Daniel > Status Update

Publication date on GR is complicated, because there is an extra field, a librarian should manually check which is the oldest edition and enter, but it is getting harder and harder to maintain the database -not helped by influx of AI imports or AI creations.

I use the fantastic fiction site a lot, to check book lists, by publication date and series (I wish they had an option to put it by pure pub date), according to whichever amazon site you chose. (It's not worldwide, checking the first date ever in any market, it is just the publication date for the same market.). Plus you can get alerts when new books are dated to database, and alerts on release date (that is very very very dangerous though!) I like that site a lot. It is not quite goodreads, which has a much much larger and varied database, but it's handier to consult for book completism purposes!

Ah, that's a good idea. I tend to forget they have anything but F&SF stuff. I rely on wikipedia for people like Wodehouse or Heyer, or just googling an author. I usually am checking on GR because I'm already on the site and just want to check the order of the most recent or see if someone has something newer only to remember it's broken when I see recent books missing and find them at the wrong end of the list.

I'd guess they could largely fix things by just fixing the code to fall back to publication date if the original publication date field is empty/missing, but idk.

I think it is worth it to get a fantasticfiction account, there is something really thrilling about getting an email (old school but what I prefer) about a new book added to database by an author I follow! and they do not spam. For sf/fantasy the isfdb org is still the very best!

About goodreads the problem with the database is that each "book" is not really a book, but a collection of editions, which has to be merged manually (and it seems there was a big problem recently with a librarian going rogue because of supposedly political censorship), so there is not like one publication date only but many. It is complicated really - it's also pretty valuable and interesting to have so many records, but if even one edition was imported with a wrongly formatted date, some kind of auto fill would be misleading a lot of the time.

I get what you're saying. I have opinions on how they handle "editions", like if I'm looking at a book with multiple translations I generally want to see only reviews of the exact translation I'm considering; or audiobooks, I'm constitutionally incapable of listening to audiobooks, so I don't care about what somebody thought of the narrator's performance.

But I'm not talking about Alexandre Dumas or something, I'm talking books that came out last month and they've got at most like 4 editions: hardcover, paperback, ebook, and maybe audio, and when you sort by pub date instead of being on page 1 they're on page 12 like they came out in the year zero. God forbid it's someone who also writes comics or has a lot of magazine publications, then it's liable to be on page 312. The feature's basically useless as it is.

Just checked fantasticfiction for my current favorite series and it's not listed. :(

Oh, that is too bad about not being listed!

And yeah, for more recent books it is far easier to edit - if you want to tell me the author's name, I can take a look and neat it up for everybody. No automatic tools - and AI is not helping on that, since there is a flut of AI produced "bait on amazon databases, trying to get buyers making mistakes on what they want to buy..