trigger for the unanswered Tweet. It links to a FB post that has some English language text (screenshot of a Word/Scrivener doc?) but FB is breaking my browser translation tools, so I don't know the precise context. ErsatzCulture 12:47, 31 March 2022 (EDT)

So you assume I cannot use Google or something? :) That's the announcement that they will have a story by him with what appears to be the first page of the English text attached. As the name Nightingale is in there and we know he had traveled to the continent, chances are that this is indeed a story from the series. But I won't add it to the series until there is a better proof (names get reused) - we don't invent information, we record it and make sure we have sources for it. Notes to the effect of the name usage and series speculation can be added if you want though... Annie 13:10, 31 March 2022 (EDT)

Sorry, was just trying to be thorough in documenting my findings ;-)

That first page extract on FB (which granted, I didn't see until after I added the series to the story) references Postmartin, Nightingale and the Folly, which seem unlikely to all be re-used in an unrelated story IMHO... ErsatzCulture 13:36, 31 March 2022 (EDT)

Not with all of them referenced, no. I scanned it quickly - in the middle of something else - and noticed just Nightingale. All set then. I will add the anthology later. Annie 13:39, 31 March 2022 (EDT)

Second opinion requested: Philip Pullman's The Imagination Chamber

This is due at the end of April in the UK; B&N doesn't seem to know the title, so I guess there's no US release yet scheduled. Cursory Googling doesn't show up any more info beyond what's on that publisher page - there are no reviews on GR and a Pullman/HDM fan wiki only has a fairly barebones entry.

As it seems to be fragmentary bits and pieces from HDM, rather than a consistent narrative, I'm inclined to submit it as a collection. Page count of 96 pages implies it's chapbook length, but IIRC chapbooks have a vague limit on the number of contents (low single digits?) so collection would win out over chapbook? Any thoughts/objections?

Thanks :-) ErsatzCulture 15:19, 7 April 2022 (EDT)

Looks like a collection to me so let's do that for now. :) Chapbooks are really for single stories (with a few exceptions such as a short supporting story and the like). A collection of scenes is a collection. And I do not see it anywhere Stateside - will keep an eye for it showing under a different title though. :) Annie 18:41, 7 April 2022 (EDT)

Thanks, now added. ErsatzCulture 19:49, 7 April 2022 (EDT)

Don Tumasonis

The source for Don Tumasonis' death is Steve Jones via Ansible. Shsilver 16:03, 7 April 2022 (EDT)

OK, thanks - that needs to be in the notes when you submit the update. You can also respond on your own page - when a moderator posts a question, they monitor your page :) Annie 18:42, 7 April 2022 (EDT)

Copies of titles appearing in different publications

These are the exact same "Author's Note", that appears in the first part and the second part of a translation that has been split into two books, because of... reasons.

• http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?3014283
• http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?3014284

Because of rules you once explained to me with titles such has "Introduction", "Afterword", and I assume also "Author's Note", I've added the title of the book as a part of the title of the essay, i. e.

• Författarens anmärkning (Otherland I: de gyllene skuggornas stad)
• Författarens anmärkning (Otherland II: i en annan värld)

Although, they are made variants of the original "Author's Note", they still resulted in two different entries, because of this, which, to me at least, indicates that there is something different about them.

Is this a problem? How would you go about it? I would have liked to use the Import function on one of them, but then the title would be wrong.

--Spacecow 07:18, 9 April 2022 (EDT)

Is it the same text? If so, you can just call it Författarens anmärkning (Otherland) - and add a note into the title record explaining the naming. What you have now is technically not wrong but as the title is the same if we did not have the disambiguation and it is the same text, keeping them together makes more sense. Annie 10:51, 11 April 2022 (EDT)

Yes, its the same text. I will rename one of them and let both publications point at that one. Once they do, I will request admin to delete the second one, which no-one longer points at. --Spacecow 16:48, 11 April 2022 (EDT)

You do not need a moderator for that. The fastest way actually will be to merge them (via the Advanced Search for title) and then rename the result :) Annie 18:47, 11 April 2022 (EDT)

Oooooooh. I will try that with another candidate. I expect you to be there and clean up my mess. --Spacecow 13:27, 12 April 2022 (EDT)

An Asimov question.

Do I bother putting this Asimov title (excerpt) into the bibliography? There is an OCLC number (72859390). If it's silkscreened, I'm not even sure what the format should be. ../Doug H 15:44, 9 April 2022 (EDT)

It is eligible :) I would not bother adding it but up to you. Format will be "other" and a note explaining what that means. Annie 10:42, 11 April 2022 (EDT)

Too cute not to. [10] ../Doug H 13:30, 11 April 2022 (EDT)

Yeah... you have the bug... :) Add a note that it was published in 50 copies (So it does not look like an 1 off vanity project). Annie 13:32, 11 April 2022 (EDT)

I had it at the title level (only one publication), but figured you're right (again) and added it to the pub. ../Doug H 15:31, 11 April 2022 (EDT)

Rich Larson's Cypher and Ymir - retitling, or unused ISBNs recycled for a different book?

Did this one ever come up in discussion before? (I couldn't find any references to it on my or your talk pages...)

Anyway, I was just trawling through Waterstones' advanced listings, and was a bit confused by this title and cover image discrepancy. Judging by the Orbit/Hachette US pages, it looks like they have reused the earlier two ISBNs 9780316416573 (ebook) and 9780316416580 (tp) for a completely different book. I have only the vaguest knowledge of the series that Cypher was the second book of, but the blurb for this new Ymir title doesn't sound like it's simply a delayed and renamed version of the older title.

I assume the recycled ISBNs might mean that Fixer won't pick it up when the time (July pub) comes - will ping Ahasuerus for comment though.

Cursory online searches are unhelpful in getting to the bottom of things - this 2021 tweet confirms my suspicion Cypher never came out. Weirdly, it doesn't seem to show up on GR at all any more that I can see, despite me explicitly referencing its entry from there in the ebook pub note back in 2020.

I guess the title and tp pub records for Cypher should also be 8888-ed and noted, similar to the ebook, but I'll keep digging around... ErsatzCulture 18:58, 9 April 2022 (EDT)

No idea - will do some digging to see if this one came out. The ISBN is shot for Fixer though - if it is in the DB, Fixer does not know that there is something new (new printing or new title)... Annie 10:40, 11 April 2022 (EDT)

'Noname' (Luis Senarens)

I'm confused by your creation of 'Noname' (Luis Senarens). "Noname" is a house name used by Francis W. Doughty, Harry Enton, and Luis Senarens for The Boys of New York dime novels. Why would we disambiguate this? That's not how we normally handle house names. -- JLaTondre (talk) 16:24, 16 May 2022 (EDT)

Absolutely no memories about that one. Probably did not recognize it as a house name and went on the usual route of making a parent by default. Will clean it up in a bit. Thanks for catching it Annie 12:15, 26 May 2022 (EDT)

Fixed. Annie 12:21, 26 May 2022 (EDT)

Current tags issue

I'm having a problem deleting a misspelling for a current tag on the following page: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?49626 The term "fantasy" is misspelled "fatasy". I went ahead & added the tag "fantasy" but can see no way to delete an existing tag. Can you help? Thanks. Mike 10:50, 26 May 2022 (EDT)

Editors (and that includes moderators and self-approvers) cannot delete tags. Only a bureaucrat or the user who added the tag can remove it. The best I can do is to make it private which does not change much except to make it invisible from the page (search still finds it). I've made it private for now - you can post on the Moderator board to get Ahasuerus to delete it completely. Annie 12:20, 26 May 2022 (EDT)

Thank you for your help. I think this change is enough. Mike 14:49, 26 May 2022 (EDT)

Possibly ignorant question about Fixer, audios, Amazon .com vs .co.uk, Audible, etcv

Hi, good to see you're back :-)

Quick question: when Fixer submits audio releases that it has collected from Amazon.com's API, are they (unlike ebooks) lacking ISBNs? I saw this Fixer-originated audio download just now, as I was updating the corresponding hc, which has an ISBN for the audio release listed on the copyright page. (And which matches the info on the Gollancz site and Kobo. As I've been feeling a bit guilty recently about never adding audios, I thought I'd try to at least get that info into the database.

However if I search for this audio ISBN on Amazon UK, it doesn't find anything (whereas it does find appropriate results if I search for the ebook ISBN). Searching for that audio ISBN does work seem to find stuff on audible.co.uk though. This seemingly illogical/inconsistent behaviour makes me wonder whether that ISBN might refer to a different pub/format? (Bear in mind that I never listen to audios, so I'm utterly ignorant about whether there are format differences similar to EPUB vs MOBI and how they might be modelled in the database.)

Basically I just want to sanity check that adding the audio ISBN listed in the hc, and on the Gollancz and Kobo sites, to that existing audio pub record is the right thing to do, as opposed to creating a new pub record. When I did track down the audio release on Amazon UK, it has a different Amazon ASIN from either of the two attached to the current record, which might be just a region splitting thing - similar to what Titan etc do for ebooks - but makes me paranoid enough that I'd rather get a second opinion about all of this, before making any edits in areas that I don't really know much about... Thanks! ErsatzCulture 18:27, 27 May 2022 (EDT)

Fixer does not have ISBNs for ebooks either - not for the last few years anyway. Most ebooks that come to the DB from him have ISBNs in their records because I track them down on publisher sites, kobo, Apple, blogs, promotional materials (and oracle bones if it gets to that). Fixer does not get ISBNs for anything besides paperbooks, physical audio disks and other physical formats and older ebooks (grabbed before the API change) - they dropped the support for the ISBNs on the digital formats a few years back. Ebook ISBNs are occasionally searchable in Amazon, audiobook ones are never searchable there.

The Audible, Kobo, Apple and publisher site version of the downloadable Audiobook is indeed the same book (as long as you make sure the reader and the dates and the covers are the same - some books do have multiple versions) so we keep a single record in the DB unless we find a reason not to (some publishers ites will have links to all stores with their own identifiers; some won't). Hope that makes sense.

Also - for the same Audiobook, Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk will always have a different ASIN (when both carry it); Audible.com and Audible.co.uk have the same ASIN when they use ISBN10; if one or both use a B-ASIN, they will be different. Our Audible field is only for the IDs from Audible.com; Audible UK (and the other 4 Audible sites - but as you are doing English only, that is irrelevant) ones go into the websites field. See for example. I'd throw the Audible UK into Sites even when the ISBN10 is used if I had checked it (because there is no other link to it). Annie 20:22, 27 May 2022 (EDT)

Thanks, I'll update all the info for this pub later today when I have a bit more time. ErsatzCulture 07:54, 28 May 2022 (EDT)

Mountain of Black Glass (dup?)

While cloning this title for a different printing I noticed that the entry [11] seems to be a duplicate of [12]. However, they have a slightly different page count. The edit history shows that you're the last one to touch it. Thoughts? --Glenn 16:30, 29 June 2022 (EDT)

From the looks of it, I removed a direct link to Amazon (in one of the cleanup efforts). They do look as the same edition indeed. Annie 11:09, 18 July 2022 (EDT)

Should I deal with this, or were you going to when you got caught up? --Glenn 17:36, 18 July 2022 (EDT)

Go ahead and get them cleaned up - let me know if you need any assistance :) Annie 18:01, 18 July 2022 (EDT)

The Prince Warriors (a request)

Hey Annie; I recently added The Prince Warriors series to this site, could you check out the foreign editions that I added, and make sure I got them right? MLB 23:33, 5 July 2022 (EDT)

Will put it on my list for this week - returning after 3 weeks of vacation is always fun. Thanks for pinging me about them! Annie 11:10, 18 July 2022 (EDT)

Mohsin Hamed - The Last White Man - novella?

This one has page count of 192 for both US and UK hcs, but the UK ebook is variously reported by vendors as 169 (Amazon) or 119 (Kobo GB). Kobo US and UK both have word count of 32k words, well into novella territory.

US publisher claims it is "A Novel" (and that is on the cover), but a Google indicates several reviewers report it as a novella.

FWIW, the US pub is a week-and-a-bit ahead of the UK one, I dunno if there are any other sources you know of that might worth checking on before making a type change? Thanks ErsatzCulture 11:32, 24 July 2022 (EDT)

I was looking at that one and have it on my list to recheck the length when it comes up - 32K is safely inside novella category but these can get adjusted a bit post-publication so I was planning to take a second look at the length when I am adding the ebooks. If you want to change it, go ahead. :) Annie 14:18, 25 July 2022 (EDT)

Thanks, I'll take a deeper look at in a few days.

BTW, in a similar vein, I just spotted this in the alt author/canonical title cleanup report, but the subtitle (which probably probably shouldn't be in the title field, I suspect) doesn't match the title type. This ebook doesn't seem to be listed on Kobo (GB), so I can't get a word count from there, and it doesn't seem like it's on Kobo (US) either, but could you just double check the later, in case Kobo have started following Amazon's habit of serving different results based on user's location? Claimed print length of 129 pages also seems fairly novella-ish. ErsatzCulture 06:06, 26 July 2022 (EDT)

Between the title (yep, that subtitle should not be there, a part of it should be in the series field instead), the page count and the author site, that is very very very likely to be a duck indeed (uhm... I mean a novella). Annie 13:33, 26 July 2022 (EDT)

Help/favour: Adam Roberts' Haven - apparent 2022 ebook

Hi, any chance you could help me understand a possible new pub from a couple of days ago?

Adam Roberts' Haven had a new tp out a couple of days ago, and this got added via Fixer. However, it seems that there may be a new ebook as well, but info is a bit inconsistent:

• Amazon UK no longer lists the previous B07D835BGP ASIN (which was valid for Amazon UK; I had/have added it in my wishlist, but it's in an unpurchasable state)
• There's a new ebook with the ASIN B0B7KG5RPT, with Amazon UK reporting it as a 2nd edn on 16th Aug
• Clicking on the Look Inside preview, it has the new cover, with the old 9781786181091 and 2018 copyright date - implying it's just the cover that has changed
• Kobo (GB) doesn't seem to list it at all now - although it did as recently as mid-June 2022 based on my scraped data
• B&N (which I now have a scraper for BTW, although I only plan on using it for "international" pubs) lists a new pub with an ISBN of 9781786186492
• FWIW, I get no Google search hits for that ISBN, but if I put it into Amazon UK's search it is recognized correctly. Neither of these apparent new ISBN or ASIN seem to be known by Fixer, but I'm currently running data that's a couple of months old

Any chance you can have a quick look at Amazon US from that side of the Atlantic, to confirm if there's an ebook listed with info that matches Amazon UK and B&N? If so, I'll submit this new pub - unless you think there's a reason not to? (It also looks like there's identical ebook reissue weirdness with the first in that series - sigh...)

Thanks :-)

I fixed the cover of the paper one while I was there. The UK has the same ISBN but two days later.

Here is what I am seeing for ebooks: ASIN B0B7KG5RPT is valid both in Amazon UK and Amazon US, same date (16). Kobo USA does not have it but that is not unusual at this point with these books - they show up a bit later in my experience.

The new cover makes a new book anyway but there is also a new ISBN here -- so I'd add it, with 9781786186492 as ISBN, the ASIN and with BOTH Amazons as source (one of the prices into the notes). It is the correct/paired ISBN for the new paperback so 99% belongs to the ebook -- and both Amazons show it the way they show ebook ISBNs these days when you search for it. Which in my experience means that this is the ebook ISBN - it will just take other places a bit to reconcile with it... Annie 18:02, 18 August 2022 (EDT)

Thanks - I went to fix the Haven tp cover, but saw you beat me to it by 3 minutes :-( On the plus side, it did remind me that I hadn't checked the WatchPrePub cleanup report recently, and there were 4 other dodgy covers that I've now fixed. (Plus a pub date one that I started fixing, before my net connection crapped out, and which I'll have to redo today.)

Will submit the ebook later today - I thought Solaris had gotten over their weird attitude to ebooks (from around a year ago, when they seemed to want to push people to only their own online store, and some stuff wasn't even listed on Amazon), but evidently not... ErsatzCulture 02:53, 19 August 2022 (EDT)

Another "can you check this ebook in the US please" request

Ebook of S. D. Perry's Resident Evil Code Veronica - I scraped details from Amazon UK and Kobo (GB) for this in late April/early May 2022, but neither of them list it any more. (It's a Titan Books - yes, them :-( - pub, so I don't have any publisher site info.)

It is however currently listed on B&N with the same ISBN, 9781781161913. The Amazon UK ASIN is/was B00MLDJOYC. The ISBN does appear in the Fixer dumps, attached to three different ASINs, including the one I had:

   (book_scraping) book_scraping $ grep 9781781161913 /mnt/data2019/_isfdb_/_fixer_20220820_/*txt
   /mnt/data2019/_isfdb_/_fixer_20220820_/ASINs2022-08-20.txt:B008QNE6M6|9781781161913|n
   /mnt/data2019/_isfdb_/_fixer_20220820_/ASINs2022-08-20.txt:B009ATEWDS|9781781161913|n
   /mnt/data2019/_isfdb_/_fixer_20220820_/ASINs2022-08-20.txt:B00MLDJOYC|9781781161913|n
   /mnt/data2019/_isfdb_/_fixer_20220820_/ISBNs2022-08-20.txt:1781161917|9781781161913|n|B008QNE6M6

Google search on B008QNE6M6 does indicate there is/was Amazon.com page for a Kindle edition, although possibly that's cached data and the listing is no longer valid? B009ATEWDS just finds a single reference on Goodreads - it also claims to be a Titan edition, so perhaps have been different issues. (The Amazon UK page did list it as a "reprint edition" FWIW.)

I'll submit this based on what I've got - if only to stop it showing up as a TODO in my tools - but if you can let me know what Amazon.com says about it, that'd be super helpful. Thanks! ErsatzCulture 17:26, 22 August 2022 (EDT)

Amazon.com has B008QNE6M6 with Publication date September 18, 2012. The Look Inside pulls an ISBN of 9781781161913 and that lines up with2012 date. The cover matches this one and the two ISBNs are a possible pair. So my gut feeling is that this is the 2012 ebook. Maybe they planned to reissue and changed their mind; maybe they decided to reuse the old records.

B009ATEWDS is invalid in Amazon.com. Considering it is a Thursday release, this is probably the UK 2012 ebook. Both ASINs are in Goodreads as the two ebooks from September 2012: A Thursday (September 13, 2012 for https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19284333 and B009ATEWDS) and a Tuesday (September 18 for https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16119229 for B008QNE6M6). Plus there is the ebook with the ISBN (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13642095 and the later date). There are more records in there and some more noise (that one needs to be cleaned up by the GR people...) but we know this pattern, don't we?

If I have to make a guess, I'd call that the ebook from 2012, published staggered across the ocean as usual (maybe for the 5 days before the US one came out, the UK one was available in US - based on the date and the usual pattern of these, B00MLDJOYC is probably that short lived record), add the 3 GR records and the two (or 3 if you prefer) ASINs, add the ISBN, note the date difference and call it a day. Annie 19:21, 22 August 2022 (EDT)

Thanks - I should have been clearer that I'd seen the 2012 date, and the multiple entries on GR, although I hadn't gone as far as working out which were Tuesday vs Thursday. Will submit this one later today to get it off my list. ErsatzCulture 06:47, 23 August 2022 (EDT)

It is almost the first thing I do when I see dates which are on the correct date-difference from publishers known to do that :) Annie 14:46, 23 August 2022 (EDT)

(As an aside, but on the general topic of publisher weirdness, I did a couple of Aconyte ebooks whilst you were on hiatus, and saw their thing of putting out the ebook a couple of weeks ahead of the tp. It also looks like the UK physical pub date is several weeks/months after the US pub date - trans-Atlantic surface shipping? - but it all looked messy enough that I beat a hasty retreat rather than daring to try document things in pub notes :-( ) ErsatzCulture 06:47, 23 August 2022 (EDT)

Aconyte are at least predictable. I ignore the UK date in such cases - if someone wants to add it to a note, go ahead and do that but I am not chasing all English speaking jurisdictions unless it is something like Titan or other similar publishers which are just close enough and/or can be mistaken. Annie 14:46, 23 August 2022 (EDT)

Charles Vess / The Queen (of) Summer's Twilight

Annie: the title and pub (pb) records both have an incorrect title for this book. They omit the word "of". My copy (of the ltd ed hc) has arrived and I can confirm from the title page that the title does contain "of". I have figured out how this happened. Amazon.com (and Amazon.co.uk, incidentally) has this misspelling. From the edit history, I see that you and Fixer have created these records. I know you could fix this but I would like to make the corrections please because I haven't come across this situation before and I would like to learn. I guess I:
1) edit the title record
2) edit the pub record
3) then, possibly, delete incorrect records
4) also, possibly, link the corrected pub record to the corrected title record.
Can you please put me right, if necessary.
Incidentally, once all corrections are done, I will create and PV a pub record for the ltd ed hc. Thank you. Teallach 18:38, 25 August 2022 (EDT)

Not sure how I missed the "of" although looking at the date that was just before my surgery so I think my mind was... not fully there.

Because there is a single publication, you can do all with a single edit. Go to the publication and press Edit. Fix the title in BOTH places. Once approved, both records will be fixed (and there won't be anything that needs deletion). If there were already two editions, you would have needed to edit the title and the multiple pub records separately indeed (still no deletions needed at the end) and the title and pub record never disconnect on an edit (they do on an import/export/remove title).

So go ahead, edit the Publication and fix both fields from there :) Annie 14:05, 26 August 2022 (EDT)

Thanks for the explanation regarding how title changes work in the ISFDb. Very useful for the future. I have submitted the edit. Teallach 17:04, 26 August 2022 (EDT)

Approved. Annie 17:07, 26 August 2022 (EDT)

AK/A. K. Mulford

Hi, sorry for bugging you again, but did you see this Community Portal item from a couple of months ago? ISFDB:Community_Portal#Proposal:_change_.22AK_Mulford.22_to_.22A._K._Mulford.22 The discussion sort-of petered out without any conclusion, and I wondered if you have any thoughts/opinion?

Since I raised that item, I did see a different case having separate author records for "AB Foo" and "A. B. Foo", so it would seem legit to have both the existing "AK Mulford" record, and a new "A. K. Mulford" one. My question now is whether it would be acceptable to make "A. K." the primary author record, and AK the pseudonym? Currently the former doesn't exist, but there are 2 entered Sep 2022 UK tps (currently listed against "AK", but which IMHO should be changed) [13] [14], corresponding UK tps (for the first one in the series at least), plus ebooks released in the summer, so that would make at least 6 pubs listed for "A. K.", not to mention the future books contracted as mentioned in the tor.com piece, which will presumably follow the pattern of those recent/imminent pubs.

