Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

I haven't been able to find anything regarding a standard for publisher data entry, and I find myself sometimes confused regarding houses and imprints. Like in my old days working with music labels, the relationships can be complex.

For example, I just added The Giver to my Currently Reading, in the mass market edition. The data page notes "Published by Dell Laurel-Leaf, an imprint of Random House Children's Books, a division of Random House, Inc." and further that it is "Reprinted by arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company." So I updated the existing publisher from "Laurel Leaf" to "Dell Laurel-Leaf," but it could just as easily be:

-Random House
-Random House Children's Books
-Dell
-Dell Laurel-Leaf/Random House

or any of a number of other variations. Do we have a standard? Do we want a standard? Does it matter much? Does this field get used for anything other than human-readable supplementary information?

Advice from the experienced appreciated; I am a relative n00b here.

I'm not experienced, but I'll put in my two cents for an eventual standard; with a lot of classic authors different publishers put in different supplementary material, and since all 800,000 versions of _Pride and Prejudice_ get combined for ratings purposes (which makes sense!) it'd be nice to eventually be able to break them out by publisher so people can comment on the appendices/footnotes/etc. Which means it would behoove us to figure out a standard for publisher names for that eventual feature request.

But then, I was an English major, so I am all about being able to figure out which version of a particular novel has the most interesting supplementary stuff.

The problem with trying to come up with a standard is that publishers merge, re-merge, subdivide into divisions, re-sort, etc. Or just have multiple names they are known by.


Does this field get used for anything other than human-readable supplementary information?

Not so far.