User:ErsatzCulture/Talk2020H1

Wrong ISBN in Across the Void submission

After hitting submit I see this has a checksum warning. Looking back, it seems I made a transposition error, it should be 978-0-7515-7071-7. If the original edit is approved unchanged , I'll do another to fix the ISBN. ErsatzCulture 13:40, 17 March 2020 (EDT)

Approved and fixed after that. Plus added ASIN (ebook ISBNs are hidden in a lot of places so we want both ASIN and ISBN), price, date (of the entry - useful to know when it was actually available as ebooks disappear and when the price was added) and fixed another formatting error. Feel free to update further :) Annie 13:51, 17 March 2020 (EDT)

Thanks :-) Is there a policy (official or otherwise) about ebook price values? I've generally avoided entering them, because they seem so fluid - most of the ebooks I've bought (especially for low-profile titles and/or unknown authors, like this one) are when they've been on a temporary sale for £1.99 or less, and by the time I get around to checking if there's anything I can add to the ISFDB entry - usually when the book finally escapes my TBR pile - the price on Amazon has invariably changed. I appreciate that adding the date the price was captured qualifies the information, but it's hard to know if that was a representative price for that period of time.

Sorry for forgetting to add the ASIN. ErsatzCulture 14:16, 17 March 2020 (EDT)

No worries on the ASIN :)

Re: Prices -- we add them with a date so it is clear when they were retrieved and from where. If there is a digital list price, we always add that. If there isn't one, we add whatever we can source. That's the best we can do -- prices are fluid (and depend on where you are sometimes... EU based editors see US prices with VAT added for example for $0.99 is $1.07 for them (or something). If you do not like it being there, feel free to edit: I personally think that as long as it is dated, it is better than none (and notes can be used to note changes when the price jumps around (if someone notices a price change)). UK ebooks are especially problematic because Amazon does not serve them to our robot the same way it does US-based ones. So we miss a lot of them. I am looking at some things to see if we can get them faster... Annie 14:30, 17 March 2020 (EDT)

I'm quite happy for a price to be there, if for no other reason than it seems to be the most reliable way of getting the country of publication, which I've wanted for a few of my personal projects that use a local copy of the database. My main concern was adding information that might be considered unreliable or poor quality, but if the "price+note about when it applies to" method is considered kosher, then I'll follow that for future submissions.

Re. UK books/Amazon/Fixer - this is probably something to ask Ahasuerus about, but I had been wondering whether stuff was getting missed. In particular, I was surprised that a Stephen Baxter novel published by Gollancz wasn't in the database a month or two after release late last year, but also that a couple of the Kitschies award finalists that have been out for several months weren't in the DB until I added them earlier today. (Granted, those two are much lower profile titles than the Baxter.) ErsatzCulture 15:00, 17 March 2020 (EDT)

I am working with him - I had been the one adding the Fixer ISBNs in the last few months so I know exactly what is coming through. Amazon is... temperamental. We had a few years when ebooks were almost never added to the DB (capacity problem),I had been catching up on those. At this point, any 2019 book that had been served to Fixer and considered high priority had been added. The Baxter would have been sorted for adding - which means it never came with the Amazon download (or something was wrong with the data -- reschedules tends to force us to kick out a title and then someone needs to remember to add it at the correct time. So yes - we catch most but we do miss some. Let me see if I can track down if the Baxter was one of those that were defered and never picked up. Or if Amazon's data missed to add an author for example... or mistyped him. :) Annie 17:13, 17 March 2020 (EDT)

The Baxter book did get added (in both hc and ebook variants) so it's only worth investigating from a post-mortem POV of how it got missed original, not in terms of adding missing data. http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/view_submission.cgi?4446331

A few months ago I wrote a bare-bones tool that would read in the Goodreads CSV export of my collection, and compare it against a local copy of the database. This was primarily to highlight books that I own that were lacking in tags on ISFDB, but maybe I should dig that out and see if it could be tweaked to report on any ISBNs that I (or anyone else who might be willing to share their personal data from GR) own, and check if they are in ISFDB? It wouldn't be anything that you'd want directly creating submissions to ISFDB, but something that would produce a checklist of possible omissions for a human being to look into. ErsatzCulture 18:44, 17 March 2020 (EDT)

If you send me a list of ISBNs/ASINs we missed, I can work on them (ask Fixer, see why he missed them and so on and add them). So if you are willing to, we can see what we can find that way? :) And that is what I meant - post-mortem strictly. Knowing why it was missed will help not to mix the next one. Annie 19:31, 17 March 2020 (EDT)

The missing ISBN/pub/title last year was the UK ebook of Stephen Baxter's World Engines: Destroyer, but the hc wasn't there either. ebook is 978-1-4732-2320-2, hc is 978-1-4732-2317-2.

UK only books are tricky - the way the API work make these almost skeleton records when there is no US record to supplement. And while most of them do have a US record thus filling the missing details, some don't. Thus me looking at some options for finding these. :) Annie 11:31, 18 March 2020 (EDT)

I hacked up a first attempt at my Goodreads<->ISFDB ISBN comparison tool, results are here. Some quick checks indicate these are a mixture of publications ISFDB doesn't know about, and what I assume are later editions of a publication with a different ISBN. That said, I haven't yet dug out my physical/ebook copies for any of these to verify them, so it's quite likely that some of them are bogus data in Goodreads. Do you think this tool might be something worth publicizing more widely e.g. on Community Portal? ErsatzCulture 08:22, 18 March 2020 (EDT)

Let me look into this. If you want to post it, go ahead but from experience, there aren't a lot of people that work with ISBNs lists :) So even if we have people producing lists, someone will need to work on them after that. Annie 11:31, 18 March 2020 (EDT)

Thanks - I'll do a bit more work on that tool to make it more useful & user-friendly before doing anything to publicize it. ErsatzCulture 19:53, 18 March 2020 (EDT)

Adding earlier books

When you are adding a new pub which is earlier than the first we have, don't forget to submit a EditTitle as well to adjust the date of the title record :) I fixed this one. Annie 19:16, 18 March 2020 (EDT)

Ok willdo. I did see the warning about the date being earlier on the post-submit page; I should have realized there might be a follow-up action. ErsatzCulture 19:52, 18 March 2020 (EDT)

The system does very little automatically - as it can lead to errors. So any time when you do AddPub, ClonePub or import and you see the yellow, check the dates and submit the needed changes :) Same applies for EditPub -- the contents will NOT get redated automatically when you change the pub date. Annie 20:06, 18 March 2020 (EDT)

Nomination for designer

Normally we only credit the artist, and the designer only get mentioned in the notes.--Dirk P Broer 12:02, 19 March 2020 (EDT)

Thanks - I thought that might be the case, but with this being an award-nominated cover with ambiguities over who the nominated individual(s) was/were, I was unsure what - if any - the most correct/ideal solution was. Still waiting for a Twitter response on who they think got the nomination. ErsatzCulture 12:41, 19 March 2020 (EDT)

Short Changes

I approved your submission on Short Changes. To address your problems: For the title "The God Shark", variant the title to the original "The God-Shark". Click on the story, then under Editing Tools, choose "Make this title a variant", look up the original title, copy the number for that title and insert it into the blank. A similar action is needed for the pen name. If the pen name is not yet connected to the author's real name, but both are already in the data base, go to the pen name, click on "Make/Remove Alternative Name" under the editing tools, and enter the number of the author's real name. Once that is established, you can variant the pen name for your story to the author's real name. Both of these types of situations are really common in the data base, and once you can handle them, you'll be much more capable as an editor. One more thing: you might want to add the source of the quote in the synopsis. Good luck! Bob 14:16, 19 March 2020 (EDT)

Thanks for the tips - I started trying to add a different collection a few weeks ago, and ended up running away in fear about how much more complicated it seemed than the simple "Add (novel) title/publication" edits than I've mostly done before now ;-)

Re. the quote, I wasn't sure how best to handle that, as it's not really a synopsis, but there's nothing in the barebones PDF either. I'll submit an edit to make it clearer where it came from.

Thanks again! ErsatzCulture 15:16, 19 March 2020 (EDT)

The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States

I approved this but of the author is indeed differently credited, you will need to unmerge, edit and then variant - the pub and the title MUST have the same author form. In the future when the authors are different instead of AddBooks, just add it as a new novel and then variant. Let me know if you need assistance with thatAnnie 13:11, 20 March 2020 (EDT)

Thanks - I only noticed the author (and title) variant after I'd already filled in the details and was about to hit submit. I wasn't sure if it'd be easier to cancel that and resubmit everything afresh - guess I'll know for next time. ErsatzCulture 13:20, 20 March 2020 (EDT)

When you had already done the work and would rather not redo it, submit with a note and explain on what your next steps are (which is what you did) - that is why I approved instead of rejecting as well. :) Annie 13:22, 20 March 2020 (EDT)

Sorry to have stepped in (I was unaware of this discussion), but author and title seem to be the same, so I merged the titles. Stonecreek 14:16, 20 March 2020 (EDT)

Is there in fact a separate title page for the UK ebook edition? And in addition, Amazon has a list price of £9.99 for the Kindle edition: it is just marked as reduced to £4.99. Stonecreek 14:38, 20 March 2020 (EDT)

First things first, I believe I need to create a "Dr. Jeffrey Lewis" author/pen-name, as that is the name credited on the UK edition(s?)

Second, the title page (visible on the Amazon UK "Look Inside" preview) shows that the title includes "A Speculative Novel" at the end. There is a variant for that already in the database, so I think I might be able to change the UK ebook publication to be based on that.

(It wouldn't surprise me if all versions of this book have the "A Speculative Novel" bit on their title page, but I only have access to the UK ebook.)

Re. the price, Amazon UK is only showing me £4.99 as the Kindle price, no indication that it is reduced. This may well be because I already bought it a year ago (when it was either 99p or £1.99, FWIW) - I've revisited the Amazon UK page in a different browser, and now it shows me the "*Print* List Price" is £9.99 - that doesn't imply to me that the regular ebook price is £9.99. Per earlier discussion with Annie in an earlier item in my talk page, I qualified the £4.99 price with the date that I saw it on Amazon. ErsatzCulture 15:12, 20 March 2020 (EDT)

We ignore subtitles such as "A novel" for example and I would put "A Speculative novel" in the same bucket as well and will not record it as a subtitle. But that is somewhat left to the editors. Why are you trying to unmerge the covers?

"now it shows me the "*Print* List Price" is £9.99 - that doesn't imply to me that the regular ebook price is £9.99" - Correct. It tells you the price of the printed version so you know how much you save when buying the e-version. The Print List Price can never be used as the e-book price because it has no relationship to the ebook at all - it is there only as a marketing trick. Annie 15:36, 20 March 2020 (EDT)

As for the author - unmerge the novels, edit the one with the other form of the name AND then you have the new form of the author and you can pseudonym it. Or I can do that so that another moderator does not merge them again without checking the form of the author names on the covers or the title page before the edit can go through. Let me know. Annie 15:40, 20 March 2020 (EDT)

In reverse order: I think that's the plan I had for getting these records in the state I think they should be in - I'll be sure to come back crying for help if I've got it wrong ;-)

Re. the title and "A Speculative novel", I was basing that change on this discussion earlier in my talk: http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/index.php/User_talk:ErsatzCulture#Title_page , plus the change of Episodes to Episodes: Short Stories http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pub_history.cgi?732478 (which I thought I'd PVed the ebook version of, but apparently not?) - I'm slightly unclear why "A Speculative novel" wouldn't be added, but "Short Stories" (which appears nowhere outside of the title page) should be.

That's one of the greyer areas around here - what counts as a subtitle and what does not. Up to the editor and mostly the verifiers. Plus the only place that does matter is the title page - what is on the cover is added in notes. :) In this case, as the verified copy had it and they had the same title page, I added it - which does not mean that it won't get removed at some point. If you want to add it here, I won't reject it. If you consider it a subtile and not a definition by the publisher, go ahead and add it. :) Annie 17:00, 20 March 2020 (EDT)

(Sorry for slow response than expectd - got distracted by other things.) OK, fair enough. I'm neutral about the change per se, I'm only trying to go by the rules/conventions, at least in my limited understanding of them :-) At this point, I'm happy to leave them as-is. ErsatzCulture 17:55, 20 March 2020 (EDT) (but another reply below)

Finally, re. the covers: the UK publications have slightly different covers - besides the author name - and the UK ebook cover is different from the UK paperback (at least based on the Amazon image for the latter), and seeing as I'm going all-out on this, I want(ed) to try to get everything as correct as I could. ErsatzCulture 15:57, 20 March 2020 (EDT)

We do not variant art for slight differences - we variant for language, title and artist. Covers which have small differences (flipped around, color changes, position of texts, added texts and so on) are merged. Covers that are different stay alone. To my eye, they look the same but if you think they are different, you will need to edit the two records to explain what is different and why not to merge. Annie 17:00, 20 March 2020 (EDT)

I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding, or failed to make my intentions clear. The main thing I was interested in was reflecting that the UK editions are credited to a slightly different name. This, if I understand correctly, requires (a) demerging to create a separate title for those UK pubs, and (b) editing that title to use the new author, (c) indicating the new author is a variant name, and (b) indicating the new title is a variant title. (There's also the potential issue of the title variations, but let's ignore that for now.)

The UK paperback and ebook obviously have different ISBNs, publishers, etc, so they get their own records in the pubs table in the database. Each record in that table has its own column (pub_frontimage) for the cover image URL - they can't be merged. Whilst I could just enter the same image URL for each of the UK editions, it makes more sense to me to enter the different image URLs that Amazon use for the different products? (I did just check a local copy of the database to verify that my understanding of how the cover images were stored was correct.)

Cover variants that I can understand you not wanting in ISFDB are the tweaks that publishers make to add "Now a movie" or "Award winner/nominee" flashes, or maybe even different blurbs - but AFAIK those are all cases where the ISBN etc remain unchanged, so it's not really a different publication/edition? That I'd be completely on-board with, but it doesn't seem to be the same issue as here.

Apologies for turning what I thought was going to be a mundane edit into an overlong epic :-( ErsatzCulture 17:55, 20 March 2020 (EDT)

For the covers - it is not just for these tweaks. If one cover is red and one is white, we will merge. If one is black and white and other is colored, we will merge. If one of them is mirrored, we will merge. Let me see if I can find the help page on that. We merge the record - each PUB inside of the coverart record will be carrying its own image. See for example. See how the image is mirrored (left/right axis)? We still have 1 title record with 2 publication - which brings two images. The images are in the pub level. The thing that I see different is where the burning portion is in regards to the white house image. I would count that as minor enough to keep them together - one of the covers just has its middle portion zoomed in. If we split, we cannot variant them. Do you think that they are different enough to constitute absolutely separate titles? If you do, I will leave the request on the board and let another moderator take a look as well.

For the rest - yes - that is all you need to do - unmerge the novels, change the author, pseudonym and then make it a variant. You made it clear but you submitted unmerge on the covers, not the novels titles. Thus me asking you what you are trying to do. If I see unmerge on the NOVELs, that will go through based on what we are talking about. If you submit the request for the novels unmerge, I can approve immediately. Annie 18:26, 20 March 2020 (EDT)

I'll start a new item on my talk page for this, because the amount of indentation is driving me bonkers... ErsatzCulture 20:22, 20 March 2020 (EDT)

Christian, do you see "Digital List Price" as 9.99 or Print? If the latter, it is irrelevant - as I mentioned above it is a marketing trick. If the first, then it is possible that EU sees this differently than UK and US. Annie 15:43, 20 March 2020 (EDT)

I only see that 9.99 is crossed out, with no reference of the relation; but you're probably right that it's a marketing trick (which wouldn't be allowed over here). Christian Stonecreek 00:09, 21 March 2020 (EDT)

2020 Commission issues contd. ...

Annie: aha, halfway through writing this up, I see what I did wrong, unmerging the COVERART record (2433403), not the NOVEL record (2391993). Problem was, I didn't realize that I'd done something different from what I intended, so when you correctly pointed out that I was doing the wrong thing, I interpreted that as you talking about a different issue (covers in the context of the image URL in the pubs table - I still mentally associate the titles table primarily in the contetxt of NOVEL, ANTHOLOGY, SHORTFICTION, etc, not COVERART).