All of which would make "A. K." clearly the most used variant, but only once all those recent/imminent pubs are entered/corrected. I'd rather not do a bunch of extra work making "A. K." a pseudonym of "AK" just because in the short term it has fewer pubs, only to have to redo it all shortly thereafter once "A. K." has more pubs added ErsatzCulture 15:29, 30 August 2022 (EDT)

What's with the "sorry for bugging you"? :) It's never a bother.

I think that having both A. K. and AK for authors where these are clear abbreviation and where the AK is not in use consistently (thus overriding our normalization - and that's why we had her as AK until now) is against the rules as written and even more importantly, against the spirit of the rules. We normalize names so we don't end up in this situation... Some people disagree and we get what you see. While I am all for "as written", that ship had sailed for author names I think. If new books are going to follow the usual practice (with dots), I think we should normalize to A. K. and explain all that in the note (aka the usage of the name sans dots early on and so on). Talk to the PV to see what he thinks as well and start a new Community thread (SHORTER!) asking the exact question (do we pseudonym or do we bring the account to policy now that the author is using dots) but without making it a novelette (I do not mind your long-winded explanations, especially here on my page, but part of why some discussions peter out over on Community is because it takes forever to get to a point in some posts). Not that we are not all guilty of that. :) Annie 16:11, 30 August 2022 (EDT)

Thanks, I'll see if I can curb my tendency to ramble and post a new discussion item later today... ErsatzCulture 13:58, 31 August 2022 (EDT)

John Scalzi - Travel by Bullet - US check requested

Any chance you can double check this one that I've just added please? In particular, I suspect the US price is $24.95 - with the 2 different UK prices being Amazon weirdness converting that to GBP differently on their UK sites - but AFAIK it'll be hard for me to get that info from this side of the Atlantic.

Also Goodreads has a different ASIN B0B8394JQS from either of the UK ones I've entered, so maybe that's something else that needs fixing/adding?

(Given that this had zero activity on GR until today, I'm guessing it was a stealth release that Fixer wouldn't have known about - sigh...)

Thanks! ErsatzCulture 16:03, 1 September 2022 (EDT)

Audio books work differently than ebooks in regards to ASINs. They (almost) never share ASIN across the different Amazons (as in "I am yet to find one that does share it but it is possible because I had not seen a statement saying otherwise"). Audible ASINs can only be shared when they are ISBN10s - for B-ASINs on the Audible site you will have one for .com and one for co.uk (the field takes only the .com one; the UK one goes into the web pages; please note that an ISBN10 may be the ASIN on one Audible but not on another one occasionally). Unlike Amazon, the different Audible sites are almost independent in regards of content (that's why we do not have a multi-value field like with the Amazon ones. We had talked about having a separate external ID for the Audibles used the most - thus the Web Pages link - so we can keep track of them :)

The price on the Amazons side is irrelevant for these - the Audible governs (as we want the list price - Amazon also has that but it can be a bit hard to see sometimes).

Fixed this one - moved the Audible UK ID out (it will never work unless you are in UK and Audible forwards you behind the scenes and you had allowed it (mine won't - it always asks me when I switch around)), added the Audible.com one, added the Amazon.com ASIN and fixed the price and the note.

Let me know if anything above does not make sense.

PS: Fixer possibly found it under the US ASIN - I had not touched ebooks and audio books in a few months - between the vacation and then the surgery, they are just waiting their turn. :) Annie 16:23, 1 September 2022 (EDT)

Well, I'm not sure that all the different IDs that international arms of Amazon and Audible use makes sense to me, but I think I understand what you say :-) Now that you mention it, I do vaguely recall some of the details you've mentioned, so I'll try to remember them for next time.

(This might have been only be the second audio download I'd submitted - certainly I don't think I've done more than single digits of them. I did submit this earlier this week, but I guess that as it has an ISBN10-derived Audible ASIN, it should be OK? Maybe there's a different Amazon.com ASIN?)

Thanks for cleaning that up anyway! Must confess I'm inclined to continue to steer clear of submitting audios, unless they are new titles like these two were.... ErsatzCulture 17:04, 1 September 2022 (EDT)

"The Second Earth Adventures Collection" looks good (and yes, the ISBN10 helps - same on both sides (which happens often) so we are good). I added the other ASIN anyway so it does not popup from Fixer. :) Annie 17:26, 1 September 2022 (EDT)

Yet another US check request: Rich Horton's Year's Best 2021

Just added this title and pub, but:

• Sources have inconsistent pub dates (plus RH himself only tweeted about it a few days ago, which makes me wonder if either of the August dates I've noted in the pub note are correct?
• GR has a second Kindle version with ASIN B09Y2D8466 and Aug 1st pub date - unsure if erroneous/cancelled entry, or a different US ASIN?
• The ISBN(s) are a mess, as documented on the pub note. Not sure why that might be if (as the copyright page claims) it has a legit ISBN, unless Prime Books are another weird publisher?

Slightly surprised this one didn't come via Fixer, but maybe hasn't been prioritized due to ebook-only pub?

I'll add the contents later, but this already took up more time than I was expecting :-(

I have corresponded with RH a few times on Twitter - a few times specifically re. ISFDB - so I can potentially query him about stuff, but I get the general impression that authors/editors aren't necessarily any better informed about publication minutae than the general public.

Thanks! ErsatzCulture (talk) 15:21, 12 September 2022 (EDT)

See above on all the ebooks and audiobooks - due to my health issues this summer, these are behind. :) I will catch up with them at some point but it is slow going - even paper was behind (that's why Ahasuerus did some paper ones earlier this summer). As there is no way to find the ebook only (as New may mean Ebook only or title being weirdly input), there is no easy way to chase these so they will come in as I get to them... The current focus is on September/October. I will go back to the earlier months as time permits.

Kindle/Mobi and ePub ebooks carrying separate ISBNs is not unheard of - in theory "ebook ISBN" does not exist as a concept and each format should have its own ebook but the practice had kinda changed that so outside of some children publishers and occasional examples like here, publishers had been issuing "ebook ISBNs" :) Practice trumps theory and all that. Most publishers print BOTH of them in all the ebooks though so it is clear they are different. In such cases, when we know that they did use separate ISBNs, we should be adding both different ebooks - one with the B&N and Kobo details (ePub format noted in the notes), one with the Kindle ones (Mobi noted in the notes). However, preview in Kobo USA shows the 978-1-60701-547-5 ISBN while showing the other one outside so there is a disconnect somewhere and I don't think that there is a second ISBN here.

Oh, and B09Y2D8466 was possibly a placeholder, maybe with a promotional price. Dead as a door nail at the moment on all Amazons. Or due to the delays, Amazon changed the ASIN but it is dead at the moment. But if you google it, authors used it so it was there for awhile. Its date is bogus though :) Annie (talk) 17:02, 12 September 2022 (EDT)

Thanks. Hopefully this pub is now all good with contents added. ErsatzCulture (talk) 17:53, 12 September 2022 (EDT)

Art Calendars

I can't see anything specific in the rules about their inclusion and wondered if there was an accepted practice/interpretation or if it should be raised in the Help. Any pointers? Thanks ../Doug H (talk) 17:24, 18 September 2022 (EDT)

Same rules as with any other nonfiction book - they are eligible if they are plausibly related to speculative fiction. So a LOTR or Harry Potter ones would often be allowable (one with stills from the movies is not eligible IMO - one with illustrations from a book edition will be); a calendar with fantasy pictures which are not tied to fiction is out. Feel free to open a discussion though - standardizing what we accept is never a bad thing - they do stretch the definition of a book a bit but I think they are as much books as any other art book. Annie (talk) 03:02, 19 September 2022 (EDT)

Self-moderation

Started here

I am surprised by your offer. The following questions arise: What happens to my current pending edits if I accept the self-moderation? is there a control of the self-moderation edits? Can mistakes or errors be discovered? --Zapp (talk) 17:14, 19 September 2022 (EDT)

Answers posted on your page - I was (mostly) off for the weekend so just getting around to ISFDB today. Annie (talk) 18:33, 19 September 2022 (EDT)

Algernon Blackwood - Ancient Sorceries pubdate

You moderated the original Fixer submission for this one, and updated it a couple of days ago. It's recorded with a pub date of 2022-09-06 - which I can see B&N and Amazon.com still have - but most of the sources on this side of the Atlantic - notable exception being Blackwells - have it as 2022-10-13, including the publisher.

Any idea if this one is a case of different dates across territories, or if the US sites haven't picked up updated data? As far as I can tell, Amazon.com doesn't have stock, B&N isn't clear - but I dunno if they are being awkward due to me being outside the US? I'm happy to make appropriate updates, but I'd prefer to have more confidence in what they should be :-) Thanks! ErsatzCulture (talk) 11:19, 23 September 2022 (EDT)

Earlier this week, Amazon US reported that they have copies. They do so now as well (" In Stock / FREE delivery Tomorrow, September 24 / Ships from Amazon.com / Sold by Amazon.com"). So it seems that it is indeed available. I don't need another Blackwood collection so I do not plan on testing them by buying it but... when they say they can deliver tomorrow, they usually know they can. So yes - I know it is an UK publication but it is already here on this site of the pond it seems... Annie (talk) 11:53, 23 September 2022 (EDT)

Thanks for checking; I've added UK details as extra info to the note. ErsatzCulture (talk) 11:58, 23 September 2022 (EDT)

Application

Hello, Annie! I don't know if you have seen my application for self-moderating. Would you mind to leave a comment? I have learned my lesson and things like not communicating on vital things that were cared for by other editors will not happen again. On the other hand I'm working on a number of projects which seem to be stuck in the queue for an ever expanding time span - entering European magazines (well, mostly German), adding months of publication based on infos stated in magazines (like here), the seemingly neverending Perry Rhodan complex, and caring for some European authors, at last especially Sławomir Mrożek whose bibliography needs original titles & dates and misses lots of relevant speculative work. Regards, Christian Stonecreek (talk) 12:31, 23 September 2022 (EDT)

Туманность Андромеды

Hello Annie, I have a problem with this title. The first Russian edition in 1957 is what, a pre-release or really the first edition? The first German edition is a translation of the edition in 1957, the second German edition is a translation of the edition in 1958. This German website explains the different between the German editions. The question is, if it is an pre-release 4 chapters are omitted, or the 1958 edition is expanded by 4 chapters? The chapters are:

• Река времени / Der Strom der Zeit / The River of Time
• Конь на дне морском / Das Pferd auf dem Meeresgrund / The Horse on the Sea Bed
• Школа третьего цикла / Die Schule des dritten Zyklus / A Third Cycle School
• Остров забвения / Die Insel des Vergessens / Island of Oblivion

What do you think, separate the titles or add some notes? Confused regards Henna (talk) 14:18, 25 September 2022 (EDT)

I have some notes about this books somewhere - let me try to find them tomorrow when I am on a proper computer. Annie (talk) 23:41, 25 September 2022 (EDT)

After some digging around:

• In 1957, the novel was published in a serialized form in two separate magazines. There was a practice in those days in abridging these serializations (usually mentioning it for post publication serializations but not always mentioning it for pre-publication ones) so it is possible that some parts are missing even in the Техника-Молодежи serialization which does not mention abridgements. The other serialization in 1957 (in Пионерская правда) was definitely abridged although it stated it clearly in its title. It is also possible that the German translation used the abridged serialization and not a version of the complete novel for that first edition (or both were abridged - who knows).
• The 1958 version is the official complete version - it may or may not have gotten extra chapters (or they could always have been there). That's part of the reason why novels are dated based on first book appearance even if they are serialized before that.

I'd say that adding notes about the editions is the best option considering what we know. I had never seen the 1957 version reprinted although I may have access to the magazines so I will put it on my list to compare the 3 versions at some point so we can expand the notes). Annie (talk) 14:50, 27 September 2022 (EDT)

Hello Annie, thank you very much for your investigations. Can you say me what is the third title in this list? Thanks again Henna (talk) 14:15, 28 September 2022 (EDT)

"Туманность Андромеды. Звездные корабли"? It is a volume from a series of collections of contemporary science fiction and contains the novel we had been talking about and this story. Fantlab's record is here. I will add it to our DB later. Despite Fantlab's title, the actual title on the title page shows up as "Туманность Андромеды / Звездные корабли" (see the image (/ is the usual separator in ISFDB for this kind of works when there is no other separator on the page) :) Annie (talk) 14:32, 28 September 2022 (EDT)

Dave Hutchinson Cold Water audio download release

Hi again - sorry, but this is another request for help/advice re. audio downloads, although this particular case is a bit of a weird one...

Per the original solicitations around the start of 2022, Dave Hutchinson's Cold Water was supposed to come out from Solaris in tp and ebook yesterday, in the UK at least. At some point - around a month or 2 ago? - most of the sources I scrape had switched to a November pub date, a notable exception being Amazon UK, but just for the ebook, with them keeping 2022-09-29 for the tp listing. That that tp didn't come out yesterday surprised the author, even though I'd previously warned him not to trust Amazon's listing.

Anyway, it does look like the audio download - which is from Penguin rather than than Solaris/Rebellion or their print distributor S&S - did make it out yesterday. Amazon UK has an audio sample - although I'm not sure if that's meaningful or not w.r.t. actually being published? - and Kobo (GB) and B&N also seem to have it available for immediate purchase/download. (Although for some reason B&N seem to be using their own code 2940174870222 rather than the proper ISBN 9781786188953.)

Does this sound like the audio was published to you? I'm not inclined to set up an Audible account to see if I can d/l a preview or actually buy it ;-) I'll submit the title pub if it seems legit, but given how messy this release seems to have been, I'd prefer a second opinion. Thanks! ErsatzCulture (talk) 11:23, 30 September 2022 (EDT)

It is out - not because of the sample (these can come out pre publication) but because you can buy it from Audible today (I have an account). On Audible USA at least - Audible UK is a different entity. The usage of the 294 pseudo-ISBNs is the same thing as the Amazon ASINs - neither of the two use the ISBNs for downloadable audio books ever. I will add it in a bit together with the paperback (which is already in the board with Fixer and I was chasing its current dates. Annie (talk) 13:21, 30 September 2022 (EDT)

And done. With a note explaining the discrepancy in dates and the delay for the other versions. Annie (talk) 15:14, 30 September 2022 (EDT)

Thanks. I've tweaked the title record as it doesn't follow on directly from the other novels, and is possibly the first in a trilogy. ErsatzCulture (talk) 16:06, 30 September 2022 (EDT)

(dedent for item resurrection)

I saw the tp and ebook are in the WatchPrePub cleanup report, and I'd seen tweets that indicated it did come out a couple of days ago. However....

... the ebook seems a bit spotty. Amazon UK has it (and a preview); Kobo (GB) doesn't list it at all (but does have the audio), and B&N no longer lists it, even though I did scrape data from them on 2022-10-06. In particular, when I scraped the latter, they had an ISBN of 9781786187239, but the Amazon preview of the ebook has 9781786187246. (The tp is 978-1-78618-722-2, so it's not a case of the previewed content coming from there.) Neither ...7239 nor ...7246 are recognized in searches on Kobo or B&N, there's only a Kindle entry on GR, and the title doesn't show up on the publisher's store. Could you have a look to see what Amazon.com says about the ebook? I assume it's the same as .co.uk, but given this mess, I'm loathe to assume anything :-( Thanks! ErsatzCulture (talk) 19:06, 10 November 2022 (EST)

Amazon.com has it as $6.99 and it can be bought (pub date November 8, 2022). The ISBN on the Look inside and in the sample is 9781786187246 which I've now added to our record. It is possible that they may have changed the ISBNs or had a different epub version or something. Feel free to add more notes. Annie (talk) 19:18, 10 November 2022 (EST)

Garth Merenghi's TerrorTome: Different ASINs for US vs UK?

This shows as B0B1M2Q1P8 for me, but the pub note says "Data from Amazon UK". I'm guessing you visited Amazon UK when moderating the Fixer submission, but they served you different content based on your IP?

No worries, but I just wanted to double check that theory is plausible before I add "my" ASIN to it and add an explanatory note. ErsatzCulture (talk) 17:28, 19 October 2022 (EDT)

Nah, I see the same one as you in Amazon UK (the other one is Amazon.com) - I just forgot to add the second ASIN apparently - either got pulled for something during the editing or just forgot what I was updating in this one and missed one element. Added now, feel free to update the notes any way you want. Amazon will give me US ASINs so if the book is British, I go to UK sources (Kobo, Amazon, publisher sites) and update the price and so on. Sometimes apparently I forget to add a differing ASIN (some match, some don't - when they don't I always plan to add both of them). :) Annie (talk) 18:23, 19 October 2022 (EDT)

No problem - now that you mention it, I've often seen you've added multiple ASINs to pubs that you & Fixer got to first; I should have clicked there was something atypical about this one. What you now added is more than fine by me. (I've just added the hc BTW). ErsatzCulture (talk) 18:55, 19 October 2022 (EDT)

I won't check Amazon UK (or any of the others) routinely for every book I add from Fixer to see if the ASIN works there (I may for some if something looks off and I am chasing where that book originated in or looking for more data because the .com listing is poor or incomplete. In the latter case I may even open every single one of the Amazons to see if they have a better record) but if I recognize it as a UK book, I always do (well, try to anyway). Same with Amazon Australia and Canada for their respective books. Or the internationals when I am adding a non-English version. You see them often because you work mainly UK books and the double ASINs are usually on UK books - it does not happen that often if you look at all books. On the other hand, Fixer gets a lot of rejections some days when you beat me to adding some of those ebooks and I just need to add the US ASIN into the existing record. :) Annie (talk) 20:43, 19 October 2022 (EDT)

Rebecca Roanhorse - Tread of Angels - novella?

Kobo has the UK ebook as 38k words, GR reviews refer to it as a novella, so any objection to switching the type of this? ErsatzCulture (talk) 16:19, 22 October 2022 (EDT)

Go ahead. I was waiting to see a word count somewhere - it was bound to be close to 40K. Annie (talk) 17:49, 22 October 2022 (EDT)

Chapbook/novella converstion done, and the UK ebook added. Think this is the first multiple-pub conversion of this type that I've done solo, so if you have a second can you check it over that I haven't missed anything? Thanks ErsatzCulture (talk) 17:19, 23 October 2022 (EDT)

The note goes on the novella record which is the record for the text itself, not the chapbook (or on both of you so prefer). :) Annie (talk) 20:23, 23 October 2022 (EDT)

Travis Baldree Legends and Lattes ebook messiness

So this is a case of an indie title being subsequently picked up by tradpub - fairly common these days, right? Well...

The Tor & Tor UK physicals are due early Nov and are already entered; I was just about to do the UK ebook, and was a bit surprised to see it with a June pub date. My guess is that is when the tradpub deal was done, and the original indie ebook was immediately superseded by Tor ones. However, I thought I'd better double-check that theory, and the actual reality turned out to be pretty messy :-(

Both Amazon UK and Kobo (GB) previews show that the ebook has a Cryptid Press title page, and has a copyright page that lists the ISBNs for those original pubs - basically it seems to be the original ebook, possibly with the new UK cover. This is in contradiction to the listings which say it's from Tor UK and has new ISBN (9781035007332) and ASIN (B0B426VJL7).

My suspicion is that some time around the Tor physical pubs come out, the ebook will be updated to match - which I think is what happened with Atlas Six, another Tor indie acquisition - but in the meantime we have this mess of the ebook not matching the product listings.

My plan is to add the new ebook, but leave the pub date as 2022-00-00, add a pub note with the gory details similar to the above, and make sure I re-check it in November to see if/when it might have changed. Does that seem reasonable to you?

It wouldn't surprise me if the US ebook has a similar situation, but I haven't dared look at that... ErsatzCulture (talk) 13:28, 24 October 2022 (EDT)

I'd use the November date -- with watchPrePub added for the date, cover and whatever else seems suspicious.

For previews: Amazon and everyone else will rather you see a preview or not. So they will show whatever edition they have handy. You always need to make sure that the edition is what you think it is. In some cases, they are decent enough to tell you they are showing a different edition. In others - not so much. So if the edition you are seeing on a preview does not match the described one in the page, do not read too much into it, just proceed as if there is no preview - it is not uncommon, even post publication but it can be endemic pre-publication when there is a previous edition out there... Annie (talk) 13:46, 24 October 2022 (EDT)

Thanks. I've added the ebook with a 0000-00-00 date, long note, and WatchPrePub. The Tor UK tp already had the latter (I'm not sure if it'll get the subtitle), so I'll check both of them in a couple of weeks. I *think* the Amazon preview is of a (slightly) different ebook from the original, as it has the new "chalkboard" cover rather than the original - as if someone just replaced that image in the epub/mobi, but left the other content unchanged. ErsatzCulture (talk) 17:23, 25 October 2022 (EDT)

EDIT: Just on the subject of Tor (US) - you wouldn't happen to know if/where their catalog(ue)s are available to the public these days, would you? The Tor/Tor.com ones on this page are a year out-of-date. ErsatzCulture (talk) 13:33, 24 October 2022 (EDT)

That's a complicated question :) Nowhere I know of online (I usually find a seasonal PDF from them when I look for one) although the macmillan pages will have the individual books. Annie (talk) 13:46, 24 October 2022 (EDT)

TBH, it was a slightly cheeky question, as the stuff in trade catalogues is usually less useful for ISFDB submissons than their websites. However, I find them interesting because they have stuff that has been cancelled or delayed, and in the case of Macmillan, details about publicity campaigns, which titles are being targetted for awards, etc, that doesn't normally leak out to the general public. I have to wonder if they've realized that, and that's why they're no longer on their public site for download :-( ErsatzCulture (talk) 17:23, 25 October 2022 (EDT)

Who knows. The last few years had been so weird that you never know what publishers may be doing these days. It made sense for all catalogs to be up with all trade shows and face to face things cancelled. These days? Who knows. The Henry Holt catalog is current so maybe we will see some of the others as well? I would not keep my breath though. I was just looking at the Bloomsbury winter one the other day. Annie (talk) 18:25, 25 October 2022 (EDT)

Jayda/Eden the Snowboarding Fairy, and the Daisy Meadows Fairy books in general

So this is a weird one. The UK sites have this ISBN as Jayda... not Eden... On Amazon UK, the cover image has Eden..., but if you click on the preview, the content is Jayda... Feels like there was some title change that never got communicated to Amazon.com - can you check to see what title the preview there has?

