User talk:ErsatzCulture

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The Tenpercent Thief again

I've added another installment to our previous discussion here, if you want to chime in. Cheers. PeteYoung (talk) 14:54, 2 July 2023 (EDT)

GB not in US

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1791329; I saw your recent message about the list of British books not published in the U.S. and clicked one at random because the title sounded interesting, Satan's Daughter, and it turns out that I entered the U.S. edition from Pocket Books back in 2021. So there may be others that don't belong on that list. --Username (talk) 12:09, 4 July 2023 (EDT)

That the list stops at 2020 might give an indication of how "recent" it was generated ;-) I've not looked at that code or even re-run it for over 3 years - I vaguely recall there are niggly things with author and title variants that could cause false positives and/or negatives, and I didn't have the motivation to try and improve that. ErsatzCulture (talk) 12:15, 4 July 2023 (EDT)

I figured it might not be an updated list. Still useful, though. On the plus side, while looking into this I discovered a fairly recent eBay listing which showed the copyright page of the U.S. edition (January) so I made an edit for that. --Username (talk) 12:28, 4 July 2023 (EDT)

List prices from UK sources

If you get bored, you may want to see if you can find the list prices of these (there will be more - so check occasionally). Fixer is ending its reconciliations so quite a lot of UK books showed up on my current sweep through 2022. For some finding the list price is easier than it is for others. I plan to take another stab at these once I am done with the complete range but if you have nothing better to do or you can fill in from your scrapping, have fun :) Annie (talk) 19:20, 5 July 2023 (EDT)

I vaguely recognize a couple of them, but I don't generally submit anything more than 30 days out, so if you and Fixer beat me to it, my tools will mark them as done, and not pick up on any missing info.

(This is one of the downsides of Fixer picking up UK pubs early, and/or you creating them when the US one comes in - if I haven't already got some data for one of the other pubs like ebook or audio, I might never see it in my upcoming/TODO pages. There are a couple of ways I could fix that, but I've been too lazy to do anything about it as yet.)

That said, most of them I don't think I've got anything at all for currently, and I wouldn't have thought American Psycho or Beloved were eligible for inclusion :-) Will try to pick them up once I've got other stuff out the way - that Chinese anthology is still half-complete, but I've had enough of all that for today... ErsatzCulture (talk) 19:29, 5 July 2023 (EDT)

These are from 2022 (some were even added them but most were added today). Finding the prices on 2023 is a lot easier - the older ones get... harder. If I need you to look at something I added as future/new, I ping you specifically but for older ones - I may as well give you the search page. :) Annie (talk) 19:34, 5 July 2023 (EDT)

This one is an export edition, and whilst Blackwell's and to a lesser extent Amazon sometimes list them, I've never found a great source for those editions that's easy-to-scrape. I did write a scraper for an Australian site, but I've almost never used it, as it turned out they pretty much only ever listed the regular UK editions. Must confess I only looked at Australian and NZ sites, maybe some mainland Europe ones might be more amenable to sourcing info from? ErsatzCulture (talk) 19:39, 5 July 2023 (EDT)

Then add a note "International edition" and leave it as is for now. I will look at these again later - I usually can find international prices (usually via AU/NZ stores) :) Some of these may be hard to solve - so don't worry about them but quite a few I added today were just the regular paperbacks. Annie (talk) 19:41, 5 July 2023 (EDT)

PS: That one is solved :) Annie (talk) 19:54, 5 July 2023 (EDT)

Asimov - Foundation

Hello, any objections to me changing the imprint / publisher for our PV'd pub to HarperVoyager / HarperCollinsPublishers, per the copyright page? (see also here) Thanks, Kev. --BanjoKev (talk) 20:24, 24 July 2023 (EDT)

Hi, I am a bit wary of this change, but for slightly selfish reasons.

The UK records for Harper Voyager are a mess, with the following all being used:

- "Harper Voyager (UK)"

- "HarperVoyager"

- "HarperVoyager / HarperCollinsPublishers"

(This is from a list I manually maintain for the benefit of my own tools that do data analysis using the ISFDB backups; you can see that Gollancz, Orbit, Hodder and Tor/PanMac are much worse...)

About a year or two ago, I griped about this somewhere on the Wiki - I suspect it was either on my talk page, Annie's or Community Portal. (Will edit this response to link to it, if I can locate it.)

When I submit new books based on the data I've scraped from various places, I submit as "Harper Voyager (UK)", which on the one hand, I don't like doing, because it's inaccurate - the space between "Harper" and "Voyager" is only for the US imprint(s) - but it's the only one that clearly indicates it's a UK imprint, which I think is the most important thing that a casual visitor to the site might need/want to know.

(A minor point is that HV itself recently started sprouting child imprints - see "Magpie Books / Harper Voyager (UK)".)

None of this is your fault, or problem to solve, but if possible I'd like to use this as a brazen attempt to reopen the prior conversation, and try to get some consensus about what to use going forwards, even if cleaning up all the old-data isn't going to happen any time soon regardless.

If you make a change to the relevant pubs in the meantime, I won't revert or complain though ;-)

Cheers ErsatzCulture (talk) 13:06, 25 July 2023 (EDT)

The Pomegranate Gate

Ahem. Moved the note to where it belongs, cleared the links :) Annie (talk) 15:45, 27 July 2023 (EDT)

Does this make us even then? ;-) I was a bit surprised this seems to be a Solaris UK/Commonwealth only release, I couldn't find any evidence of a US pub. ErsatzCulture (talk) 15:49, 27 July 2023 (EDT)

EDIT: ah, I see you've just added a US pub for it, pretty sure I failed to find that when I looked. ErsatzCulture (talk) 15:51, 27 July 2023 (EDT)

Shrug - without enough details, it was unclear if it is the same one. So I left it alone until we know. Now we know and everyone is reunited. :)

PS: I was mostly pulling your leg. I was chasing down the edits to see if a moderator missed to advise a new editor on where these links go (happens a lot -- as you cannot add them when you add a first book for an author so we routinely see them on the title level from new editors) and realized it was deliberately added on that level. :) Annie (talk) 15:59, 27 July 2023 (EDT)

Gah, I have a vague recollection of recently noticing and fixing a note or link at the wrong level - title/pub probably. Will have to remember to be more careful, so that I don't get relegated to having to get someone else to approve my edits... ErsatzCulture (talk) 16:17, 27 July 2023 (EDT)

You really need to mess up a LOT more for that to happen so I would not worry. Me pulling your leg when I spot these on the other hand... that may happen ;) Annie (talk) 16:28, 27 July 2023 (EDT)