Sigh, it's been a few long/frustrating/worrying few days, and rather than use ISFDB as a means of distracting myself from all that crap, I fear that I've brought that stress here with me :-(

Anyway, this is what I'm ultimately trying to get to:

• A third NOVEL title record for this work. (This is what I intended edit #4604424 to achieve, but I did it on the COVERART)
• That NOVEL to be a child/variant of one of the existing two ones (2391993 probably)
• It should have a new "Dr Jeffrey Lewis" author record
• That new author record to be a pseudonuym/child of one of the two existing author records (275116 probably)
• The two UK editions/publications to refer to this new NOVEL title record.
• The UK paperback publication (http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?673370) should have the cover URL updated, because I don't think that particular image has ever been used on a UK edition, and it doesn't match the image on Amazon UK right now. (Possibly it did when Fixer created the original record?) This current use of a US image on a UK publication is what I thought you were referring to by "merging" the covers...
• That slight variant in cover images absolutely doesn't merit having a separate COVERART title record, so I need to undo edit #4604424
• Theoretically I might also add the "A Speculative Novel" suffix for the new title record and/or the UK publication records, but I think I'll leave as-is now.

I'll maybe submit an edit for the first of these shortly, although given it's now 1am here, I dunno that I dare risk screwing something else up :-( ErsatzCulture 20:58, 20 March 2020 (EDT)

No worries at all. I will approve whatever you send in a bit (dinner time for me) and all finish the needed edits. The image link that is there now was what amazon was showing at the time - or I would have changed it. Or I may have missed the difference and not corrected Fixer - although I try to check for that - but things can slip. . :) PS: You can always add (unindent) at the bottom of a thread and restart that way without a brand new topic. Either way is fine. :) Annie 21:07, 20 March 2020 (EDT)

I hope I have undone the damage, and installed instead what you have in mind. Sorry, Christian Stonecreek 00:21, 21 March 2020 (EDT)

Hi, I don't think you caused any "danage" as such - more that this was the most complicated series of edits I've done on ISFDB - and absolutely not helped by me doing a demerge on the wrong COVERART title record rather than the intended NOVEL record - and having other edits happen on these titles/pubs at the same time just made me even more unsure about what I was doing.

Now that I've had a good night's sleep, hopefully I can look at this afresh, and fix any outstanding issues :-) ErsatzCulture

EDIT: It looks like you've done everything I planned to do, so many thanks for saving me the job (and avoiding the risk of me screwing it up again) ! ErsatzCulture 06:11, 21 March 2020 (EDT)

Yes: it just takes time to accomodate to the complexities involved, and sometimes everybody is able to screw things up - no matter how long you are already working here.

Also, you don't seem to have screwed up any major thing. It just takes time to sort out what is this thing called artwork: we usually mean drawings, paintings, or photos by it, but there seem to be cases where the letters of the title may be viewed as part of it. Stonecreek 07:07, 21 March 2020 (EDT)

Black Leopard, Red Wolf UK publisher

Pre-empting any mod comment - I see the publisher for this should probably be "Penguin Books". I'll do a follow-up edit to fix it, if no-one else does. ErsatzCulture 11:54, 24 March 2020 (EDT)

The Penguins are always giving me trouble :) Approved and fixed. Annie 16:42, 24 March 2020 (EDT)

Thanks for fixing that! The good news is that I just submitted an AddPub for Gibson's Agency, and I remembered to put the right publisher name on that one :-) I'll add some code to the tool that's picking up all these missing pubs to rewrite the publisher names to the preferred ISFDB forms, so that I won't have to remember to manually correct it in submissions.

BTW, I had a brief email exchange with Ahasuerus about the tools I'm working on - which have expanded/changed a bit from the stuff using the Goodreads CSV I mentioned last week - and he suggested you should be kept in the loop. For, ahem, reasons, it's not something I'm ready to publicise on an open venue like this wiki, but if you care to know, you can email me at <anything>@<myusername>.com, and I'll forward you the email thread. ErsatzCulture 16:59, 24 March 2020 (EDT)

My mail is not a secret and had been posted before so just drop me a line - anniemodee at either yahoo or gmail will find me very easily. :) Annie 17:32, 24 March 2020 (EDT)

The City in the Middle of the Night

I approved your submission The City in the Middle of the Night. You made an error in specifying the Forbidden Planet reference, forgetting the a href=" at the front end and the quote marks at the end of the address. I fixed that for you since that was easier than asking you to do so. Bob 16:55, 24 March 2020 (EDT)

Thanks for fixing my screw-up. I saw the error message after I submitted, but AFAIK there's no way to edit a pending submission, other than cancelling it and redoing it from scratch, is that right? If it'd just been one field I'd changed, I'd have probably done that, but I was too lazy to face copypasting or retyping all the notes etc. ErsatzCulture 17:01, 24 March 2020 (EDT)

At this time there is no way to edit pending submissions, I am afraid. Ahasuerus 19:10, 24 March 2020 (EDT)

Thanks - I didn't think there was, but I wanted to double-check, as I don't want to create extra unnecessary work for the mods. ErsatzCulture 19:31, 24 March 2020 (EDT)

Glad to help. I think you're doing thing right and hope you'll continue to contribute. Bob 10:03, 25 March 2020 (EDT)

Deleting publications ...

... should not be done, if they weren't erroneously entered. I rejected your submission - I also don't understand your reasoning: the contents have to be added one way or other. Stonecreek 12:54, 25 March 2020 (EDT)

OK, I just submitted an AddPub with the full details http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/view_submission.cgi?4607415 , and didn't see you'd messaged me until after I'd hit submit. If that record can be merged with the existing ebook pub, then fine, although I'm not sure if that's possible? Entering all 17 stories in the same AddPub form seemed to be much less painless than the alternative of adding individual publications to each individual story? Or am I missing something (which is quite possible)? ErsatzCulture 13:04, 25 March 2020 (EDT)

We have an import function - where you can import the existing stories. The way you added these in this AddPub now requires 17 followup merges if it gets approved -- so you are not solving anything by adding manually this way, you are adding more work. And you could have done that on an EditPub instead of AddPub anyway if you wanted to add them and force the merges later. :) Annie 13:11, 25 March 2020 (EDT)

Will accept the submission, because the date of publication for the ebook and the print edition are the same. Please do in the future as hinted to above. Thanks, Stonecreek 13:16, 25 March 2020 (EDT)

Doh - I looked at EditPub first, and didn't spot any UI to allow me to add stories/titles to it. Now that I look at it again more closely, I see that it's in the middle of the form, but doesn't have the multiple entry boxes for titles that I was expecting to see, plus it has the greyed out collection title, which mislead me into thinking I couldn't edit that bit.

Sigh, will remember for the future. Please don't spend any of your time cleaning this up, let me try to rectify my errors. ErsatzCulture 13:24, 25 March 2020 (EDT)

ISFDB always has ways to surprise you :) In general - you can do anything with a pub - it may just need more steps sometimes or finding the correct place. Collections/anthologies and magazines can be especially tricky. :) Annie 13:32, 25 March 2020 (EDT)

Yeah, I first tried to add these contents a month ago (one of the original stories was nominated for a BSFA Award), but ran away in fear. I've plucked up more courage in the meantime, but it seems like it was misplaced :-(

It looks like Stonecreek has cleaned up my mess, so many thanks for that! ErsatzCulture 13:35, 25 March 2020 (EDT)

You are doing fine. Noone learned to swim without learning how the water tastes. Look into import next time you try something like that - it will surprise how much flexibility it gives you. And you can mix and match - import what we have, add what we do not - all in a single edit :) Annie 13:41, 25 March 2020 (EDT)

Yes, one has to do better by learning, and you're learning well! Won't mention the mistakes I made in the beginning (just too embarassing)! Stonecreek 14:02, 25 March 2020 (EDT)

Big Echo, No. 12

I approved your submission of Big Echo, No. 12. That magazine is already in the data base as Big Echo, June 2019. The title in that form is usually preferred for the ISFDB, and the issue number put into the notes. But your entry contains more information that the earlier one. You should combine the information from both entries into one, then delete the other. I suggest that in the future before you enter a magazine, you check the name of the magazine (not the issue, the magazine in general) to see if that issue is already in the data base. More tricks of the system! Bob 21:29, 25 March 2020 (EDT)

Thanks for approving. I did actually look around to see how that had been entered previously, and saw the "June 2019" entry - but according to their website, #12 is dated "July 2019", so I assumed it was something different. (As it's a website, I assumed it wasn't following the "date printed on the cover is the end of the period it should be on sale" pattern that printed products use.) Their earlier issues also seemed to use "No. ##" as the title e.g. http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/publisheryear.cgi?65475+2017 , http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/publisheryear.cgi?65475+2018 , so that was the pattern I followed.

They seem to have an irregular publishing schedule (2020 issues in Jan & March; 2019 issues in Jan,July, Oct; 2018 issues in Jan, Feb, May and Aug and Nov), so - as someone who doesn't really care about webzines - it feels like issue numbers are more useful than months for this one? e.g. the month name isn't a good guide to knowing if an issue is missing in ISFDB. Not that I expect ISFDB practices just to change based on my opinion though ;-) ErsatzCulture 22:00, 25 March 2020 (EDT)

EDIT: clicking around a bit more, it seems I wasn't the only one confused about this publication series: 2 are in a series http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pubseries.cgi?7870 but 4 (including the one I added) are not http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pubs_not_in_series.cgi?65475 Is adding all of these to the series the right thing to do?

I will go through and update the series (standardizing existing ones & adding missing ones). For the titles, the months should be present per our standard. However, I agreed with that the irregular publication schedule makes that appear odd so will also include the numbers (which has been done for other magazines so its not unreasonable). For the publication series, magazines are handled as a title series and not a publication series. I will remove the publication series. -- JLaTondre (talk) 12:58, 28 March 2020 (EDT)

Awesome, thanks! ErsatzCulture 15:07, 28 March 2020 (EDT)

Chung Kuo: The White Mountain(s) pub date

Another talk item pre-empting a mod picking me up on it...

I've just submitted edits for 4 "Corvus / Atlantic Books" pubs to rename them to be "Corvus" for consistency with the other pubs we have. (This sort of thing will be helpful for some tooling I'm working on to spot holes in ISFDB's coverage, especially of UK pubs. See also "Orbit" vs "Orbit / Little Brown", which has similar issues, but on a much bigger scale.)

One of those 4 pubs was lacking a pub date, so I naively copypasted the one from the publisher site, and indicated the source in the notes. I subsequently realized that there was another printing of this pub in one of the 4 other pubs, so that leaving of the pub date blank was likely deliberate?

As such, please feel free to undo my setting of the pub date if that goes against the original submitter/PVers intention, but I'd like to keep the publisher renaming on these edits. Thx ErsatzCulture 22:47, 27 March 2020 (EDT)

Publication: As you mention above, the publication date would be for the first printing, not the second. I have rejected the edit and changed the first instead.

Publisher: As these are all primary verified, it is best to coordinate with the primary verifier instead. I will drop PeteYoung a note about. For now, I rejected the changes as it's easy to do a merge of the two publishers.

Thanks. -- JLaTondre (talk) 09:07, 28 March 2020 (EDT)

Publisher has been merged. Thanks for finding this. -- JLaTondre (talk) 11:18, 28 March 2020 (EDT)

Thanks - I did look to see if there was any "Publisher merge" functionality, but either I missed it, or it's not available to non-mods? ErsatzCulture 11:55, 28 March 2020 (EDT)

I believe it is only available to mods. If you run across a similar situation in the future, you can always post it to ISFDB:Moderator noticeboard and someone will take care of it. -- JLaTondre (talk) 12:08, 28 March 2020 (EDT)

Doggerland

Thanks for the hint! I actually had seen the translation of this novel at the German Amazon, but it didn't read like a speculative one. Will add this today or tomorrow. Christian Stonecreek 10:18, 2 April 2020 (EDT)

Cool :-) I thought hoped/you might see that, as you're one of the few people accepting my edits right now (for which - thank you!)

Is there a more official method, or place on the Wiki, for pinging someone who might be more able to deal with something like that? I know there's a list of users and what languages they know, but I guess that doesn't necessarily correspond 100% with people who might want to get involved in adding translated pubs for those languages.

Thanks again. ErsatzCulture 10:30, 2 April 2020 (EDT)

If someone had added themselves here, they are saying that they are willing to help with those languages - as long as they are still around. So just ping them on their Talk pages. For anything with Latin and/or Cyrillic scripts, even if I am not listed there, I can at least take a look for example (if there is no better option). :) Annie 10:44, 2 April 2020 (EDT)

84K

Pages and Publisher tend to get mixed up now and then (too close to each other) - fixed it here :) And yes - it was on the possible duplicates report because there was an ebook with an ISBN (the US one) and one without an ISBN (the UK one) so it was saying: go check it and make sure we did not duplicate. If an ISBN cannot be found in these cases (some ebooks really do not have an ISBN), a moderator can ignore it in the report. Annie 10:48, 2 April 2020 (EDT)

I saw you did a fix edit for the field - thanks for that. (I'm slightly surprised that it didn't warn me after I did the initial submit - or maybe it did, and I just wasn't paying attention?)

Re. the ISBNs, I'd never thought to check any of the reports until the conversation with Zapp about ASINs a day or two ago, and I saw that three of my recent submissions were listed on possible dupe report. I knew that all three pubs would definitely have ISBNs, so I thought it worth fixing, albeit with the Orbit screwup. I'm in the process right now of getting my tools to collate data from multiple sources - notably Blackwells, as they have both print and ebook, with ISBNs - and whilst it won't be anywhere near a state that I could make a submission without checking it first, it will at least make it easier for me to get all that info. ErsatzCulture 11:01, 2 April 2020 (EDT)

Price is a free text field -- because we support all kinds of currencies. :) Annie 11:16, 2 April 2020 (EDT)

Tell me about it... - I even went to the lengths of asking my parents to explain to me how the British pre-decimal currencies (replaced the year I was born) were supposed to be written down, because the values in ISFDB seemed inconsistent/nonsensical. I don't know that I ever got my head around it, or got my code to work with all the uses in ISFDB :-( ErsatzCulture 11:25, 2 April 2020 (EDT)

The Reflection

I approved your submission for this pub. Yes, it's kind of marginal, but I think we should be inclusive so long there is some evidence that the item is speculative fiction. And you're right, many of those who win these awards are kind of quirky. Bob 18:24, 2 April 2020 (EDT)

Thanks :-) ErsatzCulture 18:38, 2 April 2020 (EDT)

Invisible Tentacles

Hi. I put a few of your Invisible Tentacle submissions on hold. I don't know that we want to be recording games. The app one is a stretch, but at least it contains a book. Much as Rules and Standards discussions are tedious, I think it's worth discussing there what we want to do in a situation like this, where an award's single category covers material that is "in" and material that is way "out". Let me know what you think. Thanks. --MartyD 09:12, 3 April 2020 (EDT)

No worries. It looks like they abandoned that category after running it twice in 2014 and 2015, so not a big deal in the overall scheme of things.

I don't have any strong opinions on including this category, whether in full or only for relevant works, or not at all, but possibly relevant points are:

• Ahasuerus added this category when the overall awards were added a week or two ago, I dunno how closely he might have looked at what had actually been nominated
• Pro: Nebula game category is on ISFDB, but that's for Game *Writing*.
• Con: The Dragon Awards have (IIRC) game categories - both board and electronic I think - but none of them are on ISFDB.
• The Tiptree (or whatever it calls itself now, Sideways or something like that?) might be the most useful comparison, as that's another award that's a grab bag of whatever people thought worthwhile, such as music videos - I dunno if there are any video games or multimedia works amongst its nominees?

ErsatzCulture 09:39, 3 April 2020 (EDT)

I’d say ‘no games’ if you want another opinion. We do not allow drama (audio or video) either so allowing games makes no sense. Annie 09:57, 3 April 2020 (EDT)

This is only in the context - at least as far as I'm concerned - of having stub entries for awards, not proper entries in authors/titles/pubs etc. ISFDB has the Hugo Dramatic Presentation categories, and this http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/award_category.cgi?248+0 AFAIK is a music album and/or video. As I said, I'm not too bothered one way or another over this, and I'm absolutely sympathetic to resisting scope creep that's likely to be detrimental in the long run, but I'm not seeing a clear distinction between the aforementioned stuff that's already been added to the ISFDB awards data, and my pending edits.