No preview on the US side. Nothing in this one triggered my spidery sense at the time :) It is now fixed. Annie (talk) 13:50, 31 October 2022 (EDT)

Thanks; I've also fixed the title for the "unknown" author titles records, and fixed the pub note that seemed to have been prematurely truncated. ErsatzCulture (talk) 13:41, 1 November 2022 (EDT)

More generally, I've noticed that some of these Fairy books that Fixer has been submitting have the same ISBNs as the UK ones, but with much later pub dates. Feels like maybe UK copies being shipped over the Atlantic in container freight or some equally slow method of transport? I only recently became aware of this series - which gives me "Adam Blade, but aimed at girls" vibes - so I'm only slowly going back and filling in the gaps, plus the new pubs as they come along. ErsatzCulture (talk) 19:54, 30 October 2022 (EDT)

Depends on the publisher. There is Orchard Books (UK) and then there is Orchard Books / Scholastic on the US side with different ISBN ranges. I try to untangle them and send them to the correct one (which also means usually resetting dates) but sometimes some slip - so I tend to hit the publishers pages occasionally and move things around where they belong. If you find them before me, feel free to readjust them. It is one of the pair of publishers that can get very tedious to untangle. Annie (talk) 13:50, 31 October 2022 (EDT)

Must confess I was too lazy to check the ISBN ranges - I'm currently showing 61 pubs by this author-gestalt that don't have any match in the database, and the data is so inconsistent between the vendor and publisher sites, I'm only attacking things very slowly... ErsatzCulture (talk) 13:41, 1 November 2022 (EDT)

Audible and their ASINs revisited

Sorry, this is a long and rambling one, even by my standards...

So a few months ago, I bugged you about Audible further up this page. Since then, I've been a bit of a coward, and whilst I have added a few audios, I've pretty much stuck to audio CDs, as they seemed simpler, albeit less common these days. However, I decided that it was overdue that I got my head around submitting these, so have now written a scraper for Audible.co.uk - and maybe their other sites? - but this has raised a few questions. A couple of examples to illustrate things:

Stephen Baxter's The Thousand Earths

AFAIK this has only had publications from Gollancz, but is available worldwide. Buried in the metadata of the audible.co.uk page are links to other Audible sites, the extracted data looks like this:

   {'de': 'B0B4T9Y1BF', 'en-ie': 'B0B4T8KM36', 'de-de': 'B0B4T9Y1BF', 'en-ca': 'B0B4TC7Z5Y', 'en-us': 'B0B4TDQ7T1', 'en-bb': 'B0B4TDQ7T1', 'en': 'B0B4TDQ7T1', 'en-za': 'B0B4TDQ7T1', 'fr': 'B0B4T95HHT', 'fr-ca': 'B0B4TC7Z5Y', 'de-at': 'B0B4T9Y1BF', 'en-nz': 'B0B4TF4438', 'fr-be': 'B0B4T95HHT', 'fr-ch': 'B0B4T95HHT', 'en-au': 'B0B4TF4438', 'de-lu': 'B0B4T9Y1BF', 'fr-lu': 'B0B4T95HHT', 'fr-fr': 'B0B4T95HHT', 'de-ch': 'B0B4T9Y1BF', 'en-gb': 'B0B4T8KM36', 'ja-jp': 'B0B4T9DG6J'}

So from this, I guess I should put B0B4TDQ7T1 as the Audible-ASIN value (audible.com link, and the audible.co.uk page as a link. Easy, right? Well......

Adrian Tchaikovsky's Eyes of the Void

This is one where the UK pubs are from Tor UK, and the US ones are Orbit US; you and Fixer already added the US audio, Audible-ASIN is B09VK6R673 for reference. The problem (for me doing the UK pubs) is when scraping the audible.co.uk page for this Tor UK pub, the international Audible-ASINs in the audible.co.uk page metadata include the Orbit US pub:

   {'de': 'B09LJQ5NM1', 'en-ie': 'B09LJZMW4G', 'de-de': 'B09LJQ5NM1', 'en-ca': 'B09LJX1QTQ', 'en-us': 'B09VK6R673', 'en-bb': 'B09LJY57WR', 'en-in': 'B09LJY4M5Q', 'en': 'B09VK6R673', 'en-za': 'B09LJY57WR', 'fr': 'B09LK48QGT', 'fr-ca': 'B09LJX1QTQ', 'de-at': 'B09LJQ5NM1', 'en-nz': 'B09LJWH2YG', 'fr-be': 'B09LK48QGT', 'fr-ch': 'B09LK48QGT', 'en-au': 'B09LJWH2YG', 'de-lu': 'B09LJQ5NM1', 'fr-lu': 'B09LK48QGT', 'fr-fr': 'B09LK48QGT', 'de-ch': 'B09LJQ5NM1', 'en-gb': 'B09LJZMW4G', 'ja-jp': 'B09LJV3RLF'}

So, when submitting this UK audiobook pub, just naively setting the Audible-ASIN field to the en-us value (B09VK6R673) would be wrong, as that's an Orbit pub, not a Tor one.

What might save the situation is that for some of the audible.co.uk pages I've scraped, there are a couple of hidden inputs that have a "reviewsAsin(UK|US)" value:

   (book_scraping) book_scraping $ grep -i reviewsasin /mnt/data2019/scraperecorder_data/uploads/www.audible.co.uk_pd_*Void*
   <input type="hidden" id="reviewsAsinUK" value="B09LJZMW4G">
   <input type="hidden" id="reviewsAsinUS" value="B09LJY57WR">

The "reviewsAsinUS" value here seems to be en-bb (Barbados?) and en-za - I'm guessing these are territories that use audible.com, but fall under UK & Commonwealth licencing? If I go to the audible.com page for B09LJY57WR, that does serve me details of a pub from Macmillan (albeit priced in USD), as opposed to redirecting me to a generic audible.co.uk page. Can you let me know what content gets served for that link from your side of the Atlantic?

(As an aside, GR only has B09LJX6JFH as an ASIN for the Tor audiobook, which doesn't match any Amazon or Audible ASIN that I've come across)

For cases like this, I propose to submit the en-bb/en-za Audible-ASIN, which seems to be (a) an ASIN which works on audible.com and (b) refers to the correct publication. (And include the audible.co.uk URL as a separate link, of course.) Does that seem reasonable to you? ErsatzCulture (talk) 15:36, 1 November 2022 (EDT)

The automation is getting you all confused here. Stop looking at the links which Amazon has added to facilitate selling -- it will connect different editions sometimes (when they are sold in different markets so relying on the link is a problem)

Audible.com (and all of the rest really) can have MORE than one record - if there are UK and US edition for example, it will often have both listed, sometimes one with "you cannot buy it here". The ASINs for both are different and unless they are ISBN10, they will be different from the rest of the Audibles across the world that show the same books. The basic rule is:

• Use an Audible ASIN which works on Audible.com (if it exists) AND matches the book - so if there is an Orbit one in UK and Recorded Books one in US, we need two separate records, each carrying its own Audible ASIN and the UK one carrying the Audible.co.uk link as well.
• If the book does not originate in USA (German, Spanish, UK book and so on), add the audible link from its closest Audible in the links and see if the book can be found in Audible.com for the ID from it.

I know you are trying to automate this but this is what got you confused here. :)

The GR ASIN is NOT an Audible ASIN but an Amazon ASIN. Audibooks will have both Audible ASINs (on the Audible page) and regular ASINs for the Amazon page. So for a UK audio-book which is available in the States as well, you will have:

• Audible ASIN
• 2 ASINs - one from Amazon.com and one from Amazon.co.uk
• Audible.co.uk link in the Web pages. Annie (talk) 17:48, 1 November 2022 (EDT)

Hi, so I had a look at what audible.com had to say about these two:

* The Baxter is listed with an Audible-ASIN of B0B4TDQ7T1, which is what audible.co.uk's metadata told me was the value for the US.

* For the Tchaikovsky, both the Orbit US and Tor UK audios are listed when searching for the title. The latter is listed with the BB/ZA/"reviewsAsinUS" Audible-ASIN B09LJY57WR, which matches what I was expecting based on the metadata on audible.co.uk.

As such, that very limited sample set seems to imply that the audible.co.uk data, and my processing logic for it, should be OK?

The problem - for me at least - with using audible.com as a data source for UK pbus is that none of the above pages (a) list the en-gb ASIN or (b) a GBP price. (I imagine the former is buried in the metadata, but I haven't checked.) As such, to submit these UK pubs, I'd still have to get info from audible.co.uk, and if that - in theory - has all the info that audible.com might provide, then that saves me the extra work of visiting audible.com.

However, until I've got the experience of doing a lot more audios, I'll double check things with audible.com, just in case there are any nasty edge cases lurking.

BTW, that GR ASIN of B09LJX6JFH isn't the amazon.co.uk ASIN - which is B09LK4RWDM - and Google doesn't know any pages that reference it, other than that GR listing. Clicking through to the details, it looks like it was submitted by a German GR editor, so perhaps it's the amazon.de ASIN? ErsatzCulture (talk) 12:39, 2 November 2022 (EDT)

If you are not sure, leave the Audible ASIN empty - it will show up on a report and if it is available, it will be added one day :)

Amazon.de is not scary: here it is :) As I mentioned somewhere, unlike ebooks, audio books always have different ASINs and Audible ASINs (unless they are ISBN10) across the different versions of Amazon (in the ones they are available in anyway). I tend to add the ones that are "natural" for the language and country the book is in (or closest for the languages which do not have Audible/Amazon version) so if you want to add this ASIN to ISFDB, be my guest and it is not wrong because it is a valid identifier after all... :) Annie (talk) 12:57, 2 November 2022 (EDT)

Enna Burning

Hi, Annie. For this edition, I don't understand how the month came from Locus1, which stops at 2007. Also, the archive.org copy has a £6.99 price and a cover by Hennie Haworth. Where did Alison Jay come from? —Rosab618 (talk) 22:29, 2 November 2022 (EDT)

No idea - all I did on this one was to move the OCLC from the notes to the external IDs when we added these and when I was moving the ones the automation could not. This is a very old record so we do not know who created it :( Annie (talk) 13:41, 3 November 2022 (EDT)

This listing on Abebooks shows a very different cover that's definitely not by Alison Jay. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 15:23, 3 November 2022 (EDT)

Because of the note of the incorrect ISBN, I wonder if it was not a bad assumption that this is a reprint of the 2004/2005 edition as opposed to a new edition (or if that note did not belong elsewhere actually). Annie (talk) 17:54, 3 November 2022 (EDT)

But where did the note about Locus1 come from?—Rosab618 (talk) 20:56, 3 November 2022 (EDT)

It was added by whomever added the book or by another editor a later stage a long time ago - before we started having history. There is no way to determine who added it unless the editor who did happens to remember. Annie (talk) 11:19, 4 November 2022 (EDT)

Quick question 2

When reviewing variant submissions which were submitted prior to another editor creating the same variants prior to the initial submissions being reviewed. Is our policy to reject or approve them anyway. I know it will only be a duplicate in the edit history. Thanks, John Scifibones 22:02, 9 November 2022 (EST)

No policy really. But this is what I do: If they are connecting existing titles, it does not matter so I tend to approve them if the time works out (aka if the original variant connection is after this one was submitted). Otherwise newish editors will just give up on doing the followups. If they are creating a new parent, reject because it will require a merge after that and that makes no sense - and I will follow up with an explanation on the editor’s page on the timing factor and thanking them for submitting them. However, if the variant was created by a moderator based on a cleanup report or something else, I would also ping the moderator and remind them to check the queue before “fixing” things - for the same reason - you don’t want editors to decide there is no point submitting the follow ups. Hope that makes sense. :) Annie (talk) 22:21, 9 November 2022 (EST)

I'm the moderator who submitted them while cleaning up Hungarian transliterations. The editor involved is the one with the majority of the submissions in the queue. I started to reject them but thought I'd ask. Still undecided which route to go. Sorry about the ambiguous thread title, thanks for fixing. John Scifibones 22:30, 9 November 2022 (EST)

The way I see things is that moderators have two equally important jobs: keep the quality of the data as high as possible and work with the editors so that they don’t feel discouraged and run away (or get sloppy because they know someone will fix things after them). So give yourself a warning not to do that again and do what feels right for you. Sometimes it will depend on the editor - when you were under moderation in the last months before you got permissions, I may have rejected yours and let you know why - if that would have scare you out, you were not moderator material and that is what I was looking at at the time. That specific editor? See all my notes from today on their page - their submissions require a lot of extra work very often - if you feel like rejecting, do so - just leave them a note on why it happened. Or approve them. Either way works. The current queue size is unprecedented in the last years so we are operating under somewhat weird conditions. Annie (talk) 23:00, 9 November 2022 (EST)

And no worries for the thread title - I am working off my phone in the evenings so scrolling around is annoying so I am just making sure the link in the Watchlist sends me where it is supposed to. :) Annie (talk) 23:08, 9 November 2022 (EST)

"Data probably from Amazon ..."; replacement of ISBN-named file

Annie, You approved my pubupdate for The Fish in Room 11 in 1st US ed. 5484525 approved. Two crucial note items are candidate boilerplate to be re-used (quote):

• "Data probably from Amazon.com prior to 2016-10-24." [damn@! quotation marks are not intended]
• This replaces an ISBN-named file at "/images/P/" that is visually identical today.

What do you think? Intended to address the /images/P/ problem as I understand it, for publications none of us has seen. Amazon.com now provides /I/ that is visually identical to the one at /P/ that it replaces here, but we don't know that the latter hasn't changed since we linked to it (more than six years ago, for the Fish in Room 11).

P.S. #5484574-75-76 complete the import of original Fish in Room 11 coverart into the early publications. I know that the /P/ will benefit from replacement and I have the info at hand for Update that will do that among other things. --Pwendt|talk 18:39, 10 November 2022 (EST)

I would not speculate on the source of the data. "Cover entered prior to 2016-10-24 based on the ISBN/ASIN of the book and replaced with a stable image based on the Amazon.com record as of 2022-11-10. That image may not be correct for this edition." sounds a bit better to me or something along these lines. People won't understand the /images/P thingie or why there is a problem if they do not know ISFDB or had not worked with Amazon's covers... In a better world, finding the cover elsewhere (ebay, other sellers, blogs - you get the idea) will allow you to replace cleanly; if not possible, a note is fine. I was pondering on the wording after the approval and was going to come talk to you when I make up my mind.:) Annie (talk) 18:49, 10 November 2022 (EST)

Now I may have submitted all the Fish in Room 11 updates and imports *except* further replacement of /P/ (one cover image) and reconsideration of the longer publication notes that partly concern cover images. Intellectually that's all I can handle. I'll return to those exceptions at proofread stage. --Pwendt|talk 15:38, 11 November 2022 (EST)

Submission 5486393 is a significant, not radical, alternative for your consideration. I haven't submitted any other replacement of a cover image file at "amazon.com/images/P/" during November 10-13, unless I am losing track of such matters faster than I know. --Pwendt|talk 20:44, 13 November 2022 (EST)

We do the best we can with these :) Annie (talk) 10:40, 14 November 2022 (EST)

Markwood

This PV finally responded re: the Spectrum title changes, 5484204, 5484207, 5484232, with a sarcastic comment about my name (even though they responded to a couple of my messages earlier in the year and didn't say anything about it then) and then said the titles were entered correctly based on the covers, so I had to let them know that it's what's on the title pages that matters here. They told me to get a 3rd opinion from a mod, so I'm letting you know so you can tell them the reason I was asking them about this in the first place is because a mod told me to. --Username (talk) 10:32, 11 November 2022 (EST)

The answer was within 24 hours so not sure what is with the "finally". You also do not need to post on my page - if I posted on yours, I am monitoring there and that allows the conversations to stay together. I will process the relevant submissions. Thanks! Annie (talk) 10:55, 14 November 2022 (EST)

I posted on your page because it was you who had me contact this guy about something I already knew the answer to, after which he responded with sarcasm and displayed his ignorance of how books are supposed to be entered; title page > cover. If I answered on my page there wouldn't be a separate message with his name on it to let people know that they may receive the same kind of response when they try to ask him a legitimate question. He couldn't even enter the notes about the title differences uniformly, with the last volume's note entered backwards. You mods made a giant mess of this site with the server move, with the biggest backlog of edits in the entire history, and then you want us to contact every PV about any and every change, even though many of them aren't active but none of you ever added the "no longer active" message to their pages, or they're like this guy and think this is a joke or something, not to mention the ones who answer with open hostility, of which there are more than a few. Instead of complaining you should be glad myself and a few others still contribute so much every day despite all the issues with this site and most of the others ISFDB is allowed to use. At least 1 long-time mod has apparently called it quits recently, at least until 2024, so don't be surprised when others are gone soon, too. --Username (talk) 11:30, 14 November 2022 (EST)

And it being on my page does not help much either for people seeing it.

There is a "last active" date next to the PV name on a book which tells you if the PV is around or not - the Wiki pages message is not automatic and we don't police them - if we see someone inactive we will add it but it is not a guarantee (and people come back without posting to their pages). Maybe if you do not call people "dude" when contacting them, they won't respond the way they do sometimes - just a thought. And we do require notes to be uniform.

Everyone contributes as much as they are able or willing to. Annie (talk) 11:40, 14 November 2022 (EST)

It helps a lot more than it being on my page, since the traffic on your page is enormous compared to mine. The "dude" thing came about because so many of the editors/mods here are such angry and/or pompous people that I adopted a fake cheery persona to try to combat that; sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. You seem to be under the illusion that this is some kind of professional site where people behave properly instead of the usual internet collection of bitter, mentally disturbed trolls, with a few legitimate scholars who actually care about entering this stuff. As I've said more than once here, I'm a complete amateur with no credentials at all who's been doing this for the last 2 years or so only because it's better than other things I could be doing. The fact that in that short space of time I have one of the highest number of edits in the entire history of this site says something; if I can do it, anyone can. Not to mention that thousands of those edits are correcting previous edits from other editors. Just a piece of advice: if these massive site problems that have been going on since the move aren't corrected soon, you're going to see a lot more editors than me leaving, dude. --Username (talk) 12:04, 14 November 2022 (EST)

The site is what people make it. (Almost) noone here is a professional or does anything around here because they have to - we do it because we like the genre. Belittling everyone else's contributions is not the way to make this a pleasant environment to work in. You have the time and you want to use it to contribute here? Great. Other people do the same - as much as they can around their other commitments.

PS: I already indicated that I find calling people dude a bad idea. Calling me dude in response is either childish, or disrespectful or both. Neither of these have any place in a site where collaboration is important. Annie (talk) 12:17, 14 November 2022 (EST)

Artist Matt Griffin

Matt Griffin record 212203 and Matthew Griffin record 239573 are the same person. Art work from Matthew (Ninth City Burning) and artwork from Matt (Dune) can be found together on https://www.tumblr.com/mattgriffinart. I have no idea on how to merge and rather than screw it up and cause lots of work for somebody and lots of ill will toward me, thought I'd just let you know. aardvark7 (talk) 22:01, 15 November 2022 (EST)

We won’t merge them - as we record credits as credited in the books. We will pseudonym them and variant the titles out from the one who becomes an alternate name. I can guide you through the process or I can get these connected. Let me know what you prefer. Or I can do both - I can do that one and still give you the steps so you know what to do for next time. Annie (talk) 22:05, 15 November 2022 (EST)

PS: No worries about making mistakes - everyone does.:) Annie (talk) 22:07, 15 November 2022 (EST)

I will let you play. Getting ready to play with a house 2.5 hours away, fun fun (not) But yes, please leave instructions. I think this is the second one I have come across. (LUISA J. PREIẞLER and her 3-4 permutations) aardvark7 (talk) 22:31, 15 November 2022 (EST)

I will sort it out in the morning and drop you a step by step. Have fun with the house. :) Annie (talk) 22:55, 15 November 2022 (EST)

And done: Matt Griffin. The required steps:

• Select who will be the canonical name (the one with more credits usually)
• Go to the other one (Matthew Griffin in this case) and use the "Make/Remove Alternate Name" menu to make it a pseudonym/alternate name for the canonical.
• For each title under the now new pseudonym:
  • If the same title already exists on the canonical name list, variant the second to the first (adjust the date of the parent if needed)
  • If it does not exist, create a new parent which shares all details but changes the name of the account.
  • Note: Art can be attributed based on secondary sources which do not give us the exact credit from the book. When that happens, we use the canonical name of the artist. If any of the art pieces under the now alternate name had been attributed that way, instead of making a variant, we just change the author credit. If there are two publications under that title and one is because it is the canonical name is used and one is "as is" from a book, they need splitting and proper assigning based on the new canonical.

That's it. That last part can be a pain for artists because not everyone adds proper notes when they credit based on secondary sources and using the canonical because of that... so if you are not sure, assume it is regular assignation and not canonical name one and go with a variant. Let me know if you have any questions :) 13:53, 16 November 2022 (EST)

The Book of Koli & The Fall of Koli

Please see this submission and this submission which would impact your verified pubs. Let me know if I should accept or not. If not, I would recommend updating notes to explain why credit is only in notes. -- JLaTondre (talk) 19:06, 16 November 2022 (EST)

I've copied the credit as I found it in the book into the notes. If you think this credit qualifies it as COVERART, approve them. I did not think so at the time and I am still not entirely sure they qualify but I won't argue the point (and if an editor with the book at hand decides to add them, I would approve it so there is that). That does open a question though: should we also start recording all author photographs as Interior Art titles and if not, where do we draw the line? :) Annie (talk) 17:00, 18 November 2022 (EST)

I rejected the edits since it was not an oversight on your part, but intentional. I am confused about the mention of author photographs. From the pub notes, this seemed to be one of those cases where a designer used a photograph as a basis of the artwork but it was a small enough component that the overall cover is not really the photographer's work. That's a judgement call that I'm fine with verifiers making though I think they should state they have made that call in the notes if they are going to record the photographer's credit (it reduces confusion down the road, especially if the verifier stops participating). However, if this was instead a credit for an author photograph, then the notes really should be updated to show it is an author photograph and not part of the artwork. -- JLaTondre (talk) 08:47, 19 November 2022 (EST)

I was just saying that if we create art titles for photographs for the front cover, why don’t we also credit the author ones with a proper title as well? :) The credit here is indeed for that plant on the front cover, not for the author’s photo. I’ll think on how to add a note explaining the lack of coverart title. Thanks! Annie (talk) 12:08, 19 November 2022 (EST)

Another confused fairy title: Soraya/Mikaela the Skiing Fairy

Hi, can you double check what this one looks like on your side of the Atlantic? I was just about to add the ebook of Soraya the Skiing Fairy, and was surprised that it wasn't a known title, when my tools told me the ISBN of the tp was in the database. The UK vendors all seem to agree that the title is Soraya here, but obviously the image Fixer got from Amazon.com says otherwise. This fandom wiki page says "Her original name was Mikaela." but I've no idea how reliable that might be, and it's not inconceivable it's some other context. Thanks ErsatzCulture (talk) 14:48, 2 December 2022 (EST)

Yeah - a few of these got renamed a few times (some after one publication, some before the first one) and I may not have cleaned all of them. I will check this one later today. Thanks for the heads up! Annie (talk) 14:59, 2 December 2022 (EST)

Dark Horse Stud

Hi, Annie. For this book, your note says, "Data from Kenneth R. Johnson's SF pornography." But I don't see it there (I was looking for a synopsis). Is it there? Thanks. —Rosab618 (talk) 05:06, 10 December 2022 (EST)

Never mind, I found it on the archived list of "Marginal Titles." —Rosab618 (talk) 05:16, 10 December 2022 (EST)

Conan: Blood of the Serpent ebook - out or not?

Hi, is this one showing as available to buy/download on Amazon.com? The info I can see from this side of the Atlantic is very confused:

• Amazon UK says pub date was Dec 6th, but the buy button says it's a pre-order and "This title will be auto-delivered to your Kindle and you will be charged on 20 December 2022." ?!?
• It's not listed on Kobo (GB), although the audio is
• B&N seems to indicate it is available to buy/download in the US now

AFAIK multiple UK retailers said the physical pub was in stock last week, so why the ebook has some arbitrary delay, Titan only knows... ErsatzCulture (talk) 18:25, 13 December 2022 (EST)

Yep - absolutely available at the moment with a date of December 13, 2022 (not interested in buying it though) - it was pre-order last week so it is definitely out. :) Annie (talk) 18:37, 13 December 2022 (EST)

Author credits on the (Captain) W. E. Johns ebooks

I missed a few of these, and you/Fixer added this one that came out today. I think this series won't be finished until early January, so if you process any more Fixer submissions of them, be aware that all of them so far have had messy credits, and that "W. E. Johns" is what has been on the title pages. (The inconsistent author names makes it harder for my tools to match up the disparate sources, so I haven't been as proactive on them as I might ideally be :-( ) ErsatzCulture (talk) 18:35, 13 December 2022 (EST)

EDIT: I've just fixed this one, in case you look at the links and wonder what I'm talking about ;-) ErsatzCulture (talk) 18:39, 13 December 2022 (EST)

Your link does not lead to a book but I know which set you mean. If it is one of the ones that is already out and you have a title page, sure, fix it. If it is not out and/or we do not have a title page yet, "I think it may have a different credit on the title page" is not a reason to use an author credit which is not in evidence. We record information based on sources, not hunches and "it may/should be the same as the others". If it is different once we have a title page, change it and write a note noting the difference between the cover and the title page; in the meantime until we have a title page, we record what we can get - which for pre-publication books usually mean what the cover shows (unless a publisher is nice enough to get out an early excerpt containing the title page). Annie (talk) 18:47, 13 December 2022 (EST)

Sorry about the dodgy link.

After getting caught out with the first two of these, I've been adding them with the likely correct name, with explanatory note and WatchPrePub. Then once pub date hits, I've checked them and updated the pub note, which seems slightly less effort than edit pub/unmerge title/make variant title. (Unless there's some alternative way that I don't know about.)

NB: the later ones seem to have the correct author in the sfgateway.com and Kobo listings; it's just the cover image and Amazon listings that are wrong. I wouldn't be surprised if they manage to put a pub out that has a different title page credit though, just to mess us around :-( ErsatzCulture (talk) 19:00, 13 December 2022 (EST)

Which is why I document what we can see and not what a book seller, or even the publisher, mentions as an author/title - they use whatever will help them sell more books. That way it is obvious it came from the cover and not from someone's imagination. I would not add things with "likely correct" data unless it has a very strong history (volume 12 in one of Anderle's series will keep the author credits the same way as it started - and even there I am very very careful when I contradict the visible cover). For this one, I don't feel comfortable contradicting the cover on a hunch... :) As long as there are notes, either way works but let's not "correct" books based on hunches and "most likelies" until we know how they are actually issued (and/or we have a title page somewhere). Throw a watchPrePub if you want to but don't go and change things... Still not sure which book you mean (I've added a few of these) so not sure if it is an already published one or not - if it is and you have a title page, all good; if not - see the previous sentence. :) Annie (talk) 19:06, 13 December 2022 (EST)

PS: We are in a similar situation with pretty much any title that has "and" or "&" in the title - they almost always need a second look at the title page. When I have a few minutes but don't have the patience for Fixer, I'd open the list for one of the recent months and check all omnibuses and all and/& titles. Occasionally some need fixing :) Annie (talk) 19:32, 13 December 2022 (EST)

The original one I was referring to was the one that came out today, but I also spotted the same issue with last week's so that's also been fixed. I think the upcoming ones are a mix of mine and your's/Fixer's - this one I think will need the author name fixing, but I'll leave as-is (other than the WatchPrePub I've just added). There's also one yet to be submitted, will try to get to that this week unless you/Fixer beat me to it. ErsatzCulture (talk) 19:49, 13 December 2022 (EST)

Philip K. Dick / Dr Bloodmoney - duplicate variants

Annie: thanks for approving this make variant of Dr Bloodmoney. I thought this was the last edit but was just checking over all the records and all does not look quite right. There was an existing Dr Bloodmoney variant and so now there are duplicate variant titles with the same name. I think I just need to merge them so have submitted this edit to do so. This is the first time I've come across this scenario so would you mind checking that I've done everything correctly. It seems to have taken a lot of edits to get the desired result. Could I have done this more efficiently (ie fewer edits)? Thanks. Teallach (talk) 19:00, 22 December 2022 (EST)

I missed to check on this one or would have merged. Approved yours. You could have skipped making the variant (step 4) and just merged directly (step 5). But other from that, that’s the process: rename the publication, unmerge the title (it will grab the title from the publication so you need to wait for it to be approved) and then merge. The other option would have been RemoveTitle and Import instead of the unmerge and merge/variant. So same number of steps and that route is ugly while in the middle of the edits (publication with no title page) so I tend to use the process you used. And that is without covers and interior art - add them and you may have more steps (additional unmerges and variants and/or merges OR Remove/Import. :) Annie (talk) 19:19, 22 December 2022 (EST)

Ok, I see now. I didn't realise it was possible to merge one step earlier so thanks for the heads up. Useful to know for the future. Teallach (talk) 11:04, 23 December 2022 (EST)

Octavia E. Butler / Survivor

I am editing and PVing Survivor and will add Month (from Locus magazine), note about Gutter code and will replace cover image with unsmudged, full frontal scan from my copy. Teallach (talk) 18:48, 23 January 2023 (EST)

Go ahead. I did not see a gutter code but I don’t think I looked for one in that one anyway. :) Annie (talk) 08:13, 24 January 2023 (EST)

New Subseries

Annie, I've forgotten how to set up a new subseries. I just entered a new "Crypt of Cthulhu", the first in a couple of years. The series has a subseries for each year of publication, but I seem to have forgotten how to set one up. Help! Bob (talk) 23:26, 31 January 2023 (EST)

A sub series as opposed to a yearly record for a magazine, right? Add the sub series on the book itself and once created edit the new series to add the parent series as a parent (by title and not by Id). The software will connect them Annie (talk) 23:37, 31 January 2023 (EST)

Thank you! Bob (talk) 10:43, 1 February 2023 (EST)

anytime. :) PS: If you were talking about yearly record of a magazine, just rename the title record to be Magazine - Year. Annie (talk) 19:52, 1 February 2023 (EST)

Pwendt for self-approver

Hi, Annie. I hope to be a self-approver imminently. I prefer to be nominated by another, but I plan to nominate myself ("Self-nomination for self-approver") sometime tomorrow if none of you, plural, is available ready and willing in the next 20 hours or so. I write to a couple others too. --Pwendt|talk 15:44, 2 February 2023 (EST)

Sorry, I was out for a medical thing and did not see this until now. I’d have nominated you (or would do it in the morning if you had not posted yet. Annie (talk) 21:54, 5 February 2023 (EST)

Art

Hi Annie, further to discussion elsewhere... to quote you "If the art itself is not close enough to be merged, it is not a variant candidate." set me thinking about an interesting scenario I came across.

Without any previous insight, these two images Tales of Majipoor and Interzone, #205 July-August 2006 don't seem connected. However, they are, on the Interzone title record where they are varianted (I added the note there "...both parts of the same painting...", and have a look at the link). The Interzone cover includes some of the Majipoor imagery, but the converse is not true. If I've interpreted you correctly these 'should be' merged. Is that right? Kev. --BanjoKev (talk) 17:09, 10 February 2023 (EST)

Well, no - you cannot merge them because they have different titles (the holy trinity of title/author/language (supported by translator for texts)). One is "Interzone, #205 July-August 2006", the other is "Tales of Majipoor". Even if they were literally the same image, they still be variants. We do NOT rename covers to match the title of the painting they show or any other book, we use the title of the book as a COVERART title. :)

This is the kind of weirdness that I really dislike when we variant partial images - you end up with two unrelated images either merged or varianted because they are both parts of another... :) Annie (talk) 17:45, 10 February 2023 (EST)

Doh! Of course, different titles - and you said that before :(( Btw, Jim sent me a big .jpg of his painting, it's absolutely beautiful. Kev. --BanjoKev (talk) 18:07, 10 February 2023 (EST)

No worries :) It takes awhile to get some of that to become automatic and even then, there is so many things to keep in mind that slip-up happen. What I was saying is that if two covers won't be merged if they had the same title/author/language, then they cannot be variants either. That's a good way to decide if you want to variant - would you merge them if they had the same title/author/language? If not, you are not varianting either. We are only talking covers vs covers (or interior art vs interior art) - interior art with the same image will always be a variant or parent to a cover (they never get merged cross-type. This is one of the 2 cases where variants can go cross types (the other one is SERIAL - that can be varianted to a NOVEL or SHORTFICTION).

It looks like a very nice picture even from the small version we have :) Annie (talk) 18:22, 10 February 2023 (EST)

Asimov - Foundation and Empire

Hi Annie, can you see any good reason for having this single pub title (as novel) separate from all these (as collection) because I can't. I read a review of the relevant Doubleday edition ISBN on Amazon which identified the two novellas: The General & The Mule. Whatever the reason might have been, I'm missing it. Thanks, Kev. --BanjoKev (talk) 18:31, 14 February 2023 (EST)

Nope. It was a collection (see here) so you may want to check with Bob on why he changed it instead of merging it where it belongs. It needs either a note explaining the decision OR it needs to be changed and merged. Annie (talk) 10:54, 15 February 2023 (EST)

Thanks for looking - I'll ask him. Kev. --BanjoKev (talk) 11:01, 15 February 2023 (EST)

Split novels

Would I be hijacking the thread to suggest ending the use of split novels? I'm guessing they were a 'workaround' before the introduction of serials. John Scifibones 15:07, 23 February 2023 (EST)

I am not sure if the SERIALS were not here before the split novels actually - some of our older records are magazines and SERIALS belong there. :)

Try to loop them into this one only if you want to make sure that the rules stay exactly as they are now. :) The only way to change things around here is to do it gradually - like the river that carved the Grand Canyon. That's why we did SERIALs in Chapbooks first. If you look up the old conversations, you will see that we did talk about split novels but as usual the conversation fizzled...

Now - by all means, mention it as "then there are the split novels but let's leave them for a different discussion" or something just so that it is clear we know they are there but we are really not targeting them but don't try to change all at the same time or things will never get changed. Look at what we had been changing lately (last 5 years or so) - small steps, continuously chipping at the rules that do not make sense.

Take my advice with as many pinches of salt as you want. :) Annie (talk) 15:18, 23 February 2023 (EST)

PS: When and if you start the conversation about split novels, think of the container we will be using. The cleanest way IMO will be to allow a SERIAL as the fiction in a NOVEL container but that changes radically what a NOVEL container can do and is supposed to be. Requiring them to be CHAPBOOKs so they can have a SERIAL will be a nightmare to explain, change and maintain - some languages split pretty much any novel they get their hands on... If I remember correctly, this is where we fizzled last time. Thus my advice to handle the easy case here (no container change required), then go for the other elephant. Annie (talk) 15:22, 23 February 2023 (EST)

IMO, remaining the same is the worst possible outcome. I'll hold off even mentioning them. Thanks, John Scifibones 15:36, 23 February 2023 (EST)

Flyer

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?851357; There are 2 editions on ISFDB; 1 says printed in USA in notes, 1 says printed in Canada. The person who entered the price for Canada forgot to put a C in front of it as was done for several Canadian editions of other books from Popular Library that year that are on ISFDB. Don Erikson, who PV USA, is first in edit history for Canada and just copy-and-pasted notes from one edition to another, only changing USA to Canada. --Username (talk) 18:19, 2 March 2023 (EST)

So it is probably Canadian but we have an active PV here so Chavey needs to be consulted to make sure that his PV does not need to be moved in case he got tripped by the price or that there is nothing inside of the book that actually points to a US price despite the printing location.

PS: Don was not the first editor to work on that record - we just do not have the history pre-2016-10-24 and his edit did not touch the price so this is an older entry. None of the edits changed the price on that one. So ping Chavey for a verification and resubmit if he confirms. Annie (talk) 18:34, 2 March 2023 (EST)

Is PV really active? Because from what I can see he hasn't responded to anything since May of 2022. There are nearly a dozen 2023 messages on his board, including several from me, that got no response. I wrote a note to him about this per your command, which will also likely remain unanswered. I wonder how many other Canadian editions from this publisher also don't have a C in their prices on this site. --Username (talk) 19:01, 2 March 2023 (EST)

The answers in the wiki are one element of activity. If you look at one of his PVed book such as here, you can see when he last edited the DB. Some of the older data had been entered under a different set of rules or simply never cleaned up. When we find it, we clean it. Annie (talk) 19:09, 2 March 2023 (EST)

The Epic of Gilgamesh

Hello Annie!

I have been reading about the Epic of Gilgamesh and I have some issues on how it has been presented on ISFDB:

It has been presented as a "Novel" and I think that it is incorrect. From my research and reading (represented in the note) it was known in ancient times as "Sha naqba īmuru" (the first line from the first poem) and "iškar Gilgāmeš" ("Series of Gilgamesh" - as we see in a 1st millennium BCE catalog (source)).

I think that it would be correct to do some editing: to create new pages from each poem in the epic (you can see the transliterated versions, so we may get the first line, here), while keeping the original page to add "composite" versions (the translations which mixed Akkadian and Babylonian sources to close the gaps).

What do you think? We could create an Anthology (as I think it should be seen) with only the Akkadian titles (following the link above) while considering Sîn-lēqi-unninni as its editor and other version for the Old Babylonian poems. If is ok with you, I would like for you to change this translation to "Anthology", so I may start with my idea. Tomorrow (March 4) after at 9:00 am UTC I should be online again.

PS: I started thinking about this again due this submission (a literary magazine with some speculative content - 1st magazine) and it even gave me some insomnia haha

Thanks, ErickSoares3 (talk) 19:50, 3 March 2023 (EST)

Hi again! Thinking more, I believe that would be better to treat the Epic as a series:

1-) Two main series for the Akkadian and Sumerian versions; 2-) 3 subseries for the Composite, Prose and Free adaptations.

What do you think? ErickSoares3 (talk) 04:30, 4 March 2023 (EST)

I went and did it to see how it looked. ErickSoares3 (talk) 07:02, 4 March 2023 (EST)

Correct link. ErickSoares3 (talk) 08:59, 4 March 2023 (EST)

I will look at that a bit more later (I am out of the house today) but one thing to consider is that not all translations translate the same things and they don’t always indicate it cleanly. So splitting into the separate poems may be very challenging logistically (for example the first Penguin edition adds one of the Sumerian poems at the end (the death of Gilgamesh) and does not present the Akkadian version per poem. Plus these “poems” were technically never separate entities - they just did not have enough space to write them together. We kinda sorta separate them in modern editions because of that but… So I don’t think that the Akkadian version is really an anthology - it is one single text. You may want to post in R&S because this kind of decisions are always community decisions and not a single editor deciding they have a new idea :) Annie (talk) 13:37, 4 March 2023 (EST)

I don't know if to ask somewhere else would be useful: it was attempted back in 2020, but no one helped. Be "Anthology" or "Collection", anything would be better than "Novel" (something that it clearly wasn't). For much, the prose adaptation could be seen as a novel... ErickSoares3 (talk) 13:53, 4 March 2023 (EST)

Self-Approver

Hello, as you're in the list of moderators handling my most recent submission, can you please comment on https://isfdb.org/wiki/index.php/ISFDB:Community_Portal#Self-Moderation_Request? --Stoecker (talk) 06:43, 11 March 2023 (EST)

I will post in a bit but... I am not sure you are ready yet. While a lot of the work you do is good, I had seen some creativity which will require someone to track what you are doing an clear things after you. Easy enough when you are moderated, not so easy when you are on your own. I would admit though that I don't remember how recently these were... so how about 3 months of a waiting period - I will keep an eye on your submissions for the next 3 months and if none of these issues resurface, I will support a nomination. Annie (talk) 12:24, 13 March 2023 (EDT)

Jaroslav Kalfar's A Brief History of Living Forever - variant author name issues

This one doesn't have a parent variant title for the primary author record. Is that just an oversight, or is there a reason - that I've quite possibly forgotten - why that hasn't been done in this case?

Although, when I look more closely, it seems that this might be better recorded against the parent author? A close look at the cover image of the US pubs has the accented r, and the UK cover and ebook title page also has the accented r. It seems only the product listing data (at all the UK vendor sites) has the vanilla ASCII r; I guess that's what happens when you let ignorant Anglophones do data entry on European names, eh? ;-) ErsatzCulture (talk) 17:40, 29 March 2023 (EDT)

That would be door O as in Oops - I've missed the name difference initially and then it rolled from there. Fixed :) Annie (talk) 17:52, 29 March 2023 (EDT)

Rich Horton's 2014 Best Of ebook and inconsistent dates

Hi, favour/advice requested...

I've just added the ebook of Rich Horton's 2014 Best Of. In the review screen, I got a yellow warning about the pub date being earlier than the 3 essays - the tp seems to have come out a couple of weeks later. Whilst in theory this was straightforward to fix, it's thrown up a niggle about what the most plausible pub date was.

Amazon UK lists it as 2014-06-03, but Kobo GB has 2014-06-04. As the former is a Tuesday, I assumed that would be the one to use. However, somehow the title record (which hasn't changed since 2014) already had 2014-06-04, even though that differs from the only pub that was recorded in the database prior to today?!?

I also note that tp pub has 2014-06-18, which is also a Wednesday, which makes me wonder if Prime Books maybe does weird stuff with pub dates, hence me bouncing this over to you? (I'm not at all familiar with their output/practices.) Not that one day difference makes any real difference, but might as well try to get it right now that I've got to this point...

Of course, all of this was an unforeseen side-effect/yak shaving from the actual real problem I'm trying to get fixed, sigh :-( ErsatzCulture (talk) 12:09, 31 March 2023 (EDT)

For what it is worth, Amazon.com shows the ebook as Prime Books (June 3, 2014). The 03/04 thing may be due to a geographical/timezone displacement -- set the date late enough in the day in US in a platform that shows/record timestamps and user's own timezone and both UK and Australia sources/users who do not account for the timestamp will see it as the next day. I'd use 2014-06-03 as this is what our sources have (with a note on the discrepancies if you want to add them) Annie (talk) 12:23, 31 March 2023 (EDT)

Thanks, I'll finish sorting this out over the next day or so. ErsatzCulture (talk) 16:49, 31 March 2023 (EDT)

Hachette's Mobius (non?) imprint

Did I mention this to you before? The note I copypasted in there should cover the essentials, but in short it looks to me like any pub that comes in from Fixer that lists "Mobius" as the publisher will - and/or might? - actually have a different "real" (UK) publisher/imprint.

I was alerted to them a few months ago when I saw a Locus review that listed them as the publisher, and as I didn't recognize the name I did a bit of digging, and found the ISBN they listed was the same as a (IIRC) Gollancz pub. I was reminded of this because I just added this, and was slightly surprised the title hadn't already been created from you doing a US version. Looking on B&N, it seems like they are selling the UK Jo Fletcher edition, but have "Mobius" listed at the publisher.

Of the 2 pubs currently in the database attributed to Mobius, this 2022 one seems to be a UK release from several months earlier - I'll update the record once I've scraped some detail on it. (It wasn't on my radar at all, so I've only just started grabbing pages, and won't have them all processed until tomorrow.)

The other one is a bit more of a mystery, as both Amazon UK and Blackwell's have product pages for it, both giving Mobius as the publisher/imprint, and there's a separate "proper" UK hc. In the absence of any firmer evidence, that Mobius one seems like it should be left as-is? ErsatzCulture (talk) 16:26, 18 April 2023 (EDT)

Well, I left both for the US side of the house so seems like it did not click with me it is a UK one. As you can see, we do not have that many so they had not gotten my spidey sense on yet -- there is a huge amount of small publishers out there. If you find better information, fix it, add notes - you know how it works. And yes - if we cannot find evidence on different name, we leave what the sources tell us :) Annie (talk) 16:32, 18 April 2023 (EDT)

OK, I've now fixed Magpie Lane (and will add the ebook and audio pubs at some point over the next days). ErsatzCulture (talk) 19:21, 18 April 2023 (EDT)

Thanks! Annie (talk) 20:08, 18 April 2023 (EDT)

Reminder of this: neither of these are really Mobius - one is Jo Fletcher, the other Gollancz. I'll fix them shortly - at least one is a few days earlier for the UK release. Is this something that Fixer could highlight in the submission e.g. changing the publisher name to "Mobius - PLEASE CHECK" or suchlike? ErsatzCulture (talk) 18:27, 4 June 2023 (EDT) EDIT: as that link won't show anything post-fix, for the record it was this and this. It looks suspiciously like they're putting in generic placeholder page counts of 400 just to add insult to injury. ErsatzCulture (talk) 18:41, 4 June 2023 (EDT)

Markus Heitz The Dark Lands 2019 ebook

In a vaguely similar vein to the discussion about Adam Roberts' recent ebook, and US vs UK prices, if you have time/inclination, can you see if you can expand on this which I just added? There's a "proper" UK pub out next week, which - I'm guessing - has caused that older pub to be delisted from Amazon UK, but it's still on Kobo and B&N, and I was able to get/corroborate some extra info from GR and FB.