Do you know off the top of your head of any precedents within ISFDB where where only on-topic nominees are allowed in the database? If there are, then that would seem reasonable for this award category also.

(Apologies if this is re-hashing old ground; I imagine it's of a piece with SFWA debates about allowing game writers in, WSFS debating whether to have a game category, etc) ErsatzCulture 10:14, 3 April 2020 (EDT)

The Hatton for example. We also have this for an example of the other option (add award, do not add the work). Once we open the door for games (which are never eligible) to be added, we open the door for pretty much anything so... I'd prefer to treat that as the Hattons. Maybe we should start a discussion over in R&S? Annie 10:28, 3 April 2020 (EDT)

That Harlan Ellison one you linked to is the sort of thing I meant by "stub" entry, and is what I'd intended to do for 4/5 of the noms in this category. (The fifth was an app version of a novel already in ISFDB, which I'd linked to with a qualifying note.) Did I mess up my submissions for them?

Via one of those links, I see we also have at least one video game award stub entry: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/award_details.cgi?25274

I'm more than happy to shift this discussion to R&S, although note that I'm primarily arguing from a position of completeness and pedanticism, rather than any desire to advocate for adding games to ISFDB ;-) ErsatzCulture 10:46, 3 April 2020 (EDT)

Actually, having slept on it, I think having the award lists be complete is ok, as long as we don't then go add the inappropriate works (using the award reference as justification). It's a little like using Essays to document reviews of non-genre works. I will accept them. --MartyD 11:30, 4 April 2020 (EDT)

Thanks! ErsatzCulture 17:43, 4 April 2020 (EDT)

Eden's Story

Regarding this book:

• Added the novels - please do not forget to return to the omnibuses you add to import their contents
• Changed the price to use the RRP value from the publisher - this is a better price than the current Kindle price which changes (this is basically a list price - which is what we prefer to have when we can).

Thanks. :) Annie 18:48, 3 April 2020 (EDT)

Thanks for nudging me, will try to remember for next time. I think some of my more recent submissions have grabbed the price from the publisher site, but obviously not this one.

Slightly annoying that the code didn't automagically popular the contents based on the fact that I entered the volume numbers in the contents field, but I guess not all omnibuses contain numbered volumes. ErsatzCulture 19:04, 3 April 2020 (EDT)

It does not know if you want the parent titles we have, some variants or a new variant that you are still to create - remember that you need to import the titles with the correct spelling of titles and author names and language. And what happens if someone re-numbers the series (because it was wrong or by mistake) after you submit but before it is approved? There are way too many permutations for automation not to mess up - so we keep it simple. Annie 19:19, 3 April 2020 (EDT)

UK Non-US Releases

Since the website name matches, I assume you are the one who generated this as posted at tor.com? If so, wanted to let you know that your script is not recognizing cases where the US edition was published under a different title than the UK version. For example, in the results for 1980, #15 is Gary Brandner's Death Walkers. However, this was originally a US publication published as Walkers. -- JLaTondre (talk) 11:56, 4 April 2020 (EDT)

Yes, guilty as charged. I posted a comment further down that blog post earlier today mentioning that I knew about the issues with variant author names and titles, and hope to fix them this weekend. The original code was written several months ago and abandoned in an incomplete state that didn't even pick up author names; the the pages I linked on that blog post were created in a frenzied hour or two of hackery late last night, and I added the caveats about "BUGGY BETA CODE" to try to cover myself, plus the links to the relevant ISFDB pages hopefully give a clue why the code did the wrong thing. (There are other issues like vague dates like 1970-01-00 or 1970-00-00 not being supported in Python, so being rendered as "?".)

See also User:ErsatzCulture#Other ErsatzCulture 12:13, 4 April 2020 (EDT)

I missed the follow-on post. For dates, I handle them by having the SQL cast them to chars (ex: SELECT CAST(title_copyright AS CHAR)) and then dealing with them as strings in Python. Not the greatest approach, but it works. -- JLaTondre (talk) 12:22, 4 April 2020 (EDT)

Yeah, that's exactly what I usually do, and then I have a Python function that converts them into a valid Python date, using January or 1st-of-the-month if necessary. Unfortunately the original code I was working from didn't bother to do the CASTing, and didn't get round to fixing that aspect before posting, which seemed acceptable to me in the timeframe. A tidy-up needs to fix loads of stuff, including that. ErsatzCulture 12:30, 4 April 2020 (EDT)

For what it's worth, I just pushed out a new version at a slightly different URL that should fix (most of?) the variant author/title issues, plus adds lists sorted by author (maybe useful for collectors?) and top lists of authors ranked by the number of books they have that weren't published in the US. Still looks as rough as hell, but I need to drop this distraction now, and work on some more important stuff... ErsatzCulture 12:59, 5 April 2020 (EDT)

Beneath the World, a Sea

Hello, concerning this submission, I was wondering if you could clarify this statement: Print length of 289 pages listed on Amazon UK; print length of 416 pages listed on Amazon UK.... I couldn't find any mention of an ebook with 416 pages, so guess that may be a typo? Regards, MagicUnk 14:48, 15 April 2020 (EDT)

Yeah, bad copypasting on my part: 416 is what Fixer had picked up from Amazon US, and is what is in the original notes. My guess is that that figure was some early guesstimate on the Amazon product page ahead of publication; it wouldn't surprise me if it now shows something in the 280-290 range, but I don't trust Amazon US not to serve me Amazon UK's data if I visit it from my UK IP address.

(If memory serves, my local library has the hardback of this, and I could probably check the page count of that pub (and do a transient verification) whenever it opens again... My vague recollection is that the physical edition is a relatively slim volume.)

Apologies for the confusion ErsatzCulture 14:57, 15 April 2020 (EDT)

Amazon US now says "Print Length: 288 pages". This does not change based on where you are BTW - prices change but the panel at the bottom stays the same (just for future references). Both the hc and the ebook were initially projected at 416 (go figure). :) Annie 15:05, 15 April 2020 (EDT)

Thanks, I've accepted your submissions and clarified in the notes. Feel free to update any and all of my additions :). Cheers! MagicUnk 15:21, 15 April 2020 (EDT)

Thanks for clearing up my mess - all looks good to me now. ErsatzCulture 15:55, 15 April 2020 (EDT)

Consider importing stories

I just merged 6 of the 11 or so you just added to the NewCon press new book as we had them in the db. :) Annie 11:20, 21 April 2020 (EDT)

I thought - clearly wrongly - that providing the author and title for the stories already in the DB would be enough for them to be matched up, and that I'd just have to worry about the new ones. Plus, I've only used the import tool once or twice, and I think that was in the context of importing a different pub of the same anthology or collection, not lots of piecemeal stuff like is the case here.

Will try doing an import for the next batch of ~10, and see how that goes... ErsatzCulture 11:34, 21 April 2020 (EDT)

Nope. Unless you import or clone, it will create a new title that then needs merging if we already have it. :) Look at Option 2 in the Import Screen :) let me know if you need assistance and/or have questions. Annie 11:39, 21 April 2020 (EDT)

One more thing: Why are you adding dates of 2020-00-00 instead of letting the publication put in its own date? If there is an earlier release, the date will come from there -- putting just the year causes a few issues (the order on the author page gets messed up for example). When you do not know the date, that is a different story but when you do, let the publication set the date and if an earlier one shows up, it can be adjusted.

PS: Audio counts the same as ebooks - as long as it is in a real publication and not just on someone's site and it is narration and not a dramatization, it is eligible. Annie 13:23, 21 April 2020 (EDT)

I have been putting 201x-00-00 for the stories which are listed as previously published, but not known to ISFDB.

Those ones are fine :) We can refine the date when we know it. I saw at least one 2020-00-00 though - thus asking. This was the one that caught my eye and I realized you are adding dates on all manually.

Ah right - sorry, I'd forgotten about that one. In that particular case, it was stated as being previously published, so using this anthology's pub date of 2020-04-20 seemed wrong, but using 2020-00-00 at least indicates that the exact original pub date has yet to be tracked down. Of course, it turned out that the prior publication was much earlier than 2020 - but this came back to the question I posed in the comment about whether audio pub dates counted or not, and for a mod to make an adjustment to the year if they did. (NB: I have absolutely zero interest in documenting that earlier audio-only anthology, but I tried to give enough pointers/links in case there was any other editor who might care to pick up on it.) ErsatzCulture 14:18, 21 April 2020 (EDT)

For the stories which seem to be first published in this anthology, I have been putting 2020-04-20, which I assume at worst isn't going to be any worse than leaving it blank. (Given that, as mentioned a few comments above, the site didn't "do what I meant" when I left fields blank, it seemed safer not to make any assumptions about fields being auto-populated correctly.)

Just leave it empty - they will get the date from the publication. When you create a new title inside of a publication, it will get its date from the publication date and its language from the reference title. Adding the date is not a problem but typos happen (I do a lot of typos so when there is a shortcut somewhere, I usually share it with people). We do not change automatically when you change something else but if you leave empty, default will take over. :)

For the stories which were known to ISFDB and have been imported, I've left the details as they were automatically populated.

It's possible there are some entries that I made an error in not following any of the above patterns; are there any records in particular you are thinking of? (The only one that comes close is the Tade Thompson story, but I hadn't uncovered the original pub date at the time I added that one to the anthology.) ErsatzCulture 13:51, 21 April 2020 (EDT)

Yep - not much you can do for the imported ones anyway - they will be editable only from their title pages if needed. Hope that whole thing makes sense. And thanks for working on that anthology - anthologies can be... challenging. Annie 14:01, 21 April 2020 (EDT)

Thanks - I don't even like short fiction in 9x% of cases, so why I'm punishing myself by adding these, I dunno :-( BTW, I hope doing these small batches of edits isn't too annoying, but there's no way in hell I'm going to try and do all ~50 items in one hit, and I can't imagine a mod would enjoy attempting to verify such a big change either? ErsatzCulture 14:18, 21 April 2020 (EDT)

If you do not know a date, don't make up one as with the 2020-00-00 one. Just leave it with the pub date - and when we add an earlier one, we will adjust - add a note for the earlier publication but unless you know it is 2020, adding 2020-00-00 is even more wrong than the pub date :) And no - no worries on the small batches. You may want to add a {{incomplete}} in the notes so it is clear we still have work to do. Annie 14:34, 21 April 2020 (EDT)

Firewalkers

When entering a chapbook, the shortfiction contents need to be entered also. The software will automatically create the title record for the chapbook, but not for any shortfiction within it. If the shortfiction already exists in the database, it can be imported after the chapbook creation (I'd suggest leaving a moderator note stating that is the plan). But if it doesn't, then it should be added when the pub us being created. Hopefully that explanation makes senses. If not, please let me know. I added the novella to Firewalkers. Thanks. -- JLaTondre (talk) 08:36, 24 April 2020 (EDT)

Thanks; IIRC I don't think I've created a chapbook/novella before, but I wasn't sure if it would automatically do the right thing like you get on novels. Is that because a chapbook might contain one or more novelettes or short stories rather than a novella? ErsatzCulture 08:50, 24 April 2020 (EDT)

It cannot have another story inside - if you have two pieces of fiction, it becomes a collection. Think of a chapbook as a collection of 1 story/poem. We do not add stories automatically when you add a collection/anthology. The same happens here - we create the container, you need to add the contents. Novels are both containers and contents; chapbooks are just containers - like collections. Annie 12:36, 24 April 2020 (EDT)

So in an ideal world should there be a cleanup report for CHAPBOOKs containing multiple SHORTFICTIONs? A query of the database indicates there are 239 of them as of last weekend:

   select * from (select p.pub_id, p.pub_title, count(1) c from pubs p LEFT OUTER JOIN pub_content pc ON p.pub_id = pc.pub_id LEFT OUTER JOIN titles t ON t.title_id = pc.title_id where pub_ctype = 'CHAPBOOK' AND title_ttype = 'SHORTFICTION' GROUP BY p.pub_id, p.pub_title) foo where c > 1 ORDER by c desc;

Some examples/worst offenders: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?366914 , http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?325877 , http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?514400

I also had a quick look at the proportion of SHORTFICTION subtypes in CHAPBOOKs, to see if you could make an argument that it should default to creating a SHORTFICTION/novella - doesn't seem like it (although potentially these stats are skewed by the former?): ErsatzCulture 13:36, 24 April 2020 (EDT)

   MariaDB[isfdb]> select t.title_storylen, count(1) c from pubs p LEFT OUTER JOIN pub_content pc ON p.pub_id = pc.pub_id LEFT OUTER JOIN titles t ON t.title_id = pc.title_id where pub_ctype = 'CHAPBOOK' AND title_ttype = 'SHORTFICTION' GROUP BY t.title_storylen;
   +----------------+-------+
   | title_storylen | c     |
   +----------------+-------+
   | NULL           | 10023 |
   | novelette      |  4843 |
   | novella        | 20863 |
   | short story    |  5759 |
   +----------------+-------+

There are a few special cases: for example a novella that contains a poem inside of the novella itself. We may want to add the poem for reference purposes (especially if it is published separately) but this whole book still is a single novella. So there will always be cases that look incorrect but are indeed chapbooks. Or a story/novella plus an excerpt (as we make excerpts short fiction) - this is still a single story publication. A report may be useful but most of those are probably legitimate special cases.

And nope - you DEFINITELY cannot default to a novella - everyone is publishing short stories as kindle singles and other eBooks- and these are as much chapbooks as are the novellas of the world. Or even to a short fiction (because it can be a poem instead). Or even to the same name (think of a book called "A Christmas Story" containing a story called "Santa Claus" - albeit rarely it can happen as we go for title pages titles both on the story and on the complete book. Annie 13:34, 24 April 2020 (EDT)

I fixed those two erroneous cases. I also pointed Ahasuerus to this conversation for a possible clean-up report. There may be some cases where we'd want to ignore multiple fictions, but a half-dozen more stories is definitely a collection. -- JLaTondre (talk) 13:42, 24 April 2020 (EDT)

Running ErsatzCulture's query above and spot checking them, the majority are multiple shortfiction (not extracts & his query ignores poems). -- JLaTondre (talk) 13:52, 24 April 2020 (EDT)

It is possible. I know I had moderated a few special cases - so just brought them up :) I thought we had a report for that but looking at the complete list, it seems that we do not indeed. Annie 14:01, 24 April 2020 (EDT)

Yup, 280 hits -- keep in mind that SERIAL titles are valid within CHAPBOOK pubs. We definitely need a new cleanup report. FR 1342 has been created. Ahasuerus 16:17, 24 April 2020 (EDT)

Version 1 of the cleanup report has been deployed. The data will be available tomorrow morning. Ahasuerus 11:10, 25 April 2020 (EDT)

Gollancz SF Masterworks The Lathe of Heaven and Ursula [K.] Le Guin

I noticed for your The Lathe of Heaven submission that I have on hold, you've decided to go with Ursula K. Le Guin instead of Ursula Le Guin. I wouldn't normally question that, but this submission came juxtaposed with the submission of the 17th printing where the cover showed "K." but you have a copy and found no "K." used in the interior credits and so (rightfully) omitted the "K." and noted the discrepancy with the name on the cover. In this held submission, we have the same publisher and series, and the cover image shows no "K.". Would it not be safer to assume that for this one the cover credit is correct, noting what was found in the interior of another edition despite a different cover credit, and then note that the secondary sources seem rather consistent in their use of "K." in the credit? Despite that unanimity, I think the evidence from closest to the actual publication points to its being otherwise. --MartyD 12:02, 2 May 2020 (EDT)

It's not the same (pub) series - assuming I didn't make a mistake on the submission - the 2 publication records currently in ISFDB are for the original SFMW pub series, but my tp and ebook submissions are for the SFMWII pub series. (The tp ISBN is the same for all of them, mind.)