In particular, the Kobo GB price of £5.99 looks more plausible than the B&N price of $8.21, but it seems to be a German publisher - and the preview pages indicate it has been typeset using German quoting style conventions!?! - so who knows what market it is/was aimed at? FWIW, I couldn't find it using the search facility on the publisher's website.

(I'm guessing this title should also be linked to the Solomon Kane series in some way, but I think I'll push that as a separate talk item on Community Portal in case there are any Robert E. Howard experts who might have a more informed opinion than me.)

Thanks ErsatzCulture (talk) 19:14, 18 April 2023 (EDT)

Actually, it is the German price that we want as it is a German publisher even if the book is in English (unless it is specifically marketed elsewhere). Massaged the title a bit -- including adding the Goodreads which you used as a source but did not add as an external ID ;) That also confirmed the ISBN and the date from a German source (which is added into the links). In such cases, go to the country of the publisher, not the country of the language of the book :) Always helps to check both. Annie (talk) 19:23, 18 April 2023 (EDT)

Tweaks to ASIN notes on ExternalIDs help page

Hi, I've just made an edit to the ExternalIDs help page, to try to clarify what should (or shouldn't) go in the ASIN and Audible-ASIN fields. Could you check it for anything I've got wrong, or which could be phrased more clearly or concisely? Thanks! ErsatzCulture (talk) 12:05, 21 April 2023 (EDT)

Looks fine. :) Annie (talk) 12:46, 21 April 2023 (EDT)

Hodder & Stoughton -> Hodderscape

Just a head's up if you come across any UK pubs from these - or other variants like Hodder Paperbacks - that Template:Publisher seems to be a real imprint now, not just a marketing thing. Annoyingly, it looks like they've had publications go up on Amazon etc with the metadata listing "H&S", and then some time after publication switching the metadata to "Hodderscape". The title & copyright pages in the previews have Hodderscape, presumably those were correct at publication, although I guess there's no way of knowing now.

I'll go through and fix any as appropriate - I think there's a bunch of YAish fantasy pubs that haven't gotten into the database yet due to me sulking for ~3 months; at least that saves having to check and updte those as well ;-)

AFAIK, more mainstream stuff like Stephen King will be staying as H&S. ErsatzCulture (talk) 16:49, 26 April 2023 (EDT)

I think I saw Hodderscape somewhere earlier - maybe in one of the books in my queue that is waiting for me to come back and look at the publisher so I can add it. If I get any wrong, just fix them - we do the best we can do based on the sources we have. The switch to the actual publisher/imprint at a later stage is not uncommon lately for some reason - especially with the paperback-only imprints... :) Annie (talk) 17:01, 26 April 2023 (EDT)

Annoyingly, it seems to be a big mess: I just checked the Amazon listing for the ebook of this January title, and the metadata now says Hodderscape but the preview/title page has H&S :-( I scraped Amazon's ebook page for that a month ago (i.e. ~2 months post-pub) and at that time it said H&S. Looks like someone did a blind bulk data update? This new imprint was supposed to come into effect in March, so I wasn't expecting there to be any confusion over a January pub, sigh....

I think WatchPrePub is going to get a fair bit of use for a while... ErsatzCulture (talk) 17:18, 26 April 2023 (EDT)

Welcome to my life :) Every time a new imprint gets started, there is a mess to deal with for awhile. And then it turns out that the first dozen books from the imprint were printed before the publisher made up their mind so the first printing run is actually from the original publisher, just sold and advertised as the imprint. Or they reprint the needed sheets to make it properly the imprint but do not update the media file they update everywhere. Or something like that. Sometimes all we can do is to record what we are seeing, add copious notes and hope that a PV will show up for this book one day. Annie (talk) 17:22, 26 April 2023 (EDT)

Another mess: Natasha (C.) Calder

So I just added Whether Violent or Natural, which atypically I thought I'd look up on GR, mainly to see if it had been shelved as speculative. Turns out it also has simultaneous US pubs that Fixer hasn't yet put through (pub date is May 11th).

Unfortunately I noticed that the cover images for the US hc and ebook have inconsistent names - "Natasha Calder" (as on the UK pub's cover) and "Natasha C. Calder". The latter is already in the database for a single piece of short fiction. So, depending on which name is on the US pub(s), either could be the canonical author record?!? FWIW the author's site lists their short fiction, with most of it apparently using the middle initial, but there's nothing obvious to me as to why the two variants are used. I clicked on one of the stories that uses the no-middle-initial variant, and that turns out to be from a Dec2022 anthology that Fixer hasn't submitted.

Any chance you can have a look at what exactly this upcoming US novel uses? If it turns out to use the no-middle-initial, that makes me feel more comfortable that should be the primary author entry.

(Just as the cherry on top, this author previously had a cowriter joint pseudonym, that will also need to be resolved properly with these author records.) Thanks ErsatzCulture (talk) 18:11, 26 April 2023 (EDT)

The US edition won't be out until Jun 27 and I am just starting the first run through June - that is why it is missing (if Fixer found it of course and it got sorted into Q1). Seems to be without a middle initial. Annie (talk) 18:32, 26 April 2023 (EDT)

Ah, I misread the GR page, I assumed US was the same date as UK. Anyway, I think I've sorted out all the author varianting, and I'll see about adding that missing anthology over the next few days. Thanks agaain. ErsatzCulture (talk) 18:46, 26 April 2023 (EDT)

No worries. The new GR interface is... bad if you are looking at editions. One trick - go to the "Show All Editions" page even if all are visible on the main page. It gets you this here - which is a LOT easier to read (and had not changed when they revamped the main page). Annie (talk) 18:52, 26 April 2023 (EDT)

"Hard Landing" by Algis Budrys - I need help

Hi Annie.

I hope life is treating you well.

The last novel by Algis Budrys was his great (IMHO) epistolary novel, "Hard Landings".

ISFDB has this as a novella in the October 1992 issue of F&SF https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?47322. ISFDB also has it as a novel published in March 1993 by Questar/Warner https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1815.

I was curious about how the "two versions" related, as it's not uncommon for a novel to be expanded from a shorter work, or to be a fix-up of multiple short works, or even for the shorter version to be cut down from the novel ("Rogue Moon" by Budrys is one of these, as is "The Hemingway Hoax" by Joe Haldeman). Especially where there is a clear relationship between shorter SFF and novels or vice versa, I think it's important for ISFDB to be as complete and correct as possible.

For a number of reasons, I have concluded that there is only one version of "Hard Landings". 1) Within the F&SF issue, it is noted throughout (TOC, at the story, and in the "Coming Attractions" in the previous issue as a "novel" throughout, not a novella. I did inquire of the editor Kristine Kathryn Rusch if she remembered anything about this, with no answer a week later. I may not hear from her. Regardless, I tend to think she and her staff were pretty on top of length definition. Additionally, although you can't necessarily compare page length in different formats, the page length for "Hard Landing" was almost double that of all of the other "novellas" by F&SF in 1992. 2) Within ISFDB, at the "Hard Landing" novel entry, it notes this for the Hugo Award status, "Withdrawn -- Official Publication in a Previous Year 1994 Hugo Best Novel". I did attempt to contact the Hugo Administrators to get confirmation, but the two remaining that are alive no longer remembered or had any clear access to paperwork. However, this does fit with a novel that was really first published in 1992 in F&SF, not first in 1993. 3) While I have not done a word to word comparison, I did scan the novella and novella versions found on Internet Archive. The structure, paragraph breaks, chapter breaks, etc. matched up exactly.

So, assuming that my analysis is adequate, I'd like to appropriately edit ISFDB to show only one version, with the F&SF "novel" as the original and not the March 1993 Questar version. Is this a "Make Variant" situation? At a minimum, the 1992 F&SF entry needs to show up as a novel and not a novella.

Sorry to be clueless about some of this. I appreciate your help. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by ‎Dave888 (talk • contribs) .

So if it is indeed the same novel and it is a novel, you need to do two things:

• Change the novella in the magazine to a SERIAL with the title "Hard Landing (Complete Novel)".
• Variant that into the actual novel with the later novel being the parent (we use the date of the novel publication and not the serialized one even when the serialization is complete so the parent will have the 1993 date, the child the 1992 date)

However - you may want to try to find the length of this thing before you do anything else - if it is under 40K, it will be a novella and then we convert the novel to a novella and its publications to chapbooks and then you merge the two novella records. Annie (talk) 14:55, 28 April 2023 (EDT)

Annie, thanks for inserting my name above. Sorry about that. I checked the word count by one suggested method, which was to estimate word count based upon a random sampling of three pages, counting words on the top line, counting lines, and then multiplying both by the number of pages. The average word count from this process was about 51,000 words, so this is pretty clearly a novel.

I will go ahead and follow the steps outlined. I'll circle back if anything surprising happens that I can't deal with. Thanks and best wishes.Dave888 (talk) 17:51, 2 May 2023 (EDT)

Annie, thanks for your help. I think I got it right finally. Best wishes.Dave888 (talk) 18:35, 13 May 2023 (EDT)

Defining "Published"

A quick heads-up since you participated in this Rules and Standards discussion back in February: a new version of the proposed Policy update has been posted and is available for review/discussion. Ahasuerus (talk) 16:30, 30 April 2023 (EDT)

Magpie Books(I) name

I've added some notes and links to this imprint. Would "Magpie Books / HarperCollins" not be a better way of disambiguating from the other Magpie Books? I would have made that edit, but it seems that lowly pleb editors don't have the privs for that, dunno if you can? ErsatzCulture (talk) 18:57, 13 May 2023 (EDT)

How about now? As it is really nested under an imprint, it gets the imprint as its main publisher. :) Annie (talk) 12:34, 15 May 2023 (EDT)

That's fine with me, thanks. I did ponder the "imprint of an imprint" thing, but I didn't want to risk getting into the "Harper Voyager" / "HarperVoyager" discussion again ;-) ErsatzCulture (talk) 16:47, 15 May 2023 (EDT)

I think it was the parent one (Collins) that we had the discussion about - but who remembers anymore. I just matched the name as we have it in the DB -- and added notes on both publishers' pages to link them to each other. If someone prefers different naming, they can start a discussion to change it... :) Publishers are... complicated. What we really need is the ability to use multiple names and/or canonical names which link to what the books actually say- but that is a different story. So we do what we can. Annie (talk) 17:08, 15 May 2023 (EDT)

Visões de Robô or Visões de robô

Hello Annie, could you tell me which is the correct regularization for this Portuguese title? There are several instances in this pub, for example. Thanks, Kev. --BanjoKev (talk) 14:30, 15 May 2023 (EDT)

That is a bit of a complicated question with Portuguese - as it turned out, Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese follow different rules in that regard - usually you can tell by the translator and publisher which case you are in but sometimes, it is not as clear. So I tend to let the editor adding follow their own rules when adding unless they end up needing to be merged. I prefer the go lower standard (all smalls unless names and first words) when I am adding Portuguese books but I am not fixing the Portuguese in any way. We may want to restart the discussion on this one - as it is the only one of our languages where we really do not have a good understanding of what we should be doing. Annie (talk) 15:02, 15 May 2023 (EDT)

PS: As this one was added by a native speaker, I'd go with their standard... Annie (talk) 15:04, 15 May 2023 (EDT)

As you can see in that example, some robots have caps and some not :) I've asked Erick to visit here. Hopefully he can shed more light on how we should treat Brazilian Portuguese. Kev. --BanjoKev (talk) 15:31, 15 May 2023 (EDT)

I also can see that all of the ones that use all small letters was changed by you very recently - before that they all were having their caps. So no - the book did not have them mixed up before you decided to apply your own rules on them. Just saying. :) Annie (talk) 17:12, 15 May 2023 (EDT)

You're absolutely right Annie, I did transliterate some titles, thinking I was following the rationalization help, but there were upper and lower cases before I did that. If I undid those edits, things would still not be sorted and that's why I called time-out on myself :) Perhaps I should have gone the other way and capitalised the lower case ones. The guidance for other languages is clear but nothing for this. Kev. --BanjoKev (talk) 17:21, 15 May 2023 (EDT)

Edit. Sorry I should have made clear that I only used that pub as an example - there are others. Kev. --BanjoKev (talk) 17:23, 15 May 2023 (EDT)

I meant "Robô" specifically here. :) Keep in mind that unlike English where we have a short list of what NOT to capitalize, other languages follow their standards even when they are not sentence case - so in German all nouns are capitalized; in Portuguese, all connecting words and so on are not (the rest depends on the dialect or who knows). As I said - Portuguese is complicated around here due to the dual standards and the fact that we never got around to set a proper rule for it. :)

PS: Some of the other "differently capitalized" ones in this book (and other Portuguese records) are caused by other editors deciding to "fix" them the way they think it should look like without checking the language or the rest of the book(s) - there is at least one who is very prone to applying sentence case to Portuguese when he sees it - without talking to PVs or native speakers. I will see if I can ping a few more of the editors who work the language later and then I will sort out this book. Annie (talk) 17:30, 15 May 2023 (EDT)

Meanwhile, I can easily undo all the changes I made so things start as they were - shall I? In light of others getting it wrong too, a Portuguese guide in the Title Regularization help wouldn't go amiss. What do you think? Kev. --BanjoKev (talk) 17:43, 15 May 2023 (EDT)

Let's leave it like that for a bit until we sort out what we want to do. And yes - we probably need some notes in there but earlier attempts went nowhere. I will find the all threads and see where we left it off and kick off the conversation again. :) Annie (talk) 17:48, 15 May 2023 (EDT)

Thanks for your understanding. I'm uncomfortable just leaving my edits (x9) as they are but, as you say, best leave them until we have more clarity. Kev. --BanjoKev (talk) 17:57, 15 May 2023 (EDT)

Hi! Going by this guide by the Fundação Alexandre de Gusmão what Annie's said - "all lower case unless first name" - is the correct in Brazil and other's Portuguese-language countries (there are some exceptions, but I don't think that they matter in our case_, since it is from the 1990 Orthographical Agreement. But the author/publisher may want to change it for artistic reasons ("Visões de Robôs" may look better in the cover than "Visões de robôs"). It is possible to read the section from the Agreement on Wikisource. We also need to think on how to deal with works which predates the 1990 Agreement, as an example: Sítio do picapau amarelo (a 1920s-1940s book series) is traditionally Sítio do Picapau Amarelo. While "Picapau" (Woodpecker) is supposed to be "Pica-pau" in modern spelling, the publishers haven't changed the book series title. ErickSoares3 (talk) 16:46, 16 May 2023 (EDT)

It could also happen for the author/publisher to put an all upper case title for any reason. In those cases, I think that would be better to follow the official Agreement. ErickSoares3 (talk) 16:52, 16 May 2023 (EDT)

Ah, that is what I was remembering - the pre-1990s rules - I know there was something about Portuguese that was making it a mess and when I was cleaning up some records, they were the older European books so for some reason it was the location and not the timing that remained in my mind. What the publisher does for esthetic and artistic reasons is irrelevant (As opposed to doing it for valid reasons such as a word being an acronym for example or other plays on words) - we standardize based on published standards of the language. If the standard for Portuguese these days is to use sentence case (only proper names and first words in a sentence are capitalized), that's what we do (so we use Visões de robôs in our DB). I think we need a discussion over on one of the community boards to decide what we do with pre-1990s titles - my vote would be to follow the current rule (or reprints will be raggedy looking - we will NOT have variants based on capitalization differences alone). The addition of "-" will require a variant in a title (and a note in the series name) - pretty much how the replacement of ß with ss in German does; mere capitalization changes are ignored (that's why we standardize). I will start the discussion in the next few days and post back with a link (unless someone else wants to post it). Thanks for stopping by! :) Annie (talk) 16:56, 16 May 2023 (EDT)

All right! On the Sítio I have found out, thanks to the digitization projects that some of those books - like "Reinações de Narizinho" - are supposed to be collections of short stories and not novels. There's any way for me to fix those? Since now is possible to check the early editions, should be better to clean-up the series list. ErickSoares3 (talk) 18:41, 16 May 2023 (EDT)

Yep.

• If they have more than one publication:

• Step 1: Update the title to the new type (with a moderator note explaining why)
• Step 2: After it is approved, fix all the publication types.

• If they have only 1 publication: Just edit the type in both the title AND the publication with an EditPublication.

One note: If they are translations and the original is a novel, they stay novels and you just add a note explaining that it was presented as a collection. Same applies in the other direction as well - you follow the type of the original and add notes when it differs in a translation. Annie (talk) 18:45, 16 May 2023 (EDT)

All right! Thanks! ErickSoares3 (talk) 11:23, 20 May 2023 (EDT)

Goldsmiths Press / MIT Press / Gold SF

I don't suppose you have any recollection of the source for the note "An imprint of The MIT Press" for Goldsmiths Press that you added back in July 2021? Per their site: "Our books are distributed globally by MIT Press and Penguin US", which feels more like a Baen/S&S style arrangement?

In a similar vein, Gold SF describes itself as "a new imprint of Goldsmiths Press", which means it should maybe be upgraded from a mere pub series? (Although ironically, they don't seem to have a proper website of their own, I could only find it on the MIT press site...) Thanks ErsatzCulture (talk) 12:24, 22 May 2023 (EDT)

Either Amazon or the MIT site or their own site -- as it was added based on pre-release books, it could not have been the books themselves. As for the wording - it still can be an imprint - the global distribution is a weird animal.

As for Gold SF - maybe, maybe not. We need to see a title page somewhere to know if they really behave like an imprint or they use the by word to separate the series from the rest of the their work. Unlike UK and EU, US imprints tend to be... interesting. If you think you want to change it, be my guest. But not solely on a single sentence interpretation please :) Annie (talk) 12:28, 22 May 2023 (EDT)

So I've just been looking at the Amazon preview of one of their books [*]. The copyright page says "Distribution by the MIT Press", which would seem to confirm the relationship. However, it does say "First published in 2022 by Goldsmiths Press", with no mention of "Gold SF" that I can see outside of the cover. Same goes for the novel that was already in the database, so I guess it'll have to stay as a pub series, and I'll mention this in the note.

[* - which isn't in the database, and appears to be ineligible for inclusion due to being poems about real world scientists. However it seems several of those poems were previously pubbed in Analog, Asimov's etc, so I guess that poetry collection should be added...] ErsatzCulture (talk) 12:38, 22 May 2023 (EDT)

Self-approval - still too soon?

I suspect I'm a significant ongoing cause for the approval backlog. Do you think it's still too soon to ask for self-approval status? I think I've come a long way in the past year plus. Thanks! Phil (talk) 08:22, 30 May 2023 (EDT)

If you ask for it, I will support it. You tend to stay in your own lanes and not try to fix things you are not sure about so I am fine with you self-approving (which does not mean you should not explore the DB and get acquainted with the parts you do not know :)). Just keep in mind that the same rules apply as now, moderator notes are both for documenting things and talking to moderators (so keep writing them!) and PVs are PVs even if you are the one approving. And we all are always here to assist when needed. ;) Annie (talk) 13:12, 30 May 2023 (EDT)

Thanks. BTW, is there a database diagram anywhere? I used to be a DBA so looking at one would be interesting and enlightening. Phil (talk) 13:33, 30 May 2023 (EDT)

Diagram - not per se but the schema and the backups are available. You really need to go exploring the wiki: you can get a full backup from here, the schema is here and this page may be of general interest. The first and the third of these are linked on the Main Wiki page - thus my "go explore" :) Annie (talk) 13:44, 30 May 2023 (EDT)

Please come share your thoughts

See here. Thanks! ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 19:36, 1 June 2023 (EDT)

You caught me just as I was leaving the house last night and I did not want to deal with that specific set of edits over the phone while out and about. I see that the conversation had progressed somewhat - although not about what the publisher name should be. So let me look at these again. I'd admit that I skipped over these edits multiple times in the last months - they suffered from the usual issues with this editor: lack of sources, lack of PV verification, lack of community agreement on how to change major things (or all of the above) and ever since he took to just canceling edits I ask about (because he does not care), I just leave these for someone else to deal with. Until I get annoyed enough at them and just clear them (with a lot of rejections and notes to resubmit a proper edit with all the needed pieces anyway). Annie (talk) 12:09, 2 June 2023 (EDT)

Both of you seem unaware that Leisure Books was bought up by Dorchester Publishing c. 1982 (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorchester_Publishing where it says Leisure is an imprint) and that's why some books on ISFDB include Nordon as the publisher because they published Leisure's early books and everything after that until they went out of business several years ago include Dorchester; https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/se.cgi?arg=leisure+b&type=Publisher. There are hundreds of books under Leisure/Dorchester here. The problem is that many editors just enter Leisure Books as the publisher, so I've been trying to fix that by changing any published after 1982 to Leisure/Dorchester. There's nothing wrong with those edits, there never was, they should have been approved long ago. Here's a book from 1983, https://archive.org/details/starbright0000cast, and here's a book from 2010, https://archive.org/details/creaturesofpool0000camp_w7h0. See how the Leisure logo on the title page has evolved over time but they both say the same thing, "published by Dorchester Publishing", on the copyright page? There's your explanation. --Username (talk) 13:20, 2 June 2023 (EDT)

This kind of information needs to be added to the notes of the publisher page and, if there are PVs, discussed with them before changes are done. We cannot read your mind and asking a moderator to do your research anew because you are too busy to spend a few minutes to make your edits complete is disrespectful and shows total lack of understanding of the project.

That is what we had been asking all along - document your research in moderator notes and the proper notes on different levels (publication, author, publisher) and talk to the PVs. You seem to believe that as long as you think the information is correct, you do not need to document and make it verifiable and that the rules do not apply to you. The rules are simple: every piece of information being added needs a source and/or an explanation and if there are PVs, they get contacted and consulted before a major update (even if you work off a copy of the book and not from online scans but with scans it gets even more important). This is a collaborative project and we do not overwrite data on "but XXX said so" principle.