The impression I get - and I suspect someome like PeteYoung will be more knowledgeable about this than me - is that historically UK publishers preferred to use the K-less form, but in recent years have switched to using the K. In the case of this SFMWII print edition (from 2015ish?), it feels like they've retained the negs/plates/files for the interior content of the original SFMW pub series edition (from 2001?), but because the covers were redone, they took the opportunity to change the author name on the covers and spine. How that relates to ISFDB rules & standards, I leave to the mods to adjudicate on - my main aim was to fill in the omission of this title in the SFMWII pub series

On the other hand, I would imagine that the SFMWII ebook uses the K-version throughout, because there seemingly wasn't an ebook version prior to that point. However, as I don't own that ebook pub, that's nothing more than a guess. ErsatzCulture 12:40, 2 May 2020 (EDT)

**EDIT** Sorry, just noticed it was the ebook submission that you've held, I assumed it was the tp. As I don't own the ebook, and was only adding it out of a sense of completeness, I'm more than happy for you to make whatever changes you want to the ebook submission :-) ErsatzCulture 12:49, 2 May 2020 (EDT)

Right, I am questioning the ebook submission, based on this record, which was your tp edition submission. On this tp one, the cover has the "K.", but you provide good detail about how that' omitted in the interior. We only know the vintage is sometime after 2011. But your 2015 ebook submission uses the "K." credit with a note about secondary sources using that, yet the cover image you provided with the submission shows no "K.". All that said, look what I just found. I think that's pretty clear evidence it has no "K.", yes? If you agree, I will accept the submission, change the credit, and adjust the notes. --MartyD 13:00, 2 May 2020 (EDT)

Doh - sorry, reading comprehension fail on my part, both on your message, and on the cover images for that ebook. Basically, I assumed that the ebook cover would be identical to the print version, but it seems that no, they differ over the "K". The image on the publisher's page also lacks the "K" https://www.sfgateway.com/titles/ursula-k-le-guin/the-lathe-of-heaven/9781473205994/ - even though K is in the author name txt and the page URL.

So yes, please make that edit, and apologies for wasting your time :-( ErsatzCulture 13:16, 2 May 2020 (EDT)

No problem, and making sure what we record is as accurate a possible is never a waste of time. That's what we moderators are here to help try to ensure. I will accept the submission and make those changes. Thanks. --MartyD 07:50, 3 May 2020 (EDT)

Author names

Yes, unlike titles where you need to manually merge even if everything matches, Publishers, Pub Series, Series and Author names will automatically find pre-existing records if there is a match and the existing record will be used. All of them BUT the Series also get deleted immediately if they do not have titles/pubs attached - so if you have notes on one of the three and you are moving the last entry, make sure you save/move the notes first or they are going the way of the dodo. Annie 15:57, 6 May 2020 (EDT)

Dark Angels Rising

Hello,

Where did the ISBN for this one came from? I am working on Newcon Press (with half the books on my shelf) and I had not seen the ISBNs anywhere on the site or the usual places (copyright page for example) and I know you had unearthed two (in a very weird range). So thought I should stop by and ask :) Thanks in advance! Annie 21:35, 6 May 2020 (EDT)

Short answer: Kobo - https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/dark-angels-rising

Longer not-really-an-answer: I've been trying to remember to add links to the public version of my tools in the mod notes; I certainly don't always remember to do that, but in this case I did - http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/view_submission.cgi?4637995 which points at https://sf.ersatzculture.com/product_reports/ian-whates/dark-angels-rising/ebook.html . There you can see all the data I accumulated, and where it came from. (Blackwells have the tp on their site for this title, but not the ebook, so I can't get corroboration from there; it's not showing up on Google Play Books either FWIW.)

Whether that Kobo-sourced ISBN is accurate - I dunno? I recall they were the only source for the ISBN for that charity anthology I did a week or two ago - which I guess is the one you alluded to - and IIRC in both cases no ebook ISBNs were listed on the NewCon Press website, which makes me wonder how legit the ones Kobo are showing are. I've not done an exhaustive check, but every product page I've seen on Kobo lists an ISBN, and I've been assuming they are reliable?

If there's reasonable evidence these Kobo ISBNs might not be legit - similar to the 2-prefixed IDs Blackwells invent for signed editions - then I'll happily stop making use of them, in cases like this where they don't have corroboration from other sources. ErsatzCulture 05:43, 7 May 2020 (EDT)

Kobo. I keep forgetting to check them :) Let me do some digging. What worries me is that these ISBNs seem to exist only on the Kobo site -- but let me do some more checking with the older books. Annie 14:51, 7 May 2020 (EDT)

Stormblood

Let's slow down on these please - even if the publisher is sure that it will be out in a month, this past month had been full of books that were hyped and on twitter and whatsnot and got delayed in the last minute. 3-4 weeks out is too long considering the state of the world. I approved this as it is eligible (of course) but adding it now adds more work for me for checking downstream so let's slow down on forthcoming until the situation normalizes. Thanks in advance! Annie 15:13, 11 May 2020 (EDT)

Same for this one. Annie 15:28, 11 May 2020 (EDT)

OK, willdo. FWIW, the only other upcoming title on my radar was this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Survivors-dramatic-terrifying-global-pandemic-ebook/dp/B087F542TL , which is a cash-in reissue that's only happening because of the virus...

Can I make an observation/suggestion, one that's probably more aimed at Ahasuerus (who I'll ping about this): part of the reason for me submitting these is because (IMHO) the forthcoming books section at the bottom of the homepage looks a bit silly, as we've now got stuff going out as far as November showing on the page. (I'm guessing some of these may have been titles that were scheduled for months earlier, and got pushed back, possibly before any of the Coronavirus stuff hit?) This - again IMHO - gives a weird impression about what the notable forthcoming books are. If the policy is to be conservative on adding future books - which is perfectly reasonable - then maybe it would be best to reduce that forthcoming books section to no more than a month in advance (this would be a simple code change, currently there's a cutoff of 11 months, which could be changed to 1/2 months), or maybe even remove that section whilst it is showing inconsistent/misleading results. ErsatzCulture 16:17, 11 May 2020 (EDT)

We have the "book can be delayed" text over there -- it is just not worth redoing books over and over at the moment when we really do not know what will get out and what not. I am fine with making it stronger if need be -- but adding books in order to fill the space which will then need to be checked and fixed defeats the purpose of doing anything. This virus is making a mess even from reliable publishers. There is no cutoff on 11 months technically that I know of - we should not have any books over 90 days but some slip - moderators not paying attention or books get pushed back. So we have some "very very future" books in the DB so now they show up. As I said - there is no "rule" to stop you from adding more but I would rather not - at the moment we work day by day on Fixer's submissions - on release day, we get what we have in the stores (with a prelim check before posting so some never make it if they caught as delayed and even like that I catch some I need to temporary reject; then I check all that we have from before. Rinse and repeat - daily for the last month or two. The first days when I still had the old loaded titles had a lot of date changes and notes to be written and the schedules get worse and worse this month. We will work though these times - it just requires some patience.

On a separate note - when you see something like that, instead of trying to solve it - post in Community - there may be a bug or there may be something else going on. If it was a bug and you managed to fill it with your books, it may have gone unnoticed for a long time. :) Annie 16:31, 11 May 2020 (EDT)

It turns out that the front page logic retrieves 11 months worth of forthcoming books, one month at a time. Normally, it doesn't matter because the 20 slots available on the front page get filled with books scheduled to be published over the next few days. Due to the pandemic, we don't have nearly as many forthcoming books on file, hence the "far future" publications popping up. (Which really shouldn't be in the database, but that's a different issue.) Also, keep in mind that only the top 2% of all authors (as measured by the number of "views" by our users) are eligible for the front page.

For now, I have changed the front page logic to 1 month worth of pubs. Better safe than sorry. I'll change it to something more reasonable like 3 months once the mess is over.

Thanks for identifying the issue! Ahasuerus 21:12, 11 May 2020 (EDT)

Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction

This LCCN is for the paperback: see here. So pulled it out from the external IDs (these should belong to the edition or be generic for more than one edition, not to another edition) and templated up in the note instead. Feel free to change the wording. The result is here. Annie 19:17, 14 May 2020 (EDT)

Is there a TL;DR guide to these? http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/index.php?title=Template:PublicationFields:ExternalIDs doesn't have anything particularly helpful, and the first hit on the Wiki for "lccn" is http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/index.php/Rules_and_standards_discussions/Archive/Archive08#LCCNs_in_pub_notes , which is (a) 10 years old, so maybe no longer valid, and (b) way too long for me to bother reading, given that I'm in the UK, and I only rarely see LCCNs on "grey import" ebooks. I'm happy not to add them as external IDs if that's the easiest thing, and keep them to the pub note, but obviously that doesn't help anyone who might be doing a search on that ID? (I'm afraid I'm definitely not going to bother checking another site, or if it's set for any other pub for the title in question.) ErsatzCulture 19:38, 14 May 2020 (EDT)

The idea of the external IDs field is to connect you to more data about this specific edition - this is why it is on the pub level and not on the title level. Otherwise I can add all 100+ OCLC IDs which are for a specific title (including in other languages) -- after all you want people to find them, right? :) Instead we add all those various editions separately, each carrying its own number. As LCCN tend to get printed in all kind of weird places (next editions, ebooks and so on), we mention in the notes (with a template and a note what it belongs to) and add it to the field only when it belongs.

This one should be added as an ID to the actual book it belongs to - the paperback partner. And it is already there. If it was not, a clone would have easily made it so it can be added :)

When you say you are not going to bother to check another site I hope you are not telling me that you are adding external IDs blindly just because they are printed somewhere? If you are adding one, that means you had verified that it is for the correct book and is linkable (for the linkable ones). At the very least, you should click on the links after you submit and verify they all work or are provable to be for that edition (old ASIN links may not work but they did at some point and Goodreads tends to allow for the connection). If you are unwilling to do the checks, that's ok but then don't add the IDs in the fields please - someone else will add them at some point eventually. Or mention in the notes that you had not so a moderator knows not to forget to check (things can go a bit hairy sometimes) :)

I understand it can be frustrating but I would rather have the links in the correct places (when possible) :) Annie 19:51, 14 May 2020 (EDT)

If the policy/expectation is that editors have personally verified any external IDs, then that's fine, but it would be nice for this to be stated explicitly up-front on the ExternalIDs wiki page, or similar. NB: I'm absolutely not asking you personally to update that or any other wiki doc - I'm fully aware of which mod approves >90% of my submissions, so I'd hate for you to be distracted away from that ;-) - but as a newbie here, there have been a number of times when it feels like I'm breaking rules that were decided several years ago in some obscure part of the wiki that I have no reasonable chance of even knowing of their existence :-(

We need a newbie-friendly help in a lot of places :( Generally the assumption is that any editor submitted anything had verified the "anything" - it kinda sounds obvious when you had been around for a few months/years. But yes - we probably should say somewhere "please check that all links and external IDs belong to the book". And we all learn new things all the time around here - that is partially why we have the approval system in place. I just happen to know more about external IDs than most people because I moved a cubic ton of them into the External IDs when we added external IDs initially. :) Annie 20:51, 14 May 2020 (EDT)

Anyway, if LCCN only refers to physical editions - which is what it sounds like, from what you're saying? - then it'll be easier for me to just ignore them, given that the number of ISFDB-relevant books I own that will have them can likely be counted on the fingers of one hand. ErsatzCulture 20:27, 14 May 2020 (EDT)

Not always - there may be LCCNs for ebooks but then their formats and/or ISBNs should be on the record if it applies to it. Hope that makes some sense. Think of BL (British Library) and how they have separate records for ebooks and for printed books? Same with LCCN across the pond - although they sometimes (often, always? who knows) keep the same number and just add all relevant ISBNs and formats (either directly or as to it (for example). If you would rather just skip them, that's fine as well. I tend to keep LCCN open when I add books on my own (aka not based on Fixer)(and WorldCat and Goodreads and whatever language-based site I need). But that is just me. :) Annie 20:51, 14 May 2020 (EDT)

Order in ebooks

When adding stories in ebooks like here, please don't forget to add some order in them -- we may change the default sorting order when there is no page numbers and then these will go all over the place :) Annie 14:28, 19 May 2020 (EDT)

Um, how would I best do that? I just had a look at the ebook of Exhalation (on the presumption that as it's a high-profile collection, it's likely to be done properly) and I see the page numbers have a pipe prefix followed by what looks like the print page number - is that a reasonable practice to follow? It's not quite the same as what's described at the bottom of http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/index.php?title=Template:PubContentFields:Page , which implies it might be better done as |1, |2, |3 etc - although I guess in practice the end result is the same, visually at least?

It feels like having a checkbox to select automatically do the pipe-prefixing when cloning a pub would be useful, maybe I should look at implementing it and submitting a patch... ErsatzCulture 14:49, 19 May 2020 (EDT)

Yep, use |1, |2 and so on. The numbers do not matter really - you can use |1, |2, |3 or |0.1, |0.2 or even |1, |4, |9 and so on -- as long as they are order-able and there are no repetitions :) Or if you are importing from something with pages, just add the | in front of the actual number. Think of 25 as 25|25. We use whatever is in front of the pipe to show on the page; whatever is after the pipe is what we sort with. When there is only one number (25), we use it for both sorting and showing (thus my explanation to think of it as 25|25). And if they are already there on whatever you are cloning from, you can import/clone them that way. So you either import/clone with the page numebers and add | manually on each or import without page numbers and add your own numbers. Hope that makes sense.

And yes - being able to keep the numbers but adding | on clone/import will be a nice thing to have. But not to add sequencial numbers if none are there - we have way too many books with messed up order and if we have the order, we assume it is correct - so converting wrong order to pipes is... a bad idea. Annie 14:56, 19 May 2020 (EDT)

PS: No real best practice on what is better - anything works :) The only place I do some careful numbering is with omnibuses and collections that contain work from a single series - the novel/story gets the number it has in the series. That way in a 12 books series, if I already have omnibuses for 1-6 and 7-12 and 1-12 is published, I can import from the other 2, with the numbers intact and they will line up (as opposed to having the numbers as |1-|6 on the ones with the 7-12 novels - then I will need to redo these numbers when importing into 1-12). But that is just my own preference (I work on way too many boxsets and omnibuses with the "clean authors" project. :) Annie 15:04, 19 May 2020 (EDT)

OK, that all seems reasonable. I just wish you'd nudged me about doing this before I did the 50+ story NewCon charity anthology and several print->ebook anthology & collection imports ;-)

I think I have enough outstanding anthologies and collections that need adding (for starters, 3 Dozois Year's Bests in UK ebook that I own, plus several more that I don't own but have scraped details for) that creating a code patch to do the number pipe prefixing looks very tempting... ErsatzCulture

You were adding the Newcon one piecemeal and I was not catching all updates I think. :) Probably should have -- but sometimes I think people know about it and I try not to bother people too much - or I expect to see more updates so I leave some room to people to breathe and finish what they are doing. And sometimes (like today) I see a few in a row without orders (not just yours, in general) and I go nudging people (or fix it for them sometimes). If I post on someone's page daily, they will start ignoring me :) Annie 15:44, 19 May 2020 (EDT)

On a Red Station, Drifting

A few minor issues with this one.

• This OCLC 1219654914 is invalid. The correct one from OCLC ISBN search is 1132368817 (see here). Where did you find it?
• The publisher - don't rely on Amazon/direct mentioning for the publisher - self-published all across the ebook sites (Amazon and Kobo both) means anything from real self-published to "we do not know or care". The smaller the press, the more likely is that to happen (and it can even be worse - Amazon can report the altogether wrong press). Try to do a Look Inside when possible - on Amazon or B&N or Kobo or wherever you can find it - and decide if it is for the edition you are holding. As this is a 2013 edition and this is a small press - this is pretty clear. :).In this case it is very obviously stating "Published by Nine Dragons River 2013". And it also just happens that they published all of her ebooks around this time see here. This is one of the cases where Goodreads can be a bit... weird. By ASIN, they have the Nine Dragons River; by ISBN, they have her name. Now... chances of Nine Dragons River doing one and not the other are slim and you will notice the change in dates. That tells me that we may be dealing with two separate ebooks per format and that the ISBN may have applied to only one of them. If you want to keep digging, be my guest but this is exactly the mess ebooks can create (and the multiple formats/different or lacking ISBNs we were talking about. I had asked for an ISBN check via the Amazon API/Fixer store for this ASIN - let me see what we will find. Will update that when I find it. If it is different, I will clone and split the edition to an Amazon one and ePub one. :)
• Look Inside also found the Cover art artist: Nhan Y Doanh

I fixed all three post approval. The result is here. Annie 19:18, 19 May 2020 (EDT)

That OCLC ID was from here: http://classify.oclc.org/classify2/ClassifyDemo?search-standnum-txt=9781301050543&startRec=0 . (BTW, that "Classify" tool is the top Google result for "oclc isbn search", which I found because I was unsure what difference - if any - there was between OCLC and Worldcat. I did start creating a personal wiki page with the links to tools like that and the BL one yesterday, but either I failed to save it, or the Wiki has lost it.)