And before you throw the usual "but the DB has so many mistakes", please, stop for a second to consider just how at odds both of your complaints are. One would expect that this alone would make you even more eager to follow the policies of the site but for some reason it seems to be making you assume that just because something happened in the past (unsourced and undocumented data), you can and should do it now as well. As had been said before, I will say it again - your data is often good, your submission quality is very often really bad - which works fine for a new editor and we all are willing to help them understand and follow the policies and project conventions but as you are very quick to point out, you are not that new anymore so one expects the submissions quality to increase with time and not to need to repeat the same basic policies and rules to you over and over. Annie (talk) 13:33, 2 June 2023 (EDT)

I did a note search for "imprint of Dorchester" and got exactly 1 hit, https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/note_search_results.cgi?OPERATOR=contains&NOTE_VALUE=imprint+of+dorchester. So out of all the countless different editors over the years before me who have worked on these books none of them ever felt the need to make a note that it's an imprint and that 1 title note, as seen in edit history, was last worked on by you years ago. So why you're chastising me about things that nobody else ever did but still had their edits approved, especially when you could have added a similar imprint note to the Leisure/Dorchester publisher page that's been around since at least 2009 according to edit history, which would have forestalled any of this discussion, I'm not sure. Y'all keep going on about contacting PV while ignoring the fact that more often than not they don't care anymore/have personal issues with others on this site that led to them not editing anymore, or they're sick/moving and can't check anything, or they're hostile at any suggestion that they've made a mistake, or most often they just never respond. It was like this from my very start in mid-December of 2020 so it has nothing to do with anything on my end. I'm also tired of you and others downplaying my contributions with condescending phrases like "your data is often good" like I'm some part-timer who drops in now and then to add the umpteenth printing of some old pulp novel or something. I currently have more pending edits (800+) than every other editor on ISFDB combined (which is usually the case), most of them not pending because of anything that's supposedly wrong with them but because of the complete breakdown in moderation which was bad before the server move last year and has only gotten worse since then. I've also fixed countless thousands of mistakes by other editors, from very minor ones to major ones that improve info tremendously (and don't even get me started on how many of those mistakes were approved by...Anniemod or Nihonjoe), so whatever annoyance you or others may have because I don't always follow everything to the letter is far, far outweighed by the improvements I've made (especially since most of my edits that are not approved because of some supposed issue end up getting approved eventually because whatever I did turned out to be correct). So I'd suggest you add a quick imprint note to the Leisure/Dorchester page; you could also track down every editor who ever entered a book as Leisure/Dorchester and ask them to mention that it's an imprint in the notes but we know that's not going to happen. I don't mind my edits being rejected for legitimate reasons such as entering wrong info (which rarely happens); I mind when it's based on moderators not being aware of things like this Leisure situation, which they should be aware of, because most mods are either really old and only seem to know about SF/fantasy from decades ago or really young and only seem to know about Kindle and e-books, or due to personal animosity towards me because I'm not a team player since I only started editing to pass the time and have no desire to be a self-moderator and thus don't need to schmooze to get nominated. Most of you take this stuff way too seriously; summer starts in a few weeks so go out and get some fresh air and sunshine and stop spending so much time on a computer. --Username (talk) 15:02, 2 June 2023 (EDT)

It is not the job of the approving moderator to do your homework and complete your edits and finish/redo your research - you need to add all the relevant information into the edit AND add acquire the needed consensus - being it from the PVs directly or for bigger changes via the Community boards (and no, posting there is not enough - you need the consensus). If you are unwilling to follow the policies and the rules of the site, you will be told again and again that your submissions are poor, require a lot of time to be approved and they will pile up and stay in the queue for a very long time. You fix that by following the rules and the policies. No amount of complaining will change that - your edits won't be approved unless they are complete and verifiable (either by you adding the information required or by a moderator doing the work) and moderators will work on them when they have the time to do the extra work required when you chose the second option as you often do (hint: we are all volunteers with our own projects and an editor showing a lack of desire to improve drops towards the bottom of one's daily list of things to do on the site).

If does not matter if "things turn out to be correct". It still needs to be verifiable - throwing things at the wall is half the work. Making them stick is the part you repeatedly miss to do - and when they get approved it is often because someone did the second part of the job.

PS: Everyone makes mistakes and every fixes mistakes around here. That's how the project works. Had I approved and made mistakes? Sure - I have 327,947 edits and I've approved 142,225 edits of other editors in a little under 7 years (because you like throwing numbers around so much, here are some for you) and even 1% of that gets you a lot of mistakes. That is why we all work together. When the sources and the details are logged into the records, it makes it much easier to fix these later when found - and figure out typos from actual mistakes or misunderstandings. Your contributions may be outweighing the rules in your mind but in reality, they do not matter when policies and rules are concerned - it does not matter if you have 1 edit or 300,000 - the rules apply equally. Every edit matters and every edit is treated the same. Making a lot of edits does not give one the write to not follow the rules - it is quite the opposite - the more edits you do, the more we expect you follow the policies and the rules. And every editor is appreciated for the work they do - regardless if they do 1 or 300,000 edits or how often they contribute. Annie (talk) 15:26, 2 June 2023 (EDT)

A question of versions

Hi Annie, I recently added a book that was part two of a saga. Today I found the part 1 of the saga and wish to enter it but I have a question. Amazon lists 2 Kindle, 1 HC & 1 TP version. Goodreads shows 1 ebook, 2 Kindle, 1 HC and 2 TP. All have various ASIN and/or ISBN with various publishing dates. Barnes & Noble has 1 TP, 1 HC and 1 ebook (nook) that I can all match up with Goodreads. This totals 6 versions. Should all be entered?? aardvark7 (talk) 14:06, 2 June 2023 (EDT)

The ebooks and kindles all go into a single version . Unless there are differences (covers, titles, ISBNs, publisher names, author name forms, excerpts and so on), we treat all the ebook versions as a single publication and pile in all the details. Same for digital audiobooks - one record unless there is a reason to split them regardless if they are apple books, audible, Kobo or a straight audio file from the publisher (in case you are interested). So in this case, you will have 1 HC, 2 TPs (assuming these are different and not just unmerged books in GR -- it had become progressively harder to update their records unless you are willing to become a librarian in there) and one ebook (carrying all the ASINs and Goodreads IDs). Annie (talk) 14:10, 2 June 2023 (EDT)

For the 2 Kindle + 1 ebook, does that still hold true even though all of them have their own ISBN/ASIN numbers?? aardvark7 (talk) 15:56, 2 June 2023 (EDT)

If they have different ISBNs, they get different records (keep in mind that Amazon does not show the ISBN for ebooks anymore and it is often at the back of the book and not at the sample/start. If they have different ASINs, they get different records only if there are other differences as well (or the ASIN is printed inside of the book of course - then this is treated as different ISBNs). Amazon often does one ASIN for a promotional price and one for the regular one -- but the book is the same. Annie (talk) 16:01, 2 June 2023 (EDT)

Creating a serial made up of novellas

I need to create a new serial for the "Starship's Mage" title. After looking at the Help and an example, here's what I think I need to do:
1. Create a CHAPBOOK ebook pub for novella 1 "Starship’s Mage: Episode 1". Title should be "Starship’s Mage: Episode 1". The regular title in it should be "Starship’s Mage: Episode 1" type SERIAL length novella.
2. Make the new SERIAL title a variant of the "Starship's Mage" title.
3. Edit the title record for the SERIAL title and add it to Series "Starship's Mage".
4. Change the date of the "Starship's Mage" title to be the date of SERIAL title "Starship’s Mage: Episode 1" since it's the earliest date.
5. Create a CHAPBOOK ebook pub for novella 2 "Starship’s Mage: Episode 2". Title should be "Starship’s Mage: Episode 2". The regular title in it should be "Starship’s Mage: Episode 2" type SERIAL length novella.
6. Make the new SERIAL title a variant of the "Starship's Mage" title.
7. Edit the title record for the SERIAL title and add it to Series "Starship's Mage".
8. Repeat steps 5, 6, and 7 for each of the remaining novellas.

What did I skip or miss? Phil (talk) 18:43, 6 June 2023 (EDT)

A few things:

• No length - just type SERIAL. The lenghts are only used for SHORTFICTION.
• Skip step 3 (and then 7 and so on) - the series goes on the parent. You won't be able to do it anyway - once you variant, the child cannot get a series added - it shows it on the UI but it does not carry a series (we even have a report for the rare case where it is not cleaned on varianting). :)
• Skip Step 4. No change on the date - we date novels based on first BOOK publication, not based on the serializations before that. So the novel will still remain dated 2014-12-03 no matter the date of its earlier serializations. Please review the dating rules on that :)

Also - make sure that the serialization is eligible to be added (individual ebooks or paper books are, web-serials are not; serializations inside of magazines/newspapers are added as part of the magazine/newspaper and not individually). Annie (talk) 19:00, 6 June 2023 (EDT)

Thanks. I told you I'd be asking for help - just didn't think it would be this soon! :) Phil (talk) 22:19, 6 June 2023 (EDT)

Anytime :) Annie (talk) 15:43, 7 June 2023 (EDT)

Alice James - Grave Danger / Clay Harmon - Flames of Mira

This one should be Alice James (I).

I only noticed this because:

• There was a different "Grave ..." novel out from an "Alice" author very recently, and I wasn't sure if it was some UK vs US thing with a retitling, but it seems to be just a coincidence
• I saw it whilst I was skimming through this year's Solaris pubs, which I was doing because this early July one wasn't in yet, and it rang a vague bell. When I looked, it seems I'd added all the original 3 pubs from July last year. AFAIK these are dual UK/US releases, so I'm a bit surprised that Fixer hadn't pushed them through. Whilst the ones from last summer might have been whilst you were on hiatus, that wouldn't explain Fixer not submitting the upcoming tp? FWIW, I have a scraped Waterstones page for it from November 2023 indicating that it's kept the same scheduled date. For some reason, it seems the ISBN is known to Fixer for at least a month, but hasn't been scheduled:

   $ grep 9781786189615 *ISBN*txt
   ISBNs2023-04-29.txt:1786189615|9781786189615|n|
   ISBNs2023-06-03.txt:1786189615|9781786189615|n|

I've obviously got no problem with adding these - or any other - pubs/titles, but I wonder if this is something Ahasuerus might want to check into; I'd have thought Solaris/Rebellion was a reasonably high priority publisher?

(I'll submit the Flames of Mira tp tomorrow once I've had chance to process the scraped HTML pages through my tools, but I'm about to call it a night for today) ErsatzCulture (talk) 20:31, 7 June 2023 (EDT)

Fixed. I remember wondering if there might not be a third author in there and apparently then I forgot. I tend to catch these when I add a next volume when I miss them the first time... :) As for the missing ones - check with him but keep in mind the numbers and that Solaris sometimes has the books under weird names (and dates). But he should be able to figure out why this one did not make Q1. :) Annie (talk) 23:10, 7 June 2023 (EDT)

Thanks. I see there's a third book from the newer Alice James due in a couple of months, so given the other one only has a couple of essays about ghosts/spiritualism, I wonder if it might make sense to switch the disambiguation around?

Re. Flames of Mira, I can see the ISBN for the hc was priority 1 in a Fixer file from a few days before I submitted it. The audio and ebook were also in the Fixer data around the same time (June 2022) and the ebook moved to priority 1 in August 2022, but it didn't get added till I did in April this year, and the audio was added by Chris J (not me as I first thought) just a few days ago. The tp ISBN has been known to fixer since at least Feb 2023, but has never been prioritized. I'll ping Ahasuerus about it. ErsatzCulture (talk) 08:21, 8 June 2023 (EDT)

Ebooks and audiobooks are running late-ish while we are catching up (and there are issues with the details of a lot of them so they are mostly close-to-publication and after-publication affair for the time being). There is only that many books that can be added in a day. :) No idea why the paperback was not prioritized. Annie (talk) 11:21, 8 June 2023 (EDT)

All of Our Demise - US ebook co-author credit

UK tp of this is due out in a month or so, and I notice one of the authors has namechanged to use initials since last year's hc/ebook release.

Close examination of the extant pubs here shows the US ebook cover image also has initials, even though the pub date is the same as the hc that used the full name. That ebook was only added a couple of weeks ago by Chris J, so I suspect the EPUB/MOBI/AZW/whatever file has been updated from the original; Amazon.com did let me preview it, and that has the initials on the cover but full name on the title page; Kobo (WW) is the same. GR seems to think the Kindle edition has initials, but the "ebook" has full name?!? But it also seems to think the US hc has initials, which I very much doubt.

(FWIW Amazon UK indicates the UK ebook still has the full name on cover and title page)

I don't suppose you might have US library access to an ebook of this, that maybe is the original file from 2022? Otherwise I think it'll be a case of adding a pub note about the cover/title page discrepancy, and maybe changing the date to 0000-00-00? Thanks. ErsatzCulture (talk) 18:53, 8 June 2023 (EDT)

As a matter of fact... :) Initials on the cover, full names on the title page on the ebook in Overdrive via my library (both the ePub and the kindle - I looked at both). Release date: August 30, 2022. Keep in mind that the cover MAY have been different and then reset later - but when you get the book now, it i the initials on it. I will verify and update the US edition. Annie (talk) 19:25, 8 June 2023 (EDT)

PS: My guess is that it came out with the full name and then got redone with the initials. Now if you buy a new one, you may be getting a title page with the initials (I am not planning to try...) but the one I have access to is as described above. So leave the poor record alone. We may need a second ebook for the change in name - when/if the title page is confirmed changed though. Annie (talk) 19:35, 8 June 2023 (EDT)

Replacing pre-release data

What's the protocol for updating a pub that is pretty obviously pre-release data and not PVed. Example. Is it OK to just completely fix everything and date the source for the current date or should I keep a note for when it was originally added even though all the data was replaced? Phil (talk) 09:57, 10 June 2023 (EDT)

I’d usually keep the original note (as it shows when the book was added without the need to look at the history and add a “Data updated from XXX (length, narrator, whatever fields are changed) as of new date”. And if you change the price, move the old one to a note. It also helps to see what data is being updated post publication often - I know that the lengths in the last year had been getting worse prepub so now I am adding audiobooks later until that gets resolved.

My personal policy is to respect the work of other editors basically - I add and fix but I don’t change the formatting of the notes to fit my own pattern (for example no adding html Just because I am adding a note - I’d just add it in whatever pattern is already used) and I work with the existing notes as much as I can. Annie (talk) 12:48, 10 June 2023 (EDT)

Thanks. The ones I'm looking at now are audiobooks that were added by Fixer and then minimally changed by you pre-publication. Pretty much everything has to be changed except maybe the publisher; hence the question :) Phil (talk) 13:02, 10 June 2023 (EDT)

Same rule applies. Fixer collects information - the approving moderator checks all of it, adds everything else they can find and fixes what else needs fixing. In this case, it’s how the record looked like everywhere at the time of adding. :) I’d usually kick this kind of a sparse record for a check in a month and not add it at all - probably found an external verification that it is actually coming out at the time. One note - be careful with updates on audiobooks and eBooks - Amazon and Audible collate records often so later editions show up with the dates of the newer ones - as long as it keeps the asin, they just update the price and cover but keep the original date. Not the case here I suspect but keep that in mind. Usually a cover gives it away - if the ebook or audiobook carries a later cover (from the paperback for example), it is a later edition. Goodreads can often help as they show the original cover more often than not. Annie (talk) 15:42, 11 June 2023 (EDT)

I did these two: The Mummy, the Will, and the Crypt and The Curse of the Blue Figurine. I think they are OK but would you mind taking a quick look and let me know if I should be doing something different? Thanks! Phil (talk) 15:53, 11 June 2023 (EDT)

As I said - I’d leave a dated note about the price on these records instead of losing the pre-release price altogether by deleting it. Adding it on the same line where the initial credit is usually works best. “Pre-release price: xx.xx”. As these really do not have printed prices, we don’t know if what we see now is really the list prices so we keep the data we have.

One note: you did not change the author, type, format or the title so “all data but publisher and external ids” is factually incorrect. :) List the fields and pieces of data you changed or added (price, date, length, narrator) if you want or add “additional data as of date” (I tend to do that in such cases). If you are going to list fields, they should be the correct list (of changed or not changed: I’d usually list the changed ones if I do that but that’a just me. :)

PS: And make sure you are grabbing the list price and not the Audible subscriber one or the one Amazon would sell the book to you for. :) Annie (talk) 17:34, 11 June 2023 (EDT)

I just submitted modifications that I think do what you asked. Please look at this and this and approve them if they are OK. Thanks! I appreciate the help. Phil (talk) 21:57, 11 June 2023 (EDT)

They look fine. One of them being so far under 4 hours means it may be too short for a novel though (the other one is probably around 40K so it may be hard to figure out if it is a novel but you may want to ping some of the verifiers of the shorter one for a confirmation count. Anything in the 3:30-3:45 to a bit under 5 hours range can get either way depending on the reader and the text; I am yet to see a novel under 3:45. :) Annie (talk) 22:19, 11 June 2023 (EDT)

Edward Eager

Hi Anniemod,

     I am a fairly new memeber to ISFDB, but I have collected books for over forty years with my main interests in Fantasy and Children's books. I am especially interested in Juvenile Fantasy titles. I have collected Edward Eager's books for many years, probably thirty years or more. I have a fairly complete set of his children's books, all in First Editions, except for his non Fantasy title "Playing Possum" which I have in a Second Printing. I noticed that you were the last person to edit the Harcourt edition of "Magic by the Lake", marked as a 1st. This title actually has two different issues with "first edition" stated on the copyright page. The true First Edition is bound in blue cloth with a black stamping. It is printed on a better grade of paper that does not brown easily. And the dust jacket is printed in lighter shades of blue and yellow than the other issue. The dust jacket also has a publisher's address of 383 Madison Avenue on the rear flap. The other issue (which I believe is a book club, although it is not marked as one) is bound in green paper covered boards, it is printed on cheap paper that browns very easily, and the dust jacket is printed in darker shades of blue and yellow and has a publishers address of 750 Third Avenue on the rear flap. The address of 750 Third Ave also appears on the rear flap of Second Printing copies. 

     I would be interested in rewriting the First Edition entries for Edward Eager where updates are needed if this does not create a problem. His first Children's Fantasy title "Half-Magic" also has two issues marked as "first edition", but in that case one is clearly marked as a book club. My Edward Eager collection, or at least a part of it is posted on the LibraryThing site if you would like to look it over.

https://www.librarything.com/catalog/?tag=Edward%20Eager —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Bernarrd (talk • contribs) .

Go ahead and submit updates to the records clarifying the statements where needed. Keep in mind that if a copyright page states "First Edition", we would record that in the notes - but we can add clarifying notes explaining why it is (or is not). If a book you are editing is primary verified, leave a note about the change on the Verifier's page, explaining your reasoning before you edit the book itself. Any and all information is welcome! If you need any assistance, let me know. Annie (talk) 19:40, 12 June 2023 (EDT)

Here are nearly 3 dozen books as by "Eager, Edward", https://archive.org/search?query=eager-edward, and 4 as by "Edward Eager", https://archive.org/search?query=edward-eager&and%5B%5D=mediatype%3A%22texts%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221962%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221999%22, in case you start entering any of these books and need scans to look at. EDIT: There's also 1 lonely Open Library-only "no preview" edition, https://archive.org/details/sevendaymagic00eage_2. --Username (talk) 19:51, 12 June 2023 (EDT)

I have created a new entry for the First Trade edition of Magic by the Lake. I was considering changing the current entry to reflect the other issue with "first edition" stated (probable book club issue). Is that ok, or would it be better to create a second new entry? One reason I am considering this is that the image used appears to be from the book club issue which was printed darker. I am not sure that I have access to all of my Edward Eager books, some are packed in boxes, but I have notes on most if not all of them and scans of the dust jackets, and some title pages and copyright pages. A few years ago I bought a complete set of his fantasy titles that had four 1st printings and the rest in early printings. I do know where that set is and I can use them to help me in my descriptions. It was odd finding a complete set like that after spending years buying the books one at a time, usually a year more more apart from each other. Bernarrd (talk) 08:33, 13 June 2023 (EDT)

That depends. We want one record per edition - but we also want records for all editions. So if what we have also exists, adding a new record is the way to go. If on the other hand it does not and is the same with yours and some questionable data mixed in, fixing ours will be the way to go. In all cases, even if you add a second one, the one we have will need a note that it is not really the first edition. Annie (talk) 09:12, 13 June 2023 (EDT)

As I said the thing that makes this appear to be a Book Club issue is the dust jacket image. The trade issues were in a light blue colored DJ and the book club was the only dark blue image that I know of. Also the First edition is stated on the copyright page, so an edition that does not state "first edition" is a reprint. Normally with Harcourt they will put a code on the copyright page of reprints that looks something like B.11.58 which would stand for 2nd printing.November.1958 with the letter noting the printing. So since their is no mention of "first edition" being stated, I would assume the listing is some type of reprint. It is possibly a combination of multiple copies because the entry has been updated several times. I could change this to a Book Club or to a trade reprint. Bernarrd (talk) 10:33, 13 June 2023 (EDT)

Zelazny - The Chronicles of Amber: Volume I

Hello Annie, could you do me a favour and put your systems IT hat on to have a look at this scenario. The first sign of a problem is here with Willem_H raising the question.

Could you look at it all to see if there's any system improvement that might be made to prevent/alert to? inadvertent data change. Luckily, in this case Willem caught it. This is the first time I've had it happen, so I'll be alert to the possibilities in the future.

Here's the timeline.

• Edit (BanjoKev): Edit# 5687575: PR# 37085: 2023-06-08 before 21:20 ... Reginald3 (only) addition edit prepared (loaded with pub date 1979-01-01)

• Kraang#Zelazny_-_The_Chronicles_of_Amber:_Volume_I

Question: 2023-06-08 21:20

Answer: 2023-06-08 22:02

• Edit (Kraang): Edit# 5687570: TR# 39628: Submitted time 2023-06-08 22:04:40 ... (title date 1979-01-01 -> 1979-01-00)

Approved time: 2023-06-08 22:04:58

• Edit (BanjoKev): Edit# 5687575: PR# 37085: Submitted time 2023-06-08 22:09:39 ... (Reg3# intent only, hence no mod note)

Approved time: 2023-06-09 18:52:04 ... (Reg3# ok, but title date changed -> 1979-01-01)

• Edit (Willem_H): Edit# 5690458: TR# 39628: Submitted time 2023-06-12 10:45:38 ... (title date 1979-01-01 -> 1979-01-00)

Thanks, Kev. --BanjoKev (talk) 04:18, 14 June 2023 (EDT)

Hang on, I meant to put the links in for you. Kev. --BanjoKev (talk) 04:21, 14 June 2023 (EDT)

I think we have a software problem. I have a different, but probably related example. John Scifibones 09:21, 14 June 2023 (EDT)

Sorry - I was away on a work related thing for a few days so I am just seeing that. Let me follow the links and will get back to you shortly. Annie (talk) 17:38, 15 June 2023 (EDT)

Ah, the "contents date changes when it should not" issue. It had been annoying me for ages and I had learned to look for it. That happens usually like this:

• A PubEdit is submitted (that may not even change the date of a title inside). A moderator opens it. It may be happening when it is not open as well but I am usually seeing it when I forget to reload the submissions before I approve it and I do changes in the meantime.
• The date of a contents element is changed with a different submission (another pubEdit or a titleEdit or anything at all).
• Now that first one is approved. At this point, regardless if you were trying to change the date or even if you can change it at this point (for example because there was a clone in the middle so now you cannot submit a change on an EditPub), it gets changed to what the date was when the submission was opened.