What I do is to find a valid OCLC link from another book and click on it and use the search there. No clue what the classify thing gets so wrong - if you click, it leads to a non-existing Italian version of the book - so maybe something got deleted. Annie 19:57, 19 May 2020 (EDT)

PS: And OCLC belongs to Worldcat so they are the same thing. It is just that some of the search links use their old API which was discontinued years ago - I suspect this is the problem of this search... Annie 20:14, 19 May 2020 (EDT)

Re. publisher, I don't think I'd seen this link at the time I did the submission, which states it's a self-pub http://aliettedebodard.com/2013/04/12/on-a-red-station-drifting-ebook-news/ but I had a vague general awareness that some of her novellas were self-pubbed - the non-US editions of at least one of her newer ones was seemingly put out by her agent's company - so I didn't look any further beyond seeing Createspace/Smashwords/whatever it was.

Now... a lot of the self-published authors have a "company" that is basically just for their works. This is one of those cases if you ask me. See Latin Goddess Press for an extreme example :) Sometimes it exists, sometimes it is just printed inside of the books (who knows) but we go by what is printed in the book. This still counts as "self-published" -- but as we go by "what is on the book", we follow that. :) Welcome to the ebooks and small publishers world - it is amusing over here. So the Fixer download claims this ASIN never had an ISBN associated (and for 2013 books I kinda trust it - until a few months ago, Amazon was returning the ISBNs even when not showing them). This and the different dates on Amazon/GR and others make me wonder if indeed we do not have two separate books - ePub with an ISBN (because you cannot sell without one) and a Kindle without (because you do not need it on Amazon). Let me do some digging tonight on that specific book. Annie 19:57, 19 May 2020 (EDT)

Similar story for artist - I'm so used to ebooks not having any artist credit - presumably so that they don't need to change the inner content if/when a cover gets updated - that I didn't look at that; especially as the existing print pub with the same cover didn't have the credit, although I see you've fixed that now :-) ErsatzCulture 19:38, 19 May 2020 (EDT)

Ebooks are a lot more likely to show you the credit because we can always see the first pages - the paper books may hide the title page and/or the copyright one; kindle ones cannot. Annie 19:57, 19 May 2020 (EDT)

Bloodwitch

The format here was left as unknown. This is not that great when we can easily find the format :) Amazon has the size of 13 x 3.6 x 19.7 cm which makes it a "tp" :) The 19.x thing always means a tp (both the A and B UK formats are "tp"). Just heads up if you are doing this with the API. I've fixed it post-approval. Having fun yet? :) Annie 19:28, 19 May 2020 (EDT)

An unstated reason why I mentioned in the email the other day that I want to switch to using the API, is because this isn't the first time I've forgotten to select a format from the drop down in a pub submission. It is however the first time a moderator has caught it... I was considering suggesting to Ahasuerus that the submissions shouldn't default to unknown, you should have to manually select that, and if you haven't selected anything, some Javascript stops the submission, similar to some of the other fields. Maybe it's just me who keeps making this foolish error, but it seems far more likely people would forget to select a value, than actually want/need it to be "unknown"?

My code has logic (based on notes I found somewhere in the wiki) to pull any dimension information, and suggest tp or pb as appropriate. If there aren't any dimensions - more likely for publisher sites than vendors, I've found - then a default paperback format for that publisher is suggested; that's pretty straightforward for UK publishers, who seem to put out far more XTPBs than MMPBs, but would probably be no good for US publishers AFAIK? (Not something I'm worrying about any time soon though ;-)

   def isfdb_format(self):
       ...
           if dims:
               # Discussion from 2009 (maybe out-of-date?)
               # http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/index.php/Rules_and_standards_discussions/Archive/Archive08#Premium_paperback_size
               if dims[0] >= 190 or dims[1] >= 115:
                   return 'tp'
               else:
                   return 'pb'

"dims" is a list of 2 or 3 values in mm - converted from inches (or cm) if you're getting data from a source backwards enough to use those ;-) - sorted biggest first. Of course, it's somewhat academic in doing all that processing and calculating when PEBKAC hits at the data entry stage, hence wanting to switch to API submissions to avoid that problem ErsatzCulture 19:52, 19 May 2020 (EDT)

There is probably 2 or 3 UK publishers that do real mass market pbs - you will get used to seeing them. The UK A-format is 110/111 mm × 178 mm and this is the only one that goes as pb - so on UK sites, you may see "A format"/"B format" and so on instead of dimensions. B (198 mm x 129 mm) and C (216 x 159mm usually but there are a few varieties like the Royal (156/234)) formats (the two standard ones for books) are tp. So are the A5 (think the tp from NewCon Press) and the Demi (which we do not see much in genre) I think. Sorry if you already know that - useless knowledge is to be shared. :).

Yeah, I knew the gist of that, but don't let me stop you :-) However, I am curious, which UK publishers are currently producing MMPBs? The only ones I'm aware of are Penguin Essentials and Angry Robot, and I suspect the latter's print books are mainly for the US market and (sort-of) reverse-imported to the UK - IIRC the titles they only have UK rights for - e.g. Kameron Hurley's books - are TPs.

Snort. Mills & Boon and some of the other romance publishers (time travel romance and paranormal romance is in scope so I have to deal with these a lot...). Some of the children books ones as well. A few of the "both sides of the pond" publishers. Not too many - but there are a few. Usually easy to spot by price - the 7.99/8.99 are usually tp although some do surprise me now and then. I will try to remember to keep a list for the future Which reminds me that I need to do my cleanup on this and some previous years - we have way too many B-format books as pb in the DB so I occasionally go and do cleanup on them :) Annie 20:54, 19 May 2020 (EDT)

Or Titan Books. pb with 7.99/8.99 price tags such as this one. But not all of theirs are pb either. Absolutely annoying sometimes :) Annie 22:27, 19 May 2020 (EDT)

I like it as unknown as a default - it tells me the editor may have not paid attention as opposed to picking up something randomly if a choice needs to be made. Plus people forget and the less "mandatory" steps we have, the more likely is that people won't run scared. :) Annie 20:09, 19 May 2020 (EDT)

My counter argument is that people are more likely to run away if the tools enable them to make stupid mistakes too easily, which they then get called out for... Perhaps a reasonable middle ground is if the post-submit screen were to highlight if the format is unknown - similar to what you see for dupe ISBN or disambiguated author - which would then allow you to immediately cancel the submission, hit the browser back button a couple of times, fix, and resubmit, and never have the embarrassment of needing a mod to fix it, or - perhaps worse - a mod to accept it. ErsatzCulture 20:30, 19 May 2020 (EDT)

Moderator vs editor thinking here I think. I do not call people out on things like that usually - you got called out because of other conversations we had; for most editors, I will simply fix. Same with the | and so on - it is a thin line between scaring people with details and helping. And for some editors, I know what to expect so I just fix their entries. Part of the job. And a lot of people would not know where the Back button is (and some browser lose what is in the fields when you use it -- especially if there is contents items. A yellow warning is not a bad idea though. :) Annie 20:54, 19 May 2020 (EDT)

A Very British History: The Best Science Fiction Stories of Paul McAuley, 1985 - 2011

I found Your verified pub here. Comparing with Amazon's Look Inside feature I found the last three titles missing in Your contents list. Can You please have a look on that? --Zapp 10:08, 21 May 2020 (EDT)

Yes, I know - the contents are incomplete because (as far as I could tell) I had to do it as two separate imports in order to get everything in, and I haven't gotten round to the second import, which (IIRC) is 3 stories + 1 author notes. I think some of the notes to the moderator in the edit history mention that this was going to be a three-stage process (plus I also got sidetracked with page numbers), I don't know if you can see them?

I should be able to finish this off later today. ErsatzCulture 10:45, 21 May 2020 (EDT)

EDIT: I just submitted http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/view_submission.cgi?4655402 for the remaining content ErsatzCulture 10:54, 21 May 2020 (EDT)

Use {{incomplete}} when you do not have the complete contents yet - that will tell other editors there are missing titles - especially if it spans more than a day (plus it makes it easier for you to find it later) :) Annie 11:19, 21 May 2020 (EDT)

Look down under...

978-1-44476-757-5 and 978-1-44476-756-8 are available over on Hachette Australia :) Very useful site for Hachette International editions (together with the rest of the AU sites for the other UK publishers). Not sure what enhanced means for these (the novel? the text? Who knows..) but they are valid ISBNs down under. Don't forget that the English speaking publishing is not just UK and US. :)

I did actually Google "Hachette Essentials" when I first came across this pub a couple of weeks ago, and saw that it seemed to be a brand associated with their Australian operations. However, I couldn't find any reference to it in conjunction with their UK operations, so I suspect it may be dodgy data in Amazon? (This is why I mentioned it in the note, but didn't put anything in the pub series field.) I didn't think to check there again when I was transcribing the copyright details just now, especially as all the company names and addresses are in the UK.

I am confused on what you mean. :) I was just showing where these ISBNs are valid as you had a note on them being unavailable on Hachette. Amazon and ebook ISBNs are a bit divorced these days. And with UK books, the AU sites are occasionally useful. Annie 10:18, 25 May 2020 (EDT)

Sorry, I was noting that I was aware of Hachette Australia, because that's where the "Hachette Essentials" pub. series referenced in the note seems to originate from. (Those ISBNs are not known to hachette.co.uk.)

PS: Is the Introduction really called: "Based on the Novel By" here? :) As a rule, when unsure, leave the date as the date of the first publication we know about - then it will get adjusted when needed. Otherwise we end up with a tone of 0000-00-00 which are... useless. Annie 09:50, 25 May 2020 (EDT)

Yes, I did consider appending "(Introduction)" or "(Introduction to Cloud Atlas)", but ultimately felt that this would be something better/more accurately explained in the synopsis or note for that title? Re. the pub date, the problem is that all the sources claim this ebook pub came out in 2008, but this introduction - as you might guess from the title - references the film adaptation that (per Wikipedia) didn't start filming until 2011, so entering 2008-09-04 struck me as nonsensical. The pseudo printing number of "8" in the copyright details presumably hints towards a print edition where this introduction first appeared, but neither of the UK tp editions from around that time in the database have any information like that. If there were any bookshops open around here, I would have flicked through a physical copy on their shelves to see if I could glean any more insight, but God knows when that's likely to be feasible... ErsatzCulture 10:09, 25 May 2020 (EDT)

Ah, if that is the title - that is the title. Was making sure it was not a bad copy/paste from a page. And this 8 may mean either 8th version of the ebook (we do not catalog them all) or indeed a printing number from the conversion - I had seen it meaning both. Not sure for this publisher. :) Annie 10:18, 25 May 2020 (EDT)

I've updated the note for that introduction - feel free to make any changes you see fit, if you haven't already ErsatzCulture 10:23, 25 May 2020 (EDT)

PS2: The ISBN is in the Hodder & Stoughton sequence (the UK one) so chances are that these are UK ebooks, available internationally - but who knows. In any case, the Australian sites tend to have all kinds of Export (UK) editions (which are otherwise hard to track) :). Annie 09:57, 25 May 2020 (EDT)

The SF Collection

Re: this. And while you are doing the edit to clean the note (you can submit in parallel to the Import/Export btw - no need to wait approval:) ), please add the | order for these novels :) While the default order now preserves the import order, if we ever change the default, this will be one very confused pub PS: No real need to add incomplete for empty collections/omnibuses - they get caught on another report anyway and it is obvious they are in progress. It is not wrong but if the import is coming soon-ish and the book does not have partial content already, it is a bit of an overkill. :) Annie 13:57, 26 May 2020 (EDT)

OK - although more for my own sanity/ease in knowing where I'm up to, I'm unlikely to have multiple submissions pending for the same pub at any one time.

Oh, where is the adventurer in you? :d Annie 14:44, 26 May 2020 (EDT)

It's not a case of being an adventurer, more a case of not being a precog or time-traveller, in case the submissions queue doesn't get processed for >24 hours. (Don't think that's happened recently, but definitely at least once this year - I'm guessing you were otherwise occupied that day? ;-)

Something else, not really worth creating its own talk item for: I dunno if you saw - as another mod accepted them - but earlier today I did a couple of submissions for a recently reissued (in tp and ebook) Barbara Hambly trilogy. I was a bit surprised that Fixer seemed to miss the first volume completely, had the tp but not ebook for the second - which is the Fixer behaviour I expect for UK pubs - and had both formats for the final volume (although I think the ebook for the latter was maybe you cloning it manually?). Not a big issue, but I thought I'd mention it in case it's Fixer doing strange things...

Actually, one other thing re. them; the pubs I added I used "Harper Voyager (UK)", but the others that came via Fixer are "Harper Voyager" - I dunno if that's something Fixer could/should do differently?

Possibly these questions/observations are better aimed at Ahasuerus? ErsatzCulture 14:07, 26 May 2020 (EDT)

Nah - those I can answer :)

"Harper Voyager" is a special case - there are a few different spellings possible Fixer does not know if it is a UK or US book) so usually it is up to me to sort out which one it is -- which I am messing up now and then and then clean on publisher check later on. And you are misreading your screen a bit :) If you look in Look Inside (for example, it shows HarperVoyager, imprint of Harper Collins Publishers so the correct value is indeed HarperVoyager (which is why I left that in place). Maybe check again yours - this one for example is definitely HarperVoyager and not "Harper Voyager (UK)"... I am not sure why we have both quite honestly - had not got around to checking but based on the title pages, HarperVoyager is what is used there. It is a weird font that can be read with or without space I guess. Don't mix "Harper Voyager" (the US publisher) with "HarperVoyager" - the UK one I used as it is what is visible. Wiki also has the UK branch as HarperVoyager. I need to look into "Harper Voyager (UK)"/"HarperVoyager" at some point - we may need a merge... :)

I'm not looking at the title pages, I'm going by what appears to be the internal ISFDB guidelines at http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/publisher.cgi?41601 , which implies - to me at least - that "Harper Voyager (UK)" is the correct publisher for these? I'd assumed it was similar to the "Orbit" vs "Orbit (US)" case, where the original country/region gets the "base" name, and the later offshoots in other countries get a parenthesized country to disambiguate them? (IIRC didn't Voyager start off in Australia?) If it's the case that "Harper Voyager" is US and "HarperVoyager" is UK - which is the implication from your reply, and seems to be backed up by the display names of their respective Twitter accounts - then can this be flagged up more explicitly on the relevant publisher notes, plus clarifying what "Harper Voyager (UK)" is to be used for, or alternatively indicate that it's deprecated? Maybe this info is buried somewhere in the wiki, but if so, it should be on the relevant pub pages, esp. as there're - seemingly incorrect/misleading? - disambiguation notes for them already. Sorry to put this on you, but that's the joy of being a mod I guess ;-) ErsatzCulture 15:03, 26 May 2020 (EDT)

"I'm not looking at the title pages" -- uhm... you know that this is what is the most important thing for this DB, right? I understand that you would prefer to work off secondary sources only BUT... when Look inside has it, not looking at it is not a good idea. This is partially why Fixer never gets auto-approved and why you always have an approving moderator for his submissions (me lately but that had been different in different times). We cannot just ignore the best source we have when we add from secondary sources. Yes, I know that means a lot more work. Yes, it is annoying sometimes and you need to make sure it is the correct Look Inside - but still... good idea to check when such discrepancies happen. Adding based on secondary sources is so much fun sometimes... :)

Yeah, we have 3 different publishers here: "Harper Voyager (UK)", "Harper Voyager" and "HarperVoyager". I am not sure why we do not have just the last 2. The note just tells you not to use "Harper Voyager" for UK books, it does not tell you that "Harper Voyager UK" is your only option - what is says is "IF you want to use "Harper Voyager" and it is a UK book, use "Harper Voyager UK". As it is not "Harper Voyager" to start with but "HarperVoyager", the IF is false so... :) As I said - let me chase these down after I finish with some US books so our pure marque does not get almost empty after today. Noone said the DB does not have things to fix - we may be looking at some historical split that leaves both in place for different times (like with Saga for example). I will try to untangle it. :) Annie 15:14, 26 May 2020 (EDT)

And the discussion. Let's see what happens:) Annie 15:48, 26 May 2020 (EDT)

As for Fixer missing it -- Amazon can get tricky with UK books. Sometimes the record that comes has the wrong author ID or unfilled publisher. As it is a UK book, who knows what the US Amazon knew about it -- it is not that reliable, especially this year - it may be in the store with a future date - I am adding now some books that have US side date of June 1, but are March UK books -- with the pandemic and all, the dates were never adjusted and as we do not have an Amazon UK API the same way as on the US side, we are a bit stuck. Fixer is not perfect - it is just the best we can do - it catches MOST US side books, a lot of the UK ones and that's about it. And UK books as a rule get downloaded a bit later so the May books come on the June download very often in my experience. Annie 14:44, 26 May 2020 (EDT)

PS: And now with the eISBNs missing altogether, we are in a worse shape. If the book was not in the correct category when added, it would not have come in the list; if it was correct later, it will show up later... Always fun. Annie 15:14, 26 May 2020 (EDT)

(unindent) By the way, now that I started looking, the note on the US side, says "Do not confuse with the UK imprint HarperVoyager". This whole cluster of publisher names need fixing :) Thanks for asking about it :) Annie 17:32, 26 May 2020 (EDT)

Thanks for posting the item in Community Portal - I probably won't comment, as I don't especially care which one wins, more that only one wins, and that it's documented clearly for newbies like me. (I'd be slightly disappointed if things ended up with "Harper Voyager" and "HarperVoyager", but I can understand why people might want to have the most accurate names, not have "(UK|US)" suffixes, etc.)

If it looks confusing, it looks confusing and one of them needs the country code. Less confusion is always better. If anything, I would say to slap the suffix to both in such cases so it is obvious when someone does not pay attention - so Orbit is always an error while Orbit (US) and Orbit (UK) carry the entries as opposed to chasing people to check if they meant Orbit or forgot to add the country code. But this all was decided long before my time and it is low on my list of things to grumble about and propose a change to. :) Annie 19:10, 26 May 2020 (EDT)

Re. your other points: my comment about "I'm not looking at the title pages" was more a reference to what was stated on that publisher page link, which - at least in my interpretation of what it says - would supersede the title page, in the same way as the Orbit (US) example I gave. I'm afraid I'll let the other stuff raised go, as this is already an incredibly long convo for something that started off as a "by the way..." trivial appendage to the original comment item ;-) ErsatzCulture 18:56, 26 May 2020 (EDT)

Ah, I see. I was coming from the US page that spells the "HarperVoyager" spelling instead -- it is indeed a fine mess :) Plus that is how most interesting topics start anyway. :) Annie 19:10, 26 May 2020 (EDT)

Only Human

This is one strange book. It carries a Penguin ISBN and not a Michael Joseph one. I am not going to argue with a book at hand - just noting it (and will see if we have similar patterns elsewhere tomorrow). You are absolutely sure that the copyright page mention of MJ is for this book and not an artifact of the first UK edition - that sentence "Published in" may be read also as a publishing history (it does not say "this edition" but being the last line kinda implies it)? Is Penguin mentioned anywhere (besides the image on the cover?) Annie 06:21, 27 May 2020 (EDT)

Penguin is what is listed everywhere else, both within the ebook and on all the vendor/publisher sites. There's a weird squiggly thing on the title page that I thought might have been the Michael Joseph logo, but I went as far as looking at their corporate (sub)page on the Penguin site and couldn't see it, so I assume it's related to the book/series. There are full page Penguin logos on the "pages" immediately before and after the title page, but as far as I can tell, the designer's intent is for them to be on separate pages, rather than my Kindle splitting the page. (Even if I make the text the smallest font size, those Penguin logos are still on separate pages.)

Re. the copyright page, besides the stuff I transcribed into the note, it starts "MICHAEL JOSEPH" and there's a bunch of legalese that says "MJ is part of the PRH group blah blah" and a PRH logo, but nothing that explicitly says this has been published in the UK by anything other than MJ. There's only one ISBN listed, and it's the ebook ISBN ending 5715, implying it's not a straight copy of a physical edition's copyright page.

I've got the previous two books in this series in ebook - I just checked the first one, and it's exactly the same story w.r.t. lots of Penguin logos, squiggle on the title page, etc, but nothing that explicitly states it was published by any UK entity other than Michael Joseph.

I've got no issue if you want to change this one to "Penguin Books", but maybe it's worth adding a parenthetical note about ebooks to the bit on the publisher page about "normal paperbacks", given the ambiguous (IMHO at least) text in the ebook itself? ErsatzCulture 06:54, 27 May 2020 (EDT)

Ebooks title pages are tricky - they can take a few ‘physical pages’ - and if the logo of Penguin is inside of the book, this cannot be anything else. For what is worth, BL also credits Penguin. So does OCLC. Not that they cannot be wrong but between the logos, the ISBN and everyone crediting Penguin, it feels like a Penguin book to me. Add as many notes as you are comfortable with - but an MJ book won’t have a full page Penguin logo inside of it - they are not related publishers, they just partner for hc/tp deals. I plan to check the few other MJ ebooks we have on record - my understanding is that they do not publish ebooks and their paperback partners for the book do usually but that may have changed. Sometimes cataloging is fun, isn’t it? More tomorrow - good night :) Annie 07:13, 27 May 2020 (EDT)

Two Great Novels: Up the Walls of the World / Brightness Falls from the Air

Ping Chavey on this one or at least notify him but this needs a fix IMO. He is not here every day but he does show up now and then.

Looking at the first update, this was a Fixer originating record (from before the Add/New were recorded), added pre-publication (2015-12-03 on the edit, New was either earlier or the same day) and in my experience, unless one is very very careful with those, the dates may be off - Amazon US and Amazon UK disagree often and you need an extra check to verify the date. "Publication date from Amazon" does not say which Amazon and if you click to Amazon now, it shows 2012 which is even more absurd. My guess is that we have the wrong date in which case this needs fixing. If all other sources say February, it is probably Feb but check with the PV. Annie 15:01, 27 May 2020 (EDT)

Early ebooks

About the note in "The Deep"

One thing I had noticed in the last 2-3 years is that when the UK and US publishing dates differ a lot and the editions come from different publishers (when it is the same, they just make the ebook international - the double ASINs you were seeing), the one that is publishing late pushes their own ebook early - sometimes as early as the other side of the pond. So not very uncommon for the UK e-book to be out months before its paperback if the US counterparts are out already (and vice versa). May have been going on for longer but I had not worked through the ebooks we have before 2018 so not sure :)

It is weird -- but easily verifyable if you catch them between editions. I think it is a final admission that the whole "paper books per region" does not work these days when you can buy from anywhere and people will just buy from the other region - so the ebook comes out as early as humanly possible. I cannot find a publisher pattern yet - everyone seems to do it with some books but it is interesting. Makes it bloody hard to figure out dates later on though :) Annie 14:23, 28 May 2020 (EDT)

Yeah, I'd come to similar conclusions - the mod note was just to pre-empt any query about the date inconsistencies, and to show I'd done my homework ;-) See also the note in the submission I did yesterday for the UK ebook of One Way, although at least in that case it was a book I have and remembered it being a staggered release.

I cannot respond to a mod message so I thought I will come and share what I had seen. Dealing with Fixer in the last months had been... educational. I did not use to think about those things - certainly not before I started editing here, not even after that and barely even after I became a moderator - I was not looking for patterns. Now I can almost say at a glance if a record looks weird when there is UK/US oddity :) Annie 20:29, 28 May 2020 (EDT)

One weird one, albeit a slightly different scenario, but one that I alluded to in a Wiki comment the other day, but haven't yet done enough digging to feel comfortable submitting, is Alex White's A Bad Deal For the Whole Galaxy, which is listed only as a tp on the Orbit UK site https://www.littlebrown.co.uk/titles/alex-white/a-bad-deal-for-the-whole-galaxy/9780316412100/ , and which has a different ISBN from the Orbit US one. However, I have the ebook purchased from Amazon UK, and the copyright page for that indicates it's the Orbit US release. I'm somewhat puzzled why this would be the case; if anything I'd have thought it'd be the other way around i.e. UK ebook, but importing the US tp. In theory they might have changed it to use British English - although that seems super-rare these days, if indeed it was ever a thing - but if so, why wouldn't you do that for both print and ebook?

Cheaper to print 200K copies in one place and ship then with a slow boat than to print 150K in US and 50K in UK? Who knows. As for the ebooks - who knows. There may also be copyrights being differently done (aka UK and US separately vs "tp+ebook in both but no hc and so on". Or who knows really. Add the big corporate ownership on multiple publishers and... it gets almost impossible to track. And yes - the separate language thing WAS a thing back in the days (poor countries getting cast-off books from the 60s well into the 90s made it very easy to spot) although mostly for children books I think - or children and YA... and maybe not for all books? Who knows.

You had similar situation on the US/CA market in the past - some publishers printed one book and used two covers, some printed two books and used the same cover, some had a single book... Look at this note for example. There is still some oddity on the CA/US market but it is a lot less than the UK/US-CA/AU-NZ split. Side effect of multiple countries, too far away from each other, same language... Brazil/Portugal have some pairs that have a similar case of splitting needed (although Portuguese had drifted a lot more so they usually keep separate editions and translations(!)). I am sure that if we start adding more books from the other Portuguese speaking countries, we will have a similar mess. Same for Spain and the Spanish speaking countries of Latin America.

Germany/Austria almost do not have that issue - I think they are just geographically close enough to have made separate editions feasible. They have local only publishers but I don't think I had seen Austria only and Germany only book for the same title - not lately anyway (the split Germany was a different story). But ask our German editors and I am sure they have their own stories on the topic. I grew up in a single-country language and my second one (Russian) while big and used everywhere in the area as a second language is still a one-country thing. The old colonial powers languages are just confusing - add decades of publishing practices (the world was not as connected as now even if you think 20 years ago) and so on and... we have a fine mess. Add ebooks, the easy way to buy paper books across regions (even if Amazon UK won't ship me something here, bookdepository will) and... we have a mid-20th century model of distribution and copyrights and permission used 70 years later. :) Annie 20:29, 28 May 2020 (EDT)

The whole "grey import" thing is indeed pretty gnarly, and I'd love to understand exactly how they work. In particular, if/how it affects award eligibility - I recall a discussion about whether Children of Time was eligible for last year's Hugos (due to first US pub being in 2018), and people pointing at a pub with a 2015 pub date and USD price listed here on ISFDB, which seemed be based on an Amazon US listing of the UK edition (can't recall if print or ebook). That one was a bit clearer to argue because the pubs are different (Tor/PanMac in UK, Orbit in US), but it's all a bit painful. ErsatzCulture 18:54, 28 May 2020 (EDT)

If you or your fans are loud enough, the case of eligibility can be made as long as no real US traditional publisher had touched the book. Children of Time, Lady Astronaut of Mars - if you look, there is a lot of.. weirdness come awards season - it just gets loud only sometimes. As for US prices here - side effect of Fixer and moderators not paying attention (yours truly including) and having most of the English language editors either in US/CA or down under. I had been trying to clean some of the more obvious problems in the UK/US credit and price situation but... takes time. So if you feel like working through the UK publishers and doing some cleanup, be my guest.

Sorry - that got longer than I planned to :) I will shut up and go add some books. Annie 20:29, 28 May 2020 (EDT)

No worries :-) I've cleaned up a few "Americanized" UK pubs, but only ones that I own and can PV, as I've been a bit wary of changing Fixer-created - or anyone-else-created, really - records, in case I inadvertently tread on someone's toes. This was part of the reason why I submitted the Jeremy Szal/Stormblood pub a few weeks ago, as I wanted to make sure it got a proper UK ebook record, rather than have Fixer pick up a grey import from Amazon. (I'll submit another AddPub for the physical edition of that over the weekend BTW, as there's enough photographic evidence on Twitter that copies exist and shouldn't be corona-delayed.) ErsatzCulture 18:37, 29 May 2020 (EDT)

If it looks like a duck and quacks, it is a duck even if we claim it to be a turkey - aka if it is a UK publisher and the correct ISBN-set, feel free to fix it even if you do not have it as long as there is no PV. Annie 18:48, 29 May 2020 (EDT)

Yggdrasil Station

I think that "the project" is the series itself - not the omnibus. The author hails from down under and I read that as a thank you to the local authority who made it possible for him to write and so on. As for the "somewhat different form", I would assume light editing (as with almost any reissue when the author is involved) - which is not enough to call them different enough for separate titles. Annie 14:34, 28 May 2020 (EDT)

Tales from Development Hell - Hollywood Film-Making the Hard Way

From the Acquisition Policy: "Published non-fiction works about speculative fiction which can be plausibly linked to published (as defined above) speculative fiction. This rule allows the inclusion of secondary bibliographies, i.e. bibliographies of bibliographies, which are two steps removed from published speculative fiction. It also allows the inclusion of non-fiction works about shared cross-media universes like "Doctor Who" and "Star Wars", but only as long as there is a plausible connection to the universe's published component. Thus a book about "Star Trek physics" can be included (because it applies to all types of media including novels) while a book about Star Trek movie outtakes and bloopers should be excluded."

We just edited the language a few weeks ago to make sure we all are on the same page on those "speculative movies" books. Which makes a book strictly about the MAKING of movies ineligible - the same way as movie outtakes one is. So unless you know something about this book that may be about the stories and not the making of the films, I will have to reject this one. Please let me know. Annie 21:09, 29 May 2020 (EDT)

Ehhh, I only submitted this one 'cos I stumbled across the Wiki talk between 2 mods that mentioned it - I hadn't crossed my mind that it was ISFDB-relevant until I saw that convo, and that the author of this book was already in the DB.

Granted, that talk was from ~5 years ago, long before any of these rule changes, and for all I know they subsequently decided that this book was off-topic and never submitted it.

I will note that the author's introduction (or some other note; I've put the book away now and can't grab it right this minute) says something along the lines of it being a sequel to this book: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1155453 That one looks to have been submitted 4-5 years ago, but it looks like you made an edit to it at the end of last year, although I can't tell what - and obviously, that edit still precedes the rules discussion you linked to.

Edit history, click on the submission ID and you get this. Apparently it pinged on a report for a date discrepancy and I fixed that. Chances are I never even looked at what title that was -- PVd pub so its date is considered valid if it is not too crazy so it got fixed. Annie 11:46, 30 May 2020 (EDT)

In any of the discussions about what is or isn't ineligible, are you aware of any talk about what should be done with stuff that's already in the DB, but which wouldn't be allowed under current rules? I doubt there'd be many people advocating such entries should be removed, but it would be nice if they were tagged or locked or otherwise clearly marked as off-topic, as their existence is a much more obvious & visible precedent that such works are ISFDB-relevant, than rules buried in the Wiki (the "Beware of the Leopard" factor). e.g. This pub http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?260798 is very much of a piece with the one in this submission, and I own a copy and could update the details and PV it - but it seems slightly nonsensical to do that, if my AddPub for a book that I consider similar in tone and subject matter got rejected?