Let me ping ‎Ahasuerus and see if we can sort this out somehow and finds if the original even needs to be open for that to backfire. Annie (talk) 18:09, 15 June 2023 (EDT)

Thanks for digging. I will try to recreate the problem on the development server. Ahasuerus (talk) 18:32, 15 June 2023 (EDT)

(unindent)

As far as I can tell after experimenting on the development server, there are two separate types of problems here.

The first type of problems, or Scenario I, is what BanjoKev described above:

• Editor A loads record #12345 (it can happen with any type of record: pub, title, author, etc) in one of the edit forms, which puts of the record's data into the HTML form displayed on the computer screen.
• Editor A leaves the computer for a few minutes or a few hours.
• In the meantime, editor B changes record #12345 and the submission is approved.
• Editor A comes back to the computer, makes some changes and clicks "Submit Data".
• When the submission is created, the software compares what is being submitted with what is in the database. Anything that is different is put in the body of the submission while everything else is ignored. Since editor B changed the record between the time when the record's data was loaded in the displayed HTML form and the time when editor A clicked "Submit", any field values that were changed by editor B but unchanged by editor A are now considered "changed" and added to the body of the submission. That's what happened with "1979-01-01" above.

The second type of problems, or Scenario II, occurs when two submissions are being reviewed simultaneously, either by two different moderators or by the same moderator working with two separate Web pages. This is a variation on the classic "out of order approval" situation, which can cause any number of issues. It's probably even more confusing when combined with Scenario I above, although I don't know how often it has happened.

There are a few things we can do to address Scenarios I and II.

One thing that should help would be adding a yellow warning if there is another pending submission affecting the same record, e.g. 2+ EditAuthor submissions for the same Author record. This is covered by FR 1453, "New yellow warning for conflicting submissions". The code changes needed to support this functionality would be straightforward, but would take a decent amount of development time due to the number of possible permutations, including EditPub submissions being related to EditTitle submissions.

Another thing we would do would be adding a different type of yellow warning if a recently (<24 hours) approved submission included the ISFDB record about to be modified by the currently displayed pending submission. A fairly straightforward enhancement.

Finally, we could add a new field to submission records. The field would capture the time when the editor loaded the record in the HTML form. We could then generate yellow warnings based on certain thresholds, e.g. a noticeable difference (more than 10 minutes?) between the time the data was loaded in the HTML form and the time the submission was created. A bit tedious to implement due to the number of HTML forms that will need to be changed and tested, but pretty straightforward otherwise. Ahasuerus (talk) 17:56, 19 July 2023 (EDT)

P.S. One other possibility comes to mind. We could add a "last modified" time stamp to all records starting with publication and title records. Submission review pages could then compare their values with the values of the "time record was loaded in the HTML form" as described above. It would make things much more solid, but would also require more development work. Ahasuerus (talk) 20:55, 19 July 2023 (EDT)

Thanks for your hard work on this. I would find FR 1453 useful on many occasions. Unfortunately, none of the suggestions would explain or prevent the problem I came across. Briefly; I reviewed a 'publication update' submission which changed the author credit of the COVERART title record. The next day, I discovered the COVERART title had never been associated with that particular publication. I subsequently had to import it! Implementing one or all of the above would probably be a better use of your time than tracking down what happened in my situation. John Scifibones 14:00, 20 July 2023 (EDT)

Ahasuerus, I'll echo John's thanks for your work on this. Obviously I don't have the overview to be able to offer substantive solutions - just some thoughts. Looking at scenario I, I find your paragraph Finally, we could add a new field to submission records. promising. First off, I would be wary of a solution which necessitates including an arbitrary cut-off time. There could still be outliers outside the chosen time and we would be back to square one, but less often(?).

How about a process starting with The field would capture the time when the editor loaded the record in the HTML form. 'x' time later, the editor submits the edit. At that point, the field asks "is the data to be edited in the same state as it was at the initial capture time." If no, the flag is raised to the moderator. Maybe that could work, but only if the software can capture all the initial data fields (contents, cover art etc, if applicable). Kev. BanjoKev (talk) 17:11, 20 July 2023 (EDT)

It sounds like FR 1453, "New yellow warning for conflicting submissions", is the low-hanging fruit in this situation. I have updated the software to display yellow warnings if an Edit Record submission overlaps/conflicts with another Edit Record submission affecting the same record ID. For now, the new warning won't be displayed when there is a conflict between an EditPub submission and an EditTitle submission. This is due to performance issues, but it may be possible to address them in the future. I'll post on the Community Portal in a few minutes. Ahasuerus (talk) 19:24, 25 July 2023 (EDT)

Canonical name question

Would you mind looking at my post on the Help Desk? It's been there unanswered for a week now. Thanks! Phil (talk) 12:43, 14 June 2023 (EDT)

Posted. Sorry - had a work related thing going on so was not paying much attention to the site for a bit. :) Annie (talk) 17:51, 15 June 2023 (EDT)

Publisher for Salman Rushdie's Victory City

978-0-670-09846-0 has "Penguin", but there are only 4 pubs against that name. Of the others, 2 are date unknown, and the other is from 1979, which makes me think this newer one is something else? From Googling, looks like it's Indian pub with a ₹699.00 price, but I'll let you make the final call. I note that penguin.co.in link has the same "India Hamish Hamilton" imprint value, which looks odd to me, but is the same as the one that came up a couple of weeks ago.

(I only noticed this when I added an upcoming UK pub with this publisher value, but fortunately realized my error before hitting accept on the submission.) ErsatzCulture (talk) 07:20, 18 June 2023 (EDT)

I left it on Penguin so I remember to check again which of them it is. :) These are convoluted sometimes. I will work on that today. Annie (talk) 12:40, 20 June 2023 (EDT)

And this one is sorted out. I will see if the other 3 Penguins need relocation as well... Annie (talk) 14:22, 21 June 2023 (EDT)

Audible.com ASIN sanity check requested: Slow Time Between the Stars

Hi, could you see if the Audible.com ASIN on this works for you please? I've generally avoided audios from non-UK publishers, but as Fixer hasn't picked up this series, I've done the first of the audios. However, it seems a bit painful - the Audible.co.uk page's metadata doesn't have any of the usual list of ASINs for other Audible instances, so I had to resort to seeing what link Google had indexed. (GR only has the ebook pubs)

I think I've got the right Audible.com ASIN, but if I click it, it just bounces me to Audible.co.uk. There is a link to Audible.com, but if I click on that, I just get a "this title is no longer available". I can't tell if that's because the ASIN has been lost or mangled, or if the value I got from Google search is out of date? Thanks ErsatzCulture (talk) 14:45, 19 June 2023 (EDT)

Works like a charm. Annie (talk) 12:39, 20 June 2023 (EDT)

I fixed the price (what you had looked like conversion or pre-release of some type; the list is $1.99.

PS: Careful with pre-release lengths. These had taken a dive down for awhile - I think that Amazon/Audible use the early pre-release data for a lot longer than they used to - and don't update the lengths until almost the last minute (or the pub day itself). Which is why I am not adding any pre-release audiobooks at the moment. Annie (talk) 12:53, 20 June 2023 (EDT)

Thanks. I added a couple more in this series, and they both had the same weird $1.74 price showing to me from Amazon.com. Maybe some tax thing? I'm only doing these audios slowly because they are (relative to 99.999% of pubs) such a pain to get the US info for. Also doesn't help that GR has some bogus data for the ebooks, which I've documented in the respective notes. Given that all 6 authors are - I suspect, without checking - marquee authors, I want to try to get them all in before pub date. ErsatzCulture (talk) 16:58, 21 June 2023 (EDT)

As long as the other editions are there, I won't worry about the audio-books - the marquee will show just one format anyway. As I said - at this point I strongly advice against adding audio-books pre-publication (or more than a few days before it anyway) - they almost always need adjustment later these days (lengths mainly but sometimes covers also change). Annie (talk) 17:07, 21 June 2023 (EDT)

Magpie redux

Just a head's up further to User_talk:Anniemod#Magpie_Books.28I.29_name, it seems things are more complicated: there is another UK "Magpie" imprint, this one part of Oneworld. A Bookseller article implies it's a newish imprint, so probably not the same as Magpie Books either.

That article describes it as a "book-club imprint", whatever the hell that is, but looking at their list of titles, most of them don't look ISFDB-eligible, but this one seems to be; in fact, I've just checked, and there are Canadian pubs already in. (Although GR says it was an Audible Original in 2022.)

Annoyingly both of these show up with the publisher field as "Magpie" on Amazon; it's only when you look at Waterstones or Blackwell's that you see any mention of Oneworld. The ISBN ranges are different as you'd expect, so I'll add notes for that. I dunno if any intelligence for that can be added to Fixer, just in case that catches these UK pubs before I do? ErsatzCulture (talk) 19:22, 25 June 2023 (EDT)

Fixer has a module which is chock full of IF-THEN-ELSE clauses like:

• IF (publisher_name == 'Abrams') OR (publisher_name.startswith('Abrams')) THEN publisher_name = Harry N. Abrams'

and:

• IF (publisher_name.startswith('Bloomsbury Childrens')) OR (publisher_name.startswith('Bloomsbury YA')):
  • IF (country == 'UK') THEN publisher_name = 'Bloomsbury Children's Books (UK)'
  • ELIF (country == 'US') THEN publisher_name = 'Bloomsbury USA Children's Books'

etc.

The module has access to ISBNs, so we should be able to add another IF-THEN-ELSE clause along the lines of:

• IF (publisher_name == 'Magpie') AND isbn_value.startswith('97811111111') THEN publisher_name = 'Magpie Books / Harper Voyager (UK)'

Ahasuerus (talk) 20:33, 25 June 2023 (EDT)

Thanks. I've now added this pub which has in turn created a new publisher record. The ISBN ranges should be (I guess):

- 978-0-86154 => "Magpie / Oneworld Publications"

- 978-0-00 => "Magpie Books / Harper Voyager (UK)"

ErsatzCulture (talk) 09:00, 26 June 2023 (EDT)

That's not an uncommon scenario with small US publishers - I often look at ISBNs to try to sort out different versions of publishers. Thanks for the note about Magpie. :) Annie (talk) 11:38, 26 June 2023 (EDT)

Fixer's logic has been updated. Ahasuerus (talk) 13:07, 26 June 2023 (EDT)

Portuguese titles

Hello Annie, could we take up the reins here again. I say we, but I don't know how I can contribute :( Thanks, Kev. --BanjoKev (talk) 12:27, 27 June 2023 (EDT)

Posted. Go ahead an make changes based on that agreement I'd say. We will sort out the help page this week. Annie (talk) 12:51, 27 June 2023 (EDT)

Thanks very much! Kev. --BanjoKev (talk) 13:25, 27 June 2023 (EDT)

Polish/Lithuanian (maybe?) question

Apologies for again presuming that you're the fount of all knowledge on this sort of thing and/or that all the Central and Eastern European languages are the same... Czelaw Milosz and Czesław Miłosz are both on the birthday section of the homepage, and are clearly the same person. However, the birthplace values are slightly different, and I'm not sure which one to take. One has "Šeteniai, Kovno Governorate, Russian Empire" (which is what Wikipedia-EN says), the other "Szetejnie, Kovno Governorate, Russian Empire" (which is what Wikipedia-PL says).

Naively I'd assume the accented version Šeteniai was the more correct, but the relevant Wikipedias indicate the inverse. The Wikipedia-EN page for Šeteniai says "Šeteniai (Šateiniai, formerly Russian: Шатейни, Polish: Szetejnie, Józefów)[1] is a village in the Kėdainiai District Municipality, Lithuania.", so perhaps it's a Lithuanian vs Polish thing and/or maybe more political/historical than linguistic?

Maybe it doesn't make that much difference in the overall scheme of things, but if I'm going to change things, I might as well make a token effort to get it right? Thanks, and feel free to decline to offer an opinion :-) Thanks ErsatzCulture (talk) 19:09, 30 June 2023 (EDT)

Never mind, I've now read the "early life" section of his Wikipedia page, and it confirms which is PL and which is LT. I'll go with the LT version, given that's where it is in the present day. ErsatzCulture (talk) 19:25, 30 June 2023 (EDT)

We use the ENGLISH version of the name when it is different and known, not the local/more correct one: See the help page: "For locations whose name is transcribed differently in different languages, use the English version, e.g. "The Hague" rather than "Den Haag", "La Haye" or "L'Aia"." :) Annie (talk) 19:28, 30 June 2023 (EDT)

Is "whatever Wikipedia-EN uses" a reasonable proxy for "the English version"? Naively I'd assume anything that uses an accented character like Š isn't really an English version. If I'm understanding how Wikipedia formats things properly, "Šeteniai" is considered the English version, "Šateiniai" Lithuanian and "Szetejnie" Polish. (Only the latter two appear on the [https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Szetejnie Wikipedia-PL page, which I think supports that theory?) ErsatzCulture (talk) 19:42, 30 June 2023 (EDT)

Notice the "when it is different and known" out there in my response. :) The English media and official documentation had been changing steadily to use local names more and more when the name does not have a historical precedence - including using the weird characters. As this one does not have an established English name, Wikipedia is probably your best bet so I'd go with Šateiniai - especially because the other one is Polish and the history and optics of that is akin to calling London Londres in an official document written in English (or dumping Ireland under UK for new authors). If I cannot find an English name, I'd usually use the current local one if it uses a Latin-based alphabet, even with weirdness in it - so Šateiniai here. And you just got lucky that the Polish one does not have one of the special characters - which does not make it more English. :)

PS: And yep - even if I do not know the answer, I can read the regional languages enough to usually be able to sort it out. So ping me anytime. Annie (talk) 19:49, 30 June 2023 (EDT)

Fixing a canonical name

Hello, I am this guy. But my name is Michael W. Phillips Jr., and the Jr. is present on the title page of the anthology I edited. It will also be on future anthologies and publications. Can you add the Jr. to my canonical name? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Mphillips (talk • contribs) .

Done. Note that we have a house style for names with suffixes (a comma between the suffix and the name). One of the books was added pre-publication, the other shortly after and look inside was not available at the time - so we record what Amazon says. Now with your notification and the look inside confirming, I’ve adjusted the name everywhere. Do you plan to primary verify the books? Annie (talk) 14:33, 2 July 2023 (EDT)

OK, thanks for doing that. I just primary verified them. There's an edit on the hardcover containing all of the stories and page numbers in the queue, and I'll add the paperback info soon. --Mphillips (talk) 22:19, 6 July 2023 (EDT)

The Tenpercent Thief again

I've added another installment to our previous discussion here, if you want to chime in. Cheers. PeteYoung (talk) 14:56, 2 July 2023 (EDT)

I vampiri dello spazio

Hi Annie, not sure how to do this. I vampiri dello spazio translated by Doris Cerea is found in 4 books published by Mondadori. 1st appeared in Urania #744, March 1978, 2nd appearance Urania Classici #185, Aug 1992, 3rd appearance Urania Libri #5, March 1993, 4th appearance Urania Collezione #159, April 2016. I just added Urania Collezione #159 Publication Record # 958778 with the story as (Title Record # 3202181). Urania #744 is Publication Record # 380196 with the story as Title Record # 1400093. Classici Urania #185 and Urania Libri #5 have the story tied together as Title Record # 1568283. All 4 of these need to be tied together but I have no idea how to do it. All of the are variants of The Space Vampires Title Record # 8901. What it all boils down to is Urania Classici #185, Urania Libri #5 & Urania Collezione #159 are all variants of Urania #744 and in turn these are all variants of The Space Vampires. I think I have tied Urania Collezione #159 to The Space Vampires 8901 to match the other 3. I just don't know how to tie all 4 versions of the same title together. aardvark7 (talk) 14:27, 3 July 2023 (EDT)

We cannot do variants of variants - so what we have now is the best you can do -- I finished the last variant by adding this one under the parent a well. Add the translator to the notes of all of the translations - it will make it clear it is the same translation (and you can add notes saying that specifically - aka "same translation as Urania YYY") but other from that, if they have separate titles, they stay separately under the parent. Annie (talk) 11:41, 5 July 2023 (EDT)

PS: The two novel versions had the same title and same translator (plus same author and language and no known big changes in the text such as a new translation for example) so they got merged. Let me know if you have any other questions or if I need to explain more. Annie (talk) 11:43, 5 July 2023 (EDT)

Darya Bobyleva - The Village at the Edge of Noon aka Вьюрки

Happy USA Day! ;-)

Stumbled across this whilst looking for something else, have created a barebones entry for the Russian original, but that's all based on what GR has, which seems incomplete. Dunno if you might care to look for more info? Original announcement doesn't help much. ErsatzCulture (talk) 18:26, 4 July 2023 (EDT)

Done. The 2017 was an earlier shortened serialized version. Annie (talk) 11:59, 5 July 2023 (EDT)

And the serialization was also tracked and added here so we are all set. Annie (talk) 13:03, 5 July 2023 (EDT)

Maybe stupid question about title variants for author names, and multiple language author pseudonyms

Is there any reason why this co-edited anthology doesn't have a title record for the co-editor's parent Chinese author record? I thought that's how things were done, and is what I've been doing, but I see that both you and Pete worked on it, which makes me wonder if I've misunderstood how things work - seems more likely than both of you missing it.

However, since I started typing this, I also notice that the parent author entry came from a Japanese mag, and that there's actually a fairly subtle difference between his Chinese and Japanese names: 姚海軍 (JA) vs 姚海军 (ZH). I'm inclined to create a new parent author for the Chinese name, by varianting the Japanese essay to that author name, then redoing the Japanese and English author names to that new Chinese author record. (Plus all the moving of the data from one author record to another.)

Does that seem reasonable? It seems preferable to having a Chinese person with the Japanese version of their name cf the Polish/Russian/Lithuanian birthplace the other day.

(This person is a Worldcon Honorary Co-chair, so possibly high-profile/VIP...)

Thanks ErsatzCulture (talk) 07:41, 7 July 2023 (EDT)

Uhm - Chinese people will usually disagree that Japanese names are preferable -- while it looks and sounds like it may be to an Western eye, that is again like saying that Londres is preferable in English to London (worse probably considering the history in the region). You may also want to be careful with Chinese names - as there are often two forms - simplified and traditional Chinese ones and which one is used depends on where the author is and what they use for their fiction.

The answer for this specific anthology is two-fold:

• If the anthology was never published in Chinese in that form, it will not have a Chinese parent. We do not create non-existing other-language parent to bridge a difference in languages when the original does not exist - especially valid for books that collect multiple titles (so you will have a lot of anthologies, collections and omnibuses in a language different from the canonical language of the author) - if there is a need for a parent for an author name, the parent will be in English again here (or whatever language the anthology/collection/omnibus is in).
• If the name of the author in their native language is known and it is known that some of the texts are translations and they work in their native language (or a third language) thus keeping that as their working language, parents are needed to get all titles on their new canonical page. Note the "if" -- in this case, I did not have the correct form of the author's name (neither it was clear if they work mainly in Chinese or mainly in English) so I left it alone until someone does.

So in this case, both the Japanese essay and the English anthology will need to be varianted under titles where the author's name is the Chinese one but the languages and titles are retained into the parent (unless you have a Chinese title for that essay or if the anthology was first published in Chinese). Then pseudonym the two records we have to the newly created author name and shift the author record info into the parent. Hope that makes it a bit clearer. Annie (talk) 12:34, 7 July 2023 (EDT)

Sorry, bad phrasing on my part. What I think we want is:

* A new primary author record using the Chinese name 姚海军

* The current author record with the Japanese name 姚海軍 becomes a pseudonym of the Chinese name (and all the biographical detail moved over)

* The current author record with the Roman character name "Yao Haijun" becomes a pseudonym of the Chinese name

* The Japanese essay title record becomes a variant of a new title record that's identical other than it has the Chinese author name

* Similarly the anthology title record becomes a variant of a new title record that's identical other than it has the Chinese author name for that co-author

I think that matches what you're suggesting - but my brain is frazzled enough right now, that I'm not taking anything for granted ;-) Looking back, I think I got confused, because I did a search for "yao haijun", and it showed both author records - but those are not currently linked to each other via the pseudonym mechanism.

FWIW CSFDB has well over 100 items for him, I don't think any are the works we currently have in the database. Most look to be essays about Western SF aimed at a Chinese audience, so unlikely to be translated. ErsatzCulture (talk) 17:07, 7 July 2023 (EDT)

Yep, these are the needed steps. However - the order will be different - you need to create one of the variants first so you can create the author page. PS: Chinese essays are eligible as long as the book/publication they are in is eligible - they do not need to have translations. I know this is not what you implied but just making sure we are on the same page. :) Annie (talk) 17:46, 7 July 2023 (EDT)

Yes, you are right; I was just thinking about the end result, not how to get there. Let me try to fix that now before I give up for the day... ErsatzCulture (talk) 18:03, 7 July 2023 (EDT)

EDIT: Hopefully all done. I found an entry for the Japanese essay on CSFDB, but it just listed that Japanese version; no evidence it was ever published in China. (Basically the same data/situation as we have.) Will try to get back to UK pubs some time soon...

No worries. I am adding a lot of 2022 UK books right now because the early months were already swept from US ones and we are running UK nodes downloads so while keeping these clean, I get UK books to deal with. Thus me bugging you about UK books lately. Once I am done with these, it will slow down a bit on my end of adding them. Annie (talk) 18:40, 7 July 2023 (EDT)

(dedent)

Just a semi-related follow-up on this, in part of my travels through the Chinese internet that have taken me away from doing the UK books, I saw this post from June on Chinese twitter equivalent Weibo. Basically, CSFDB has added a page for Chinese works that have been translated into (some) other languages, and it looks like SanSanFeng, formerly of these parts, is populating the data. May come in useful for tracking original titles/pubs down, if you click through on the titles?