The rules had changed a few times. Way back when, when a non-fiction was not eligible but was reviewed in our magazines, it was added (as opposed to just doing an essay). So we have a report now (mod only because of the numbers of steps involved) to review all NON-FICTION that had been reviewed and start deleting. Technically, if something is ineligible, it will be deleted sooner or later - if not now, some time later. We have a lot of ineligible pubs for various reasons - half-asleep moderators, changes in rules, pure misunderstandings, different interpretations... This last update to the rules was to put the desired interpretation in words -- the R&S thread on the topic. Annie 11:46, 30 May 2020 (EDT)

Also, in any of the prior discussions, are you aware of any talk about treating film/TV/etc based on written fiction differently from "original" ideas? e.g. take the work of novelist-turned-screenwriter-turned-director Alex Garland - would any non-fiction books about the screen adaptations of Never Let Me Go or Annihilation be treated differently to "original" works like Ex Machina and Devs? (I've no idea if there any such non-fiction books about these, I'm just pulling them out of the air as hypotheticals) My guess is that books regarding the first two may be ISFDB-relevant, but the latter pair probably aren't? (This was why in the submission I highlighted that 3 chapters related to films based on novels, but not the 2 chapters about Sandman and Batman, or the chapter on an "original" science fiction film, which I suspected wouldn't be grounds for inclusion in ISFDB.)

I linked the last discussion above and it has a link to where it started. IF the book is about the ideas and can be plausible linked to the fiction, it is in. If it is "the making of", it is out of scope. So no - it does not matter if it is original content or not - what matters is if there is a link between then and is the fiction itself related. None of those that you listed above will be eligible unless they discuss topics that are valid for both the books and the movies. For individual adaptations, they may be -- if you can tie to the fiction. The original content ones will never be eligible unless they spawn a universe and then the "plausible link" come into play. Unless they are written by an above-treshold author of course - those are in on general principle.. Annie 11:46, 30 May 2020 (EDT)

In a possibly similar vein, is there any distinction between books about the (writing of) scripts of science fiction/film/etc versus the actual production? I'm thinking in terms similar to the Hugo and/or Nebula dramatic categories (can't recall which one, or if it's both) where the award is nominally - if probably not in practice - supposed to honour the script(writers), not the actual film. My recollection - from reading it several years ago - is that that this book is about the scripts (and for the 3 cases I highlighted, how they were adapted from the source novels/short stories), and less about the film production.

The key expression is "plausible link". If I never watch the movie but read the novel, will this book has any meaning for me? IF not, then it is not eligible. Printed scripts are eligible as are printed plays. Movies and audiodrama are not. Books about Batman are eligible as long as they discuss concepts that can be tied to the non-comics works. Books about comics and movies only are not. Most movie related books will not be eligible - the way we define our main focus "published speculative fiction" and everything else is related to it makes it so. :) Annie

Sorry to push you about the rules & their implementation - like I said at the start of this comment, it didn't even cross my mind to submit this one until I saw discussion and precedents that indicated to me it was relevant here. I've probably written far more words here than my actual feelings about whether this book is on-topic; if anything, I'm exercising my pedantic instincts as a means to thrash out what the rules actually mean in practice. ErsatzCulture 08:24, 30 May 2020 (EDT)

Ah, no worries. Some questions may not have an answer until a book is submitted :) Rules are never static and a lot is open to interpretation. See the links above - we changed the wording of the rules because they could be read differently by someone who does not know the DB. The reason why we allow any movie related content at all are the universes like Star Trek and Doctor Who and so on where a lot of the concepts are crossing between the two mediums - as the rule says "Star Trek physics is Star Trek physics regardless if you are reading a novel or watching an episode". Annie 11:46, 30 May 2020 (EDT)

OK, if the rules indicate that the Sammon Blade Runner and earlier Hughes books that I mentioned are now (probably) considered off-topic and subject to deletion, I've no objection to you rejecting my submission. ErsatzCulture 13:21, 30 May 2020 (EDT)

If you want easy answers, don't work on genre-restricted bibliography. :) At this point we are trying to clean the "obviously" not eligible ones so I don't think anyone will get to these soon-ish. Annie 23:07, 30 May 2020 (EDT)

Four Asimov Pubs

I'm holding edits to four Asimov pubs. In each case, you left a pub note stating "Data from Amazon UK as of 2018-02-22; updated from PV1 copy" with a moderator note stating "Update from personal copy; will PV when this submission accepted". This is confusing. If you have these editions / printings and are going to verify, the 'data from Amazon' statement needs to be removed. For primary verified pubs, the data should be from the pub. If there is data that is not in the pub and a secondary source is used, than the pub note should clearly identify what data (ex. "No date other than year. Publication date from Amazon.com as of 2020-05-30."). Please clarify the source of the data and I will approve and adjust notes. Thanks. -- JLaTondre (talk) 14:15, 30 May 2020 (EDT)

Everything other than pub date is stuff I've verified from my copy - most of these I've updated page count and/or format from what Fixer originally populated. Pub date has also been checked against the info on the publisher site, which hasn't been explicitly mentioned, but I have added it as a web page link. (In the unlikely event there was any discrepancy between Amazon, publisher's site or copyright page year, I would have noted it.)

I've got a few more of these Asimovs to go through, I'll be sure to alter my notes along the lines you state. (Lately I've been more used to submitting pub records from scratch, rather than updating existing ones.) Do you need me to cancel and resubmit the pending submissions, or are you OK to fix them?

The mod note about "will PV" vs the pub note referring to PV1, is due to me not wanting to PV in advance of a moderator deciding to alter the note I submitted - I hope this is reasonable/understandable? Not mentioning any names, but there had been multiple cases in the past where I'd submitted something, PVed it, and then a particular mod took it upon themselves to approve but then immediately edit my submission, in ways that ranged from leaving me slightly scratching my head as to why they did that, to me disagreeing with what they'd done fairly strongly. ErsatzCulture 14:28, 30 May 2020 (EDT)

I accepted the edits and adjusted to wording. Feel free to tweak if desired / needed. If you run into moderator changes you disagree with, you are welcome to bring it up at the moderator noticeboard. We can usually sort out the situation pretty quick. I'd like to think we're getting better at not letting stuff like that drag out. Thanks. -- JLaTondre (talk) 17:13, 30 May 2020 (EDT)

Thanks for sorting out my mess. I put through an edit to an I, Robot pub that was hopefully in a more acceptable form - that turned out to be the only one of the Asimovs on my list that needed work.

Re. the other stuff, I got the impression from other discussion on the Wiki that I'd gotten away relatively lightly, so I let things go, and as far as I can tell, all the edits that have been made to my submissions recently have been corrections to things that I screwed up, and definitely needed fixing, so no complaints there whatsoever :-) ErsatzCulture 17:57, 30 May 2020 (EDT)

The Redemption of Time

About your note here and the Blackwells' link: The US paperback (ISBN 9781250306005) is due on August 4 now (see Amazon and the publisher (US style date - this is August)). It is one of the Tor books that got pushed back due to the lockdowns and the closed bookstores (even if they can make it (which may also have a delay in it), with Amazon not shipping fast anymore and bookstores closed, they won't get the expected sales... so books got pushed). Way too early to add -- when it is closer, Fixer will get it and I will add it.

You stumbled upon one of those things we were talking about earlier - dates on sites across the pond don't always get updates so when you add a book, you need a date from the correct side. Tor updated its US distribution but not the international ones (or they did but the changes never propagated to the site). Same happens in the other direction - I have a list of UK books that got delayed and noone told Amazon.com (so the API thinks they are out or coming soon) and I am monitoring to add manually when it is closer to their new time. That is why I keep telling you that if you have a verify-able UK date that we have a different one for, it is most likely a US originated wrong date so feel free to fix). :)

It does happen with random books no matter what when dates change post first announcement for the season (there is no rhyme or reason on what get updated and what does not); the virus had made that a lot more pronounced this year. So if you had submitted the US one, I would have rejected it with a "way too early, let's wait" note (or approved with fixing the date and a note of "let's not add books 60+ days out, please"). :) Annie 23:46, 30 May 2020 (EDT)

And just to make you start questioning your sanity (join the club :) ), kindle books are totally different in that. Amazon UK and some of the other European ones occasionally do not have dates (As you discovered here); Amazon US will often have their dates (although they are often 1 day off - as the Kindle dates get often loaded in local Amazon time, early AM hours, US ones can show as a day early). And as long as the same ASIN is recognizable in more than one of them, the date is adjusted even when there is a change. Usually anyway. I updated the note on that one but left the date from Twitter - it is technically the correct one with a source from the UK side. Happy Sunday! :) Annie 00:43, 31 May 2020 (EDT)

TBH, I should have thought a bit more before writing that comment - the vendor that listed the US tp was Blackwells, and it seems they *never* update their pub dates, at least going from my monitoring of them, Amazon, Blackwells, Kobo, publishers, etc in the past couple of months. (I had to change the logic of my tools that reports on recent or imminent books to not use the minimum pub_date scraped from the various sites, because Blackwells' data was causing a load of false positives.)

No worries. Welcome to the fun part of the task -- and Amazon UK/com have a similar problem - it is not just Blackwells. The basic rule is that for paper books, you need a date from the correct side of the pond -- or it can be months in any direction (for example the other day Fixer fed me some books with June 2020 UK books that turned out to be March 2020 ones - Amazon.com still says June; the UK side has the correct ones. :) Annie 04:24, 31 May 2020 (EDT)

For the foreseeable future, I have no intention of (knowingly) submitting AddPubs for US pubs that show up on UK sites, although I may well continue to mention things in mod notes if/when I spot stuff in my trawls which other people might be able to better deal with (e.g. the existence of German and NL translations when I added a UK book that Fixer never picked up a couple of months back). Obviously that's a bit crap, because a mod doing submit queue duties probably isn't going to want to add yet another thing to their personal task list, but I dunno if there's any other means of flagging up that sort of stuff? e.g. there's a recent NESFA ebook reissue of a Zenna Henderson collection that's listed on Amazon UK, but which seems to really be a US pub, and which hasn't yet been added here. ErsatzCulture 04:07, 31 May 2020 (EDT)

Ping me. I am adding all Fixer forthcoming books (minus light novels) at this point so I can deal with anything that had been missed. Mail or post my talk page. I can even get you a separate page setup under my page if you want one. :)

This one. Amazon.com does not know about the paper version (ISBN search does not find it) and the ebook got caught into the Amazon changes (we do not get ISBNs for ebooks anymore so if we know the ISBN, it finds it but Fixer cannot get the ISBN from anywhere). We still have some earlier eISBNs left but as of a few months ago, we don't get new ones. It is most likely in the ASIN store but... We do not have sorting and prioritization for ASINs (Ahasuerus is working on it) and there are thousands of ASINs in some days so no way to pull these and add them until the ASIN data is sortable and can be prioritized. When the ASIN sorting is functional (may take a few more months as there are some underlying stuff to sort out), those 2020 books that got caught into the ISBN Amazon mess will be finally added. Nothing we can do until that is done (except when I or someone else spots them so we can add them). For the ones where we get the paper one (with a 978 ISBN - the 979 ISBNs are a problem as well so... some time in late summer I will have a lot of books to add), I go back and add ebooks after publishing when I spot them but without the paper version, not much we can do. I will add both versions later after I finish what I am working on this weekend and while going through all May books and verifying dates and versions. Annie 04:24, 31 May 2020 (EDT)

The one I was thinking of is more recent:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ingathering-Complete-People-Stories-Henderson-ebook/dp/B0878RMD5D aka https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/ingathering-the-complete-people-stories if you trust Kobo's ISBNs. Must confess I'm not familiar with her at all, but I heard about that Ingathering collection via a random post in an online forum that's primarily not books/SF related at all, so I guess others are bigger/more knowledgeable fans of her work? ErsatzCulture 05:48, 31 May 2020 (EDT)

The latest (11th) printing of the paper one is from 2019 - the original is from 1995. So same problem as with the other one -- the eISBN is not coming and as there is no new paper one, nothing to tell me to look for it. We have earlier printings, I will add the 11th and the ebook when I am adding the other one. Annie 05:56, 31 May 2020 (EDT)

PS: On top of everything these ebooks were supposed to be out last year, in time with the reprint. I think that failed miserably but will check tomorrow if I can discover what happened. And the paper ones, even if there was anew one now would not have been submitted/found either - all the NESFA reprints of this one use the same ISBN so Fixer won't submit for addition anyway). Now they are out so I will add them -- and the publisher site can confirm the ISBNs :) Annie 06:00, 31 May 2020 (EDT)

Excerpts

Pre-empting any response to a mod comment I made in a recent submission - I've found http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/index.php/Rules_and_standards_discussions/Archive/Archive09#Excerpt_Titles and http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/index.php/User_talk:Darkday#The_Century_Syndrome , but I'm still non-the-wiser how important it is to include these, or not, esp. for ebooks where it feels they might be more prone to change. ErsatzCulture 14:51, 1 June 2020 (EDT)

If you wan to include them, include them. If you do not, add a note that they are there and that's it. I rarely add them when I add books. Annie 15:58, 1 June 2020 (EDT)

First chapbook

Not missing anything - if there is no chapbook, you need two steps - either New and merge or new and import. Annie 07:23, 2 June 2020 (EDT)

The Sword of Destiny

Better? :) English is one of the languages where we still have a tone of translations without notes for translators. This was just one of them. I added the note :) Annie 21:09, 2 June 2020 (EDT)

Thanks - I'd have been happy to submit a title edit, but I wanted to make sure that my limited understanding of how titles, pubs and translations interrelate was correct. ErsatzCulture 05:30, 3 June 2020 (EDT)

It was correct - and it was easier for me to just deal with that - translators is one of my pet projects. :) We did not start dealing with that until a couple of years ago so in the old publications noone had worked on yet, they notes are all over the place (or missing altogether). The more you see of the DB, especially older books, the more weird some things look. Annie 05:37, 3 June 2020 (EDT)

Those large first editions in UK

I have a few of them around the house - not Export/Airport edition but real C format UK paperbacks (or Royal as the case can occasionally be) issued alongside limited HC or without a HC at all. Part of why I try not to do UK preorders - noone can tell you sometimes if the book will be B or C format and if I need something in a matching format (I know... I am weird), it can get annoying. :) Annie 19:37, 3 June 2020 (EDT)

Well, that's not a problem for me, as I'm too cheap to buy HCs or large TPs :-) - I only get them if I find them at a remainders store cheaper than a regular tp, or on the very rare occasion that a supermarket stocks a title I'm interested in. I've upgraded ancient MMPBs to TP loads of times though.

Please don't tell me you are one of those people who sorts their shelves by spine colour though? ;-) ErsatzCulture 19:45, 3 June 2020 (EDT)

I said weird, not crazy :) It is mostly by genre (genre in a broad sense: all of ours live together - my crime books tend to get separated) and then by author except for the "publisher" bookcases - aka books from the same publisher - mostly specialty ones. I like the books to either be the same format or at least in a progression when they are from the same series or author (and publisher) - so a C in the middle of 5 B books annoys me (mainly because now I cannot put anything on top of these :) Or it is supposed to be that way - I need to finally get around organizing it because for the most part now it is on the "oh, new books and some space on a random bookshelf and it fits? This is where you end up". While it is fun to always find books I had forgotten about this way, try to find something you actually need (I have 23 bookcases and ran out of wall space so some books live in boxes as it is...). Annie 19:59, 3 June 2020 (EDT)

(unindent) About this - if it is available in the publisher market, we go with price from the publisher market and note the US one if it is also available Stateside. That one is on me - either the UK link was dead when I worked on it (doubt it) or I simply blanked out on who the publisher is (very likely) or I got distracted mid-edit and copied from the wrong Amazon (even more likely). This is why I occasionally do publisher reviews of known UK publishers - hunting for things like that. Swapped prices :) Annie 20:08, 3 June 2020 (EDT)

Something I just noticed - I copypasted the "688 pages" from the publisher's site, which I see is what it also lists for the hc. However, I also see that it describes it as "The fifth and final collectable novella in the Children of D'Hara series." The page counts for the third and fourth also seem a bit excessive for "novellas", the first two are borderline novella/novel page count IMHO. (A quick check of the Kobo listings gives more reasonable page counts for books that purport to be novellas.) There aren't any PVs that might know why these have such high reported page counts. ErsatzCulture 20:20, 3 June 2020 (EDT)

I just pulled the 4th onto my Kindle (kindle unlimited so that was easy) -- no pages but it shows 2811 kindle positions - which is indeed a bit too long for a novella. Won't be the first time the cover has the wrong size except it is usually novellas claiming to be novels. I will see if I can get a better word count for the whole series. Annie 20:28, 3 June 2020 (EDT)

us-now

Based on "From their Instagram bio: "Us Now is the design work of Julyan Bayes".", these should NOT be added as cover art items. We add artists, not cover designer. Or am I misreading the statement? Annie 16:24, 4 June 2020 (EDT)

I interpreted "design work" as referring to their general visual creative output, but the ambiguity is why I stopped adding the Pratchetts he has on his portfolio site. The cover for The Gradual - which is what triggered me into looking into him and the stuff he's been involved in - wasn't credited to anyone else, but that's mostly abstract images/textures, and is fairly different in style to the Pratchett & Rothfuss covers that I submitted. There's at least cover on his portfolio site that indicates he did the illustration though: http://www.us-now.com/portfolio/items/last-argument-of-kings/ That said, it's more of a "woodcut" style than the more cartoony images on the Pratchett covers, which might support the idea that someone else did the illustrations on the latter.

In trying to trace how much Us Now == Julyan Bayes (or not), I did come across this exchange on Twitter https://twitter.com/EdwardCox10/status/1164537268708749312 where third parties say he did the art (not design) for a cover we (IIRC) currently have uncredited, but again, it's different in style from the Pratchetts and that Rothfuss cover - looks to be stock art elements assembled in Photoshop.

I've got no real objections if you want to reject these edits. BTW, I got the impression "us-now" is just the domain name, and "Us Now" is the company/org name, but didn't feel confident enough in that to change it; plus it's maybe not obvious given that the credit in the book is to the website. (cf "Shutterstock" vs "shutterstock.com" credits) ErsatzCulture 16:44, 4 June 2020 (EDT)

And half the world calls the designed an artist just to annoy us (aka the Bulgarian publishers call the local designer an artist on covers I can trace to older US and French covers) :) Always a mess. Oh - and when adding a legal name to an author, please do not forget that it is Last, First :) I fixed it on us-now

Let me do some digging... Woodcut counts as art - so if he is a legitimate artist, I have no issue with the credit...Annie 16:49, 4 June 2020 (EDT)

Sorry about the legal name. I actually had a look at the code a week or so ago, after I saw someone else make the same mistake a couple of days after the previous time I did it, to see if I could easily add a simple "legal name lacks comma" yellow warning. (Possibly no good for non-European origin names, but might help catch a few silly errors like these.) Unfortunately that bit of functionality didn't seem to have much by way of checks or warnings currently, so I backed away from it - maybe I should revisit? ErsatzCulture 05:46, 5 June 2020 (EDT)

Season of Storms

About your note here. Technically "Season of Storms", the 6th novel is a "standalone" novel set in between some of the stories from "The Last Wish". It is the 6th book in the mega-series/world books but the original "series" are the 5 novels. Think of it as the Foundation trilogy and the 2 prequels+2 sequels - we still have the core trilogy that is expanded into the Foundation series. Annie 17:19, 4 June 2020 (EDT)

I've added a note to the series to explain the situation :) Annie 17:23, 4 June 2020 (EDT)

Thanks. As should be apparent from my AddPubs, and definitely from my PVs, fantasy isn't my area of interest or expertise, so I didn't feel like digging beyond what I put in the mod note. ErsatzCulture 05:48, 5 June 2020 (EDT)

The Empire of Gold and other operational stuff from today

• The US edition of "The Empire of Gold" is now slated for June 30, 2020 and I am not entering these yet - another week probably. The UK e-book is caught in the "noISBN for e-books". The UK hc ISBN is not on Amazon US at all (it recognizes it and shows the other ones but is not there as a book - so we cannot get it. UK books can be... challenging:)
• Order in import... This came in the order 2,1,3,4,5 :) So please do not forget the | numbers on import. Annie 13:50, 5 June 2020 (EDT)

Sorry about the second one - was concentrating more on getting the right translations (at least 2 had 2 English variant titles) that I forgot about the ordering. ErsatzCulture 14:29, 5 June 2020 (EDT)

Practice makes perfect :) Annie 14:39, 5 June 2020 (EDT)

Dead links

When there is a dead link, first make sure it did not just got moved (if you can). If it is not moved, go to archive.org and check for archives. Start from the newest one and go back until you hit a complete one - for this one the last 2 are "301 during crawl" aka the site is missing but the one from mid 2018 is viable. Then grab this URL such as this. That way we keep the old site name (it is part of the archive.org name) for pure historical reasons and we do not have a dead link. If there is no archive, I would usually move the link to the notes with a note with the date (if important enough and there is a chance for resurection) or just delete it if it does not seem important. Annie 17:34, 5 June 2020 (EDT)

Benjamin Cheah

I put the change on hold so I can look into the comment tomorrow. The short answer is: we catalog books, not authors. So if we had not gotten any books by that specific name, it is because no book had been added. Small presses are pretty much in scope but there are thousands of them and some of them seem to be trying very hard to stay hidden. :) And Steemit won't count as publication from all I know about this platform - our web-based fiction cataloging is restricted to webzines with distinct issues basically - sites with fiction do not count. :) Annie 04:01, 6 June 2020 (EDT)

No worries. The note edit I submitted does nothing to address the fact that no (obviously matching) search result came up, but at least it acknowledges that ISFDB is aware of the variant name(s).

I assumed Steemit (which I have only the vaguest familiarity with) isn't really a platform covered by ISFDB, although the fact we have a link to his page there might potentially imply that to the unwary? I guess the same goes for stories that writers post on Patreon and similar? ErsatzCulture 04:29, 6 June 2020 (EDT)

We link to author pages wherever they are; we do not index the fiction they post on them. So nope - it would not imply that or we should stop listing authors' sites altogether :)

Correct on patreon - The Rules of Acquisition spell quite clearly what we do cover. If a story/novel does not fall under these categories, it is not eligible (yet). :) Annie 04:48, 6 June 2020 (EDT)

Daniel Brown

As the website if the artist with the same name does not mention writing any fiction, it is assumed for now that this is a different Daniel Brown so I split him out into (I). If we ever prove it the other way around, it is easy to fix but this story would be mentioned somewhere if it was. And the name is common enough... Annie 19:39, 6 June 2020 (EDT)

PS: There is nothing about the writer in the magazine. You can ask him on Twitter if you feel like it but I am pretty sure it is not his. Annie 19:41, 6 June 2020 (EDT)

Introducing Rivers of London

You are not missing an easier way. You either do:

• NewPub + variant the omni + import the contents (you can import from the other omnibus instead of one by one - and the variant and the import can be submitted in parallel)

or

• ClonePub/AddPub (with a moderator note that you will unmerge)+ unmerge +Edit Pub to change of titles + variant.

or

• NewPub with contents + variant + merges for the contents

The middle one has more steps and requires waiting but in case you notice the different title late, it can be used. As a whole, the fist process is the cleanest. :) Annie 20:11, 6 June 2020 (EDT)

However, I would keep an eye on this one until the first look inside is available. There is a chance that Amazon's title and the title page will differ significantly, including reusing the paperback title -- even when the publisher site has the same name pre-release - they can afford to use whatever they want; we need to see what is on the title page. For this one, I would also add a pub note explaining where the title comes from and why it is nowhere to be seen on the cover. Annie 20:15, 6 June 2020 (EDT)

Yes, it's on my (mental) list of TODOs. ErsatzCulture 15:42, 7 June 2020 (EDT)

Hmm, I just noticed, the change I submitted capitalizes "The", which IMHO looks a bit ugly. However, that's how it's formatted on the title page, so ??? ErsatzCulture 04:45, 11 June 2020 (EDT)

We normalize the case regardless of what the title page shows - you can add notes on how it looks exactly. Now... in this case, IF there is a special formatting and it seems like it is intentional (in lieu of quotes for example), it can stay capitalized (with a note added explaining why). If not, it will need to be normalized. And you can do it with one edit - you can edit both the title and the publication on EditPub if there is only one publication. Annie 05:12, 11 June 2020 (EDT)

Collections without/incomplete contents

Hello. Just an FYI - if you enter a collection, anthology, or omnibus that do not have content titles (or incomplete contents), then there's a very handy template that you can use: {{incomplete}}. :) MagicUnk 14:06, 8 June 2020 (EDT)

Neuromancer

Another heads-up :) We generally -do- add excerpts to the contents list. For example, in your update submission of Neuromancer you mention an 11-page excerpt for Count Zero. Regards, MagicUnk 14:20, 8 June 2020 (EDT)

Ugh - we leave that to the editor actually in novels... I find most excerpts in novels to be cluttering the records and rarely add them either (and the rules do not explicitly call them as something that needs to be added - they get in under the "all fiction is to be added" umbrella and are a bit of angrey area. A note is fine for me. Annie 14:26, 8 June 2020 (EDT)

Hmmm, didn't know that. Might warrant a rules clarification? MagicUnk 14:52, 8 June 2020 (EDT)

As long as there are notes so they can be used to determine if you hold the same book, adding or not the excerpt as a contents item really does not make much of a difference. So I let the editors decide what they prefer to do. Start a discussion over in R&S? :) Annie 15:05, 8 June 2020 (EDT)

This Is How You Lose the Time War length

Would you please look at this discussion? Thanks. -- JLaTondre (talk) 08:58, 12 June 2020 (EDT)

This Is How You Lose the Time War cover credit

May I suggest we remove the cover credit for this? I know it's occasionally a grey area, but cover credits are used for artwork, not the cover designer. Stadnyk is credited as the designer, and this credit normally remains in the Notes. What do you think? PeteYoung 00:01, 15 June 2020 (EDT)

Possibly this is a tail-wagging-dog reason, but wouldn't doing that break this? http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/award_details.cgi?65700

I know I'm newish here, but I can't help but feel the rules about designers and covers don't reflect the reality of what's published nowadays. How many covers, including - perhaps, I might argue, *especially* - those from major imprints, are basically a few stock images from Shutterstock, etc chucked into Photoshop, with a bunch of filters and effects applied on top, with no "artist" involved at any step of the process? (And I'd argue that anything which credits Shutterstock as the artist - and don't get me wrong, I've submitted plenty of edits like that - is far more worse than crediting a designer for a cover.)

Sorry for going on a rant ;-) This is a slightly touchy subject for me, as I have a back-burner project - only very tangentially ISFDB-related - to try to identify as many re-uses of the same stock art CG spaceships as possible, in the forlorn hope it might shame publishers into actually having proper cover art on their books again... ErsatzCulture 05:58, 15 June 2020 (EDT)

I didn't know about the award nomination so let's let it stand. Maybe add something to this effect in the pub's notes, that the credit is there for the award nomination?

As for the rest, oh I totally agree. Given that so much of the job of a cover designer these days involves manipulating stock images, it's hard where to know to draw the line between cover artist and designer. The field was created to credit cover ARTISTS and their ART, but I don't see much point in creating other fields for designer or picture agency: one personal rule of thumb I have is if the credit is given to only to a designer, or worse "Shutterstock", (or Getty etc.), that credit gets put in the Notes and not the "Cover artist" field. Shutterstock just sold the image to the publisher, they didn't create it, and it surely serves no useful purpose to be crediting them. That's my chief annoyance when I see things like this and this and this. Yes, we give the cover credit as stated, but surely there's also room for some necessary discretion to be applied. I've been thinking about raising this suggestion as policy: don't credit the picture agency if that's all there is. PeteYoung 03:45, 18 June 2020 (EDT)

Pattern Recognition

re this submission. This is adding a pub with an ISBN13 and 2004 date. This is an unlikely combination since ISBN13s were not formally adopted until 2007. The publisher page that is linked has at 2011 date. It would seem the Amazon date is incorrect or for an earlier version that this one. Thoughts? -- JLaTondre (talk) 11:01, 21 June 2020 (EDT)

OK, there's a slight screwup on my part, although that's due in large part to the weirdnesses of the Penguin UK website. The URL I added is for the tp edition, which has a 2011 pub date; the correct URL for the ebook is https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/23650/pattern-recognition/9780141904467.html , which has the 2004-06-24 pub date (and a 13 digit ISBN, FWIW).

(The wrong URL got submitted because the tools I use to scrape and merge the data from various sources uses the <link rel="canonical"> HTML element to get a source URL, and for some reason, pages scraped from the Penguin UK site always has this canonical value pointing at a physical edition, even if you're looking at an ebook. I'll see about fixing that...)

Re. ISBN-10 vs ISBN-13, I saw the yellow warning when I hit submit on the edit, but I elected not to change it, given it's the ISBN-13 which is listed on the copyright page of the ebook, alongside various copyright dates, none of which is any newer than 2004. Quite possibly the Kindle ebook I have is a newer revision than indicated by those copyright dates, although unusually, it doesn't have any cover image in the ebook itself, other than a generic/barebones Penguin image. If it had the white and pink text on black background - which seems to date from 2011, looking at the tp which has the same image, and matches the Penguin site - then perhaps that would be more confirmation that it's not the "original" 2004 ebook?

I've got no real preference to ISBN-10 vs ISBN-13 for this submission - I'm just explaining why I submitted what I did - so I've no objection if you want to change things.

(I'll submit another edit to fix the URL to point at the exact page for the ebook edition once this AddPub is in place.) ErsatzCulture 11:42, 21 June 2020 (EDT)

Where are you seeing the ISBN in the ebook? I've looked at Amazon.co.uk & Kobo.co.uk previews and am not seeing it. Thanks. -- JLaTondre (talk) 17:04, 21 June 2020 (EDT)

I have the Kindle edition. (One of my rare submissions that I can actually PV ;-) ErsatzCulture 19:45, 21 June 2020 (EDT)

Sorry, I overlooked the verification on this submission. So used to you submitting based on Amazon ;-) Thanks for adding all those pubs, by the way. I accepted the submission than updated the webpage link and added a note on the ISBN13 vs date. Feel free to tweak to your likening. -- JLaTondre (talk) 19:33, 22 June 2020 (EDT)

Thanks for fixing the URL link and adding the note.

I didn't originally plan to submit anything like the pubs I do; initially I was just interested in adding UK-only titles that Fixer hadn't picked up. Unforunately it turned out that there were so many UK pubs - both physical and ebook - that were missing, that cause my semi-automated tools to put out so much noise, that I've ended up picking up these others too. At least it's a pleasant distraction from all the real-world craziness at the moment... ErsatzCulture 08:00, 23 June 2020 (EDT)

Riders of the Dead

Hello. Just an FYI. I notice that from time to time you provide details about data sources, or other useful information in the Note to Moderators. Going forward, you may want to add that information directly into the pub notes proper. As an example, I've moved your Note To Moderators info for Riders of the Dead. Have a look and let me know what you think. Regards, MagicUnk 14:07, 21 June 2020 (EDT)

Hi, I didn't include that stuff in the main pub note, because it felt too much like supposition on my part - perhaps I'm thinking too much along Wikipedia guidelines against original research? I guess my mod notes generally fall into three categories:

* Noting that there's are other UK pub/formats not in ISFDB, within an unstated implication that I'll submit them at some point in the future (generally once I've acquired data from more sources)

* Noting that I've seen non-UK pubs that aren't in ISFDB, or what looks like one (e.g. the lack of any US ebook for Pattern Recognition, in my pending submission for the UK ebook of that title). These are things which I personally will almost certainly not be submitting, but which might be of interest to mods in those territories? NB: I can appreciate than when you're going through doing approvals for a queue of 100+ pending submissions, adding something else to your TODO list probably isn't what you want ;-)

* Anything that seemed weird or unusual that I came across whilst putting together the submission, which was the case here.

My slight fear is that if I were to include some of the latter cases in the mod notes, then a different mod might decide to query or reject them? By putting things into the mod note, then it's less "official"? ErsatzCulture 14:48, 21 June 2020 (EDT)

Well, concerning your first two bullet points, I agree that these should remain in the Note to Moderators field. For what the last bullet is concerned, I can't read other moderator's minds, but they shouldn't reject, really, if the information is clear and concise (even if it is about uncertain data) - they may query you though if they would like to know more. Personally, I'm much more in favour of adding more information rather than less. Provide context, and clarify where there might be doubt about the accuracy of the data - in that respect, adding data sources, adding dates when information is added to the notes (or modified) falls in the same league. Regards MagicUnk 15:22, 21 June 2020 (EDT)