I see they do have details on the stories in this particular anthology, which I have on my TODO list.

I'll have a look through the edit histories for issues of Clarkesworld, to see which editor adds them, and also make them aware of that page. ErsatzCulture (talk) 10:24, 13 July 2023 (EDT)

CSFDB had always been a good resource for Chinese - when their English site is actually navigable that is. I rarely work the Eastern languages - if I have to, I can but life is too short sometimes. Then I decide I want to follow up and 2 days later I am somewhere in the interwebs chasing down a translation between two language I cannot even read. ISFDB editing can be fun. :) Annie (talk) 20:16, 13 July 2023 (EDT)

Corambis ebook: cancelled, or just not available for non-Americans

Hi, can you do me a favour please? I added this one a month ago, as you'll see from the note, it was sourced from Amazon UK, Kobo (GB) and B&N.

On double checking it just now, a search for "corambis" either finds no results, or just older physical pubs. However, if I search Google for the ISBN, it knows about both the Kobo and B&N pages. If I click through to the Kobo page, it does still have the same data, but now has "Edition unavailable in United Kingdom / This edition of this title can’t be bought in your region. Click to see if another is available for you to purchase." It's still on the publisher site, but there are no details about price, pub date etc that I can see.

Could you check if Amazon.com still lists it please?

Annoyingly there were 3 others in this series due to be published today; I've not checked them, but I guess it'll be all or nothing :-( Thanks ErsatzCulture (talk) 13:54, 11 July 2023 (EDT)

Missing on Amazon.com, missing on Kobo USA. It is also strange for these to show up as by Katherine Addison - they were under Monette last time and her styles under the two names are very distinctly different (I like both but they do not read as the same author) and I had not heard of her ditching the old name and reissuing the old catalog under her current moniker - but who knows. That may explain what is happening here though - maybe it was a mistake and they pulled out, maybe someone changed their mind? Annie (talk) 14:00, 11 July 2023 (EDT)

Thanks, I'll 8888 them now.

I presumed the author renaming was to cash in on the Goblin Emperor stuff, which seems to have been more successful than the Monette work?

Perhaps the fact that Fixer never picked it up should have been a red flag, but I'm pretty sure I own a few of their ebooks that weren't in the DB, so I didn't think too much of it. Plus if it's still on the publisher's site... ErsatzCulture (talk) 14:19, 11 July 2023 (EDT)

EDIT: 2 and 3 made it, 1 and 4 didn't.... incredible. ErsatzCulture (talk) 14:27, 11 July 2023 (EDT)

Actually, I'd also switch them to the usually used name of the author for these books in such cases together with the 8888 date, with added notes explaining the credit and advertising - was there a plan ever to have them under this name or was that advertising gimmick by the publisher due to the popularity of the other name -- especially when there were never covers (and even if there were...). That will also ensure that the "also published as by" is correct on the author page. Annie (talk) 14:34, 11 July 2023 (EDT)

This is super weird - Corambis is on Amazon UK now. (It's not on Kobo GB though.) Viewing the previews for each of 2, 3 and 4, all have just Katherine Addison on the title page, no mention of Sarah Monette anywhere in the intro blurb. (e.g. "Praise for Katherine Addison" quotes.) Maybe Melusine will turn up later today??? Fake-edit just before I hit Save changes: Melusine is also up, and has same credits. ErsatzCulture (talk) 14:50, 11 July 2023 (EDT)

Reason number 1,123 on why I stopped adding ebooks pre-publication while the summer is going on -- the summer can be very very very weird with all that. This specific publisher had been erratic lately even more than the usual. And unlike paper books, it is very hard to figure out what may have been really planned and what may be advertising crap. :) Annie (talk) 14:53, 11 July 2023 (EDT)

Cyberpunk 2077: No Coincidence - Rafal Kosik vs Rafał Kosik

Wikipedia says the author of Cyberpunk 2077: No Coincidence is this guy.

Whilst the cover does have the slashed-l (sorry, don't know what it's called, other than every single Polish person I've known seemed to have that letter in their name), all the UK pub's listings just have "Rafal", I guess the same as what Fixer sent down. Do you think it's reasonable to move the US pubs to the other name, or instead do author alternate names? I won't be adding the UK pubs until after I resync with tomorrow's database backup, but it'd be good to have a plan for how to do them when the time comes. Thanks ErsatzCulture (talk) 18:23, 14 July 2023 (EDT)

I’ll check the title pages and see what it says and update as needed. Annie (talk) 18:47, 14 July 2023 (EDT)

Done. The Title page finally showed up so title and author fixed (and Polish original title record added. Will see if I can find enough to add the Polish book as well. Annie (talk) 19:43, 14 July 2023 (EDT)

And done :) Annie (talk) 19:53, 14 July 2023 (EDT)

One person, two canonical names

LC von Hessen is in twice, both without and with periods. She seems to use LC, no periods, on her Amazon site and social media. > > Mphillips (talk) 22:25, 21 July 2023 (EDT)

Yep, same author. I will connect them - let me look through some of the credits to see where we are leaning towards (the periods are per the rules but author's usage can override that). Annie (talk) 11:51, 27 July 2023 (EDT)

tp of Bloomsbury Handbook to Octavia E. Butler

Hi, are you back in AZ? I've seen the UK TV news report on the state of things in Phoenix, so I guess it must be pretty bad.

This is showing as out today on the forthcoming books, but I'm getting inconsistent reports from the various sources, which I've documented in the note. I have looked at Amazon.com, but I'm a bit confused - it still has today's date, but the buying sidebar says "As an alternative, the Kindle eBook is available now and can be read on any device with the free Kindle app.", implying it's not out, although it doesn't explicitly say that, to me at least. Any thoughts? Thanks ErsatzCulture (talk) 15:47, 27 July 2023 (EDT)

Back in Phoenix - yes. Where we are on track to our 27 consecutive day of temperatures reaching 110F (43.3C). Yey! :) The old record of 18 days in a row is now dust...

It appears available from this side of the pond although it also says "August 15 - 17" for delivery on Amazon.com which usually means publisher delay in delivering the books to the warehouse (not uncommon for the academic publishers). The publisher site has it as "in stock". I've added a note. Annie (talk) 15:55, 27 July 2023 (EDT)

Isra Putnam = Greye La Spina

Isra Putnam was a pseudonym used by Greye La Spina, according to a letter excerpted in Golden Atom, which you can read here (the letter appears on p. 65). >> Mphillips (talk) 08:19, 10 August 2023 (EDT)

Updated. Thanks for finding this! Annie (talk) 12:44, 10 August 2023 (EDT)

(The) Bone Fields

Hi, any recollection of what happened here?

1. The cover clearly has "The", as with prior entries in this series 2. The parenthesized series name appears in the pub title

Just an oversight due to doing too many of these? TBH, I think I'd noticed you'd already done this UK pub, but I should have looked more closely and spotted and mentioned these errors.

Amazon UK now has the ebook preview, and it has the title you'd expect, so I'll clean up this title and tp pub record before adding the ebook. Thanks. ErsatzCulture (talk) 16:34, 14 August 2023 (EDT)

Cleaned up the title record, forgot to do the publication one from the looks of it. Happens once in awhile when I am doing a lot of them in a row and I get pulled somewhere and forget where I was - between the titles, author, publisher and price needing adjustment, one field did not make it :) Annie (talk) 17:03, 14 August 2023 (EDT)

Thanks. I appreciate that you do far more of the new books than I do, so even if we make <1% mistakes, you're going to suffer more than me ;-) ErsatzCulture (talk) 05:30, 15 August 2023 (EDT)

Everyone makes mistakes. I usually check all of the books under a title when adding a new one (and often all books under the series) and sort out anything that looks weird -- sometimes it is stuff I missed, sometimes it is someone else's. Additional sets of eyes and all that. If you see something like that, just fix it. If the title is supposed to be different from the cover, I always add a note explaining it. If it is different from the title one - either someone changed the title one or I missed it. Annie (talk) 12:47, 15 August 2023 (EDT)

Neil Asher's Jack Four, and Night Shade generally

Just belatedly checking this week's UK books actually made it out, and I noticed the UK hc of Neal Asher's Jack Four is now showing as Oct 10th on Amazon.com. I know the Neil Clarke Best SF 7 (their only other 2023 pub(s)) has also been pushed back at least once.

As I don't really know much about them - beyond their financial troubles a few years back - is this par for the course, or is it worth doing a Template:WatchPrePub on all of these pubs, at least to cover us until they ever emerge into the daylight? Thanks ErsatzCulture (talk) 16:15, 17 August 2023 (EDT)

I am not sure why you would not just check the publisher site in such cases and instead check multiple resellers only... :) No, I don't think that Night Shade Books new books need the prePub template on general principle... the notes are dated and there is nothing to "cover". Annie (talk) 16:23, 17 August 2023 (EDT)

Let me try a different argument then: for books like these that have had multiple reschedulings, would it be better (read: easier for us) to mark them as 8888-00-00, and then if/when evidence emerges that they aren't vapourware, then they can get a real pub date? I'm a bit fed up with having to edit these pubs again and again and again. ErsatzCulture (talk) 16:45, 17 August 2023 (EDT)

No. That's not what 8888 is for. You stick them there and they will never be updated. This way they pop up and get updated sooner or later. They are not vaporware as of this time - if they ever become, we can deal with them as if they are. Annie (talk) 16:48, 17 August 2023 (EDT)

PS: You may also want to re-read what I actually said above. The two we know are getting delayed are prime candidates for the template if you feel like adding it. What I objected to was a blanket adding of the template to all the books from the publisher - which is how your proposal read to me. Putting them as 8888 is akin to saying that these books are not even scheduled anymore. While you and I may know that you mean something else, an editor (or an internet user coming from somewhere else) will see "unpublished" while seeing other future books with their own dates - and draw a very weird conclusion :) Annie (talk) 17:10, 17 August 2023 (EDT)

Wikisource translation

Hello Annie! Since it hasn't been done until now, I'd like to know: would it be ok to submit a Wikisource translation to ISFDB? An editor translated The Tale of Peter Rabbit as O Conto de Peter Rabbit. In a side question: what if a translation has been fully published, but it hasn't received a formal Ebook or physical release? Jorge Teles has been publishing his Esperanto translation of the Sitio do Picapau Amarelo series, but in a serialized way. Thanks, ErickSoares3 (talk) 10:15, 21 August 2023 (EDT)

Nope. Here are our Rules of Acquisition. Online only publications are eligible under very limited terms:

• Webzines, which are defined as online periodicals with distinct issues (note that online periodicals without distinct issues are not considered webzines).
• One time speculative fiction anthologies published on the Web
• Online publications available exclusively as a Web page, but only if:

• published by a market which makes the author eligible for SFWA membership (listed here), OR
• shortlisted for a major award

That makes this one ineligible as the rules stand now - together with authors and translators' sites and every other iteration of online-only fiction. I'd add a note into the canonical title's Notes field ("A translation in Esperanto is available online here" or something along these lines). That way if we ever make these eligible, we know where it is. Annie (talk) 11:48, 21 August 2023 (EDT)

All right! On the Esperanto translations, I've submitted the links into the canonical title's Notes field some days ago ("Esperanto translation by Jorge Teles). ErickSoares3 (talk) 14:18, 21 August 2023 (EDT)

The Chemical Wedding: by Christian Rosencreutz: A Romance in Eight Days

Annie, Here's a pending submission affecting one of your verified pubs. John Scifibones 16:14, 25 August 2023 (EDT)

I have no access to the book at the moment but looking at the cover, I do not see an illustration on this edition: see the publisher site for how they mention it and " oatmeal linen with black and red foil stamped cover designed by Jacob McMurray and including an illustration by Theo Fadel." is only for the more expensive editions I think so not sure if the cover artist credit is legitimate for the trade paper edition... Which is why I did not add a cover artist if I remember correctly. I do not have time to look for the book today - leaving for a couple of weeks in a few hours - but will check how it is credited in the book when I am back. If you want to approve it and the other PV is ok with it, go ahead... if it is up to me, I do not think that the cover art is a legitimate credit here. Annie (talk) 16:38, 25 August 2023 (EDT)

I'll leave it for you. Have a good trip. John Scifibones

I'm just going to cancel it and do another edit with just the Archive.org link (always most important to let people read the actual book) and the note about the last page. There's some kind of red cover online at Temporary Culture but I don't know if that's the one referred to above; there is an illustration on this regular cover around the title, but whatever; you can figure out what you want to do with that. Never surrender. --Username (talk) 17:02, 25 August 2023 (EDT)

Special Happenings

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?510828; I'm not sure if you entered this book but since you're the only one in edit history, with an image clean (?), I thought I'd mention that I randomly came across this, https://archive.org/search?query=0030170214, which seems to be a 2nd printing judging by number line although some publishers started their lines with 2 instead of 1. It seems kind of pointless to have a huge anthology here when only one genre story was included but judging by some of the authors/titles I think a few more would probably qualify. In case you know which are genre/want to read it and find out. I see that my name is the only one in the title record but that was only to correct a misspelled word in a note written by...someone. --Username (talk) 11:14, 27 August 2023 (EDT)

Nope, just fixed the image -- one of the cleanup projects I was working on for awhile -- that is why I am very often the only editor on record for very old pub records :)

I added the incomplete template for now -- with a note -- and marked the anthology as non-genre. Holt starts with a "1" line so that is indeed a second printing. The template will make sure it is not lost again - will add it to the list of things to eventually chase down but the list is long :)

We want it here - even for a single story - it allows us to build the bibliography of a story better. That is why we have the "add only genre contents" rule for non-genre works -- that way we do not add all of the ones we do not need but can add ours. :) Annie (talk) 11:07, 11 September 2023 (EDT)

Brian W. Aldiss - "An Apollo Asteroid" vs "A Matter of Mathematics

Hi Annie.

I have been reading a lot of Brian W. Aldiss recently, starting with his (variously titled) "Best Science Fiction Stories of Brian W. Aldiss" (1988).

One of the stories there is "An Apollo Asteroid", a short story from "Moon Shots", Peter Crowther editor, 1999 Daw Book, and reprinted in "Year's Best SF 5", David G. Hartwell, 2000 Eos/HarperCollins.

An almost identical Aldiss story was released in 2001 as "A Matter of Mathematics" in the Aldiss collection "Supertoys Last All Summer Long and Other Stories of Future Time", 2001 Orbit, which was reprinted in "Year's Best SF 7", Kathryn Cramer & David G. Hartwell editors, 2002 Eos/HarperCollins.

Either version is a great SF story.

I am kind of surprised neither Aldiss or Hartwell identified it as the same story in "Supertoys" or "Year's Best SF 7", but they don't. The acknowledgements/copyright in both treat it as a new story, with no reference to the relationship anywhere or in the introduction or such.

I took a careful look at the text for both stories. They feature the same characters, the same plot, almost the same dialog, and I'd estimate 97%+ of the same text. There are several new paragraphs at the start of the 2001 "A Matter of Mathematics", and there are places where sentences have been revised, I assume by Aldiss, to read better. There are also large sections where the text is identical.

I did take a look around the internet, and have not found anyone really talking about how these are the same story.

Both versions have been reprinted. I assume that the 2nd, later, "A Matter of Mathematics" is the preferred text for Aldiss, but only due to it's publication by Aldiss after the first version under a new name.

At the very least, I would plan on updating the Notes on each to identify the relationship. I can also see how one could be a Variant of the other,

I could definitely use your advice here.

Best wishes and thanks,

Dave Dave888 (talk) 12:12, 1 September 2023 (EDT)

So you have two choices:

• Variant them and explain the minimal difference.
• Leave them separate but explain all of the above in a note.

If the story is short enough, a paragraph and some changes are enough to make the difference substantial.... So up to you. If they feel like the same story, connect them; if one feels like the first version of the latter - they may be worth keeping separate... Annie (talk) 11:02, 11 September 2023 (EDT)

Thanks for the insights. It feels like the same story, and I'm leaning towards connecting them as variants. Still, I've asked some peers in the sort SFF area if they have anty knowledge or thoughts on this before I move forward.

Dave888 (talk) 14:18, 2 October 2023 (EDT)

И тьма пришла...

Hello Annie, would you agree that the date for this title should be 1989-00-00? Thanks, Kev. --BanjoKev (talk) 21:24, 3 September 2023 (EDT)

Whoever dated missed the shifting titles - the translation is from 1966 but it was under different titles. I've added a note on the history of the translation and will see what I can do about the missing collections. Annie (talk) 10:42, 11 September 2023 (EDT)

Another slavic Jules Verne.

And as usual, not straight-forward. It is a Hungarian book that the [library catalogue] gives a title of Magyar könyvtár. 311-320 (the spine has M. K. 311-320). There is no separate title page for the book with this title, but there are separate title pages for each of the parts. The Jules Verne novel - Utazás a föld körül nyolcvan nap - appears first, followed by a play by Maeterlinck, then a mathematical paper, something else and a Sherlock Holmes story. So to start, I think this should be entered as an omnibus but only the Jules Verne entered as contents, the rest listed in the notes.

The novel is printed in two parts, same title page except for the elso resz vs. masodik resz. These are well separated from the title, so I don't think they are sub-titles. The other difference is on the back of the title page, it has "1328-1902. Budapest, Nyomatott Wodianer F. es Fiainal" for part one and the second substitutes 1612 for the 1328. Same for the other titles in the book, just that number changes. So, is this two content records or one? If two, I expect they would both have to variant to the original French, but are they serials or novels? I suspect that the numbers are from earlier individual publications, as seen in the publication series Linguist set up [here] although 311-320 doesn't seem to line up with the four digit numbers opposite the title pages.

From the above, would it be safe to assume the year of publication is 1902 (documenting assumption in notes)? The book seems old enough.

The translator is given as "Telekes Béla". Do I keep that order or reverse it?

I can post/send scans of any pages you might be interested in. (P.S. I've actually touched the book and want to verify it. I'm not yet back to entering all the stuff that exists in catalogues or scanned images.) ../Doug H (talk) 23:34, 4 September 2023 (EDT)

https://archive.org/search?query=jules+verne&and%5B%5D=language%3A%22Hungarian%22; I happened to be looking at Verne books recently and there are only, it seems, 2 Hungarian editions on Archive.org and only 1 of them is really in Hungarian; the other is misidentified and is actually an 1878 British edition. Maybe the 1 real Hungarian translation can be helpful with something. --Username (talk) 10:53, 11 September 2023 (EDT)

I've added A Barsac~expedíció különös története, although my focus has been more on finding copies to primary verify than simply enter. That said, new translations are good. ../Doug H (talk) 22:03, 11 September 2023 (EDT)

About the translator -- I leave them as I find them for Hungarian. As long as it is in the nominative (and these are - not as much for the Slavic languages...), I use what the book uses. If/when we have a system for these, we may decide how to record but for the time being - as long as it is there in one of the two forms, you are fine.

Let me look at the rest in a bit - been off for 2 weeks so need to catch up a bit :) Annie (talk) 10:59, 11 September 2023 (EDT)

Portuguese titles (2)

Hi Annie, when you get a chance... could you have a look at this thread. Thanks, Kev. --BanjoKev (talk) 14:13, 7 September 2023 (EDT)

Posted and will update it shortly. Sorry - it slipped my mind :( Annie (talk) 10:33, 11 September 2023 (EDT)

Some French Book

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/view_submission.cgi?5742526; I got this rejection, you're the first available editor in the history and it looks like you wrote the note although it's hard to tell with the way the broken system is set up, note is wrong because info was taken from a 1995 magazine and yet edition entered was 2004, it's a 1994 book with a 1998 edition on Archive.org, title is wrong, and vs. &, so if you care you can do something with this. --Username (talk) 10:26, 8 September 2023 (EDT)

The note came from the creation, I just cleaned it up. Unfortunately, we cannot ask Bob anymore for details -- will see what I can find out later. Annie (talk) 10:32, 11 September 2023 (EDT)

Watch by Moonlight

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/view_submission.cgi?5138714; Alred should be Alfred in the note. --Username (talk) 23:23, 15 September 2023 (EDT)

Yep - fixed. Thanks! Annie (talk) 10:33, 18 September 2023 (EDT)

Janka Kascakova / Janka Kaščáková

These two are surely the same person? Janka Kascakova, Janka Kaščáková.

I would merge or variant them, but the author note on the first one - which I'm guessing you added, as the only pub it was was a Fixer record you handled in August - seems to be explicitly written to say that pub is the only one relevant to ISFDB?

Thanks ErsatzCulture (talk) 15:25, 17 September 2023 (EDT)

I will check that one - thanks. Annie (talk) 10:30, 18 September 2023 (EDT)

One has to wonder why the 2010 book is not mentioned on most of the academic sites I looked at. All sorted out. Thanks! Annie (talk) 12:37, 22 September 2023 (EDT)

Night Prophets

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/se.cgi?arg=night+prophets&type=All+Titles; 2023 edition is a reprint of an old novel with an added "The" in the title. --Username (talk) 09:17, 22 September 2023 (EDT)

Indeed. Varianted. Thanks! Annie (talk) 12:38, 22 September 2023 (EDT)

Primm - Favorite Children's Authors and Illustrators

Hello Annie, what do you make of this entry? It's non-fiction, the author is below threshold, and someone lost the will to carry on after the 4th volume :) Kev. --BanjoKev (talk) 16:27, 23 September 2023 (EDT)

Should be deleted - will take care of that :) Annie (talk) 10:35, 25 September 2023 (EDT)

Unless some of these are our authors and their in-scope books -- which will make it in scope. Let me do some digging first. Annie (talk) 10:37, 25 September 2023 (EDT)

https://archive.org/details/favoritechildren0000unse; OL-only copy. --Username (talk) 10:40, 25 September 2023 (EDT)

Please come participate...

...in this discussion on page numbering questions. Thanks! ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 19:10, 17 October 2023 (EDT)

Ah, that topic. Will post my thoughts in the morning. Thanks for the ping :) Annie (talk) 19:34, 17 October 2023 (EDT)

Rothfuss' The Narrow Road Between Desires - novella?

Kobo has the UK ebook at 38k words; any objection to turning this into chapbook/novella? Thanks ErsatzCulture (talk) 12:43, 8 November 2023 (EST)