We already have a “was written by” relationship for works, that’s the one I was thinking about.
I actually don’t agree with this. A release is a specific date, not a time span. Editions don’t become unreleased when there is a new edition or reprint. It may be useful to have a relationship for reprints, but that would be a different thing.
I also don’t think we need a “first published” field, the first edition containing it is the “first published” date. The only exception I can think of is for works first published as manuscripts (before the printing press was invented/widely used), because we’re not adding those (yet?)…
These last two are the same situation that we have with releases in MB and it works well. (Except for the manuscripts, which I’m not sure how to handle… Do we need a relationship just for those? De we allow adding the first known manuscript as an edition just to get the correct date?)
There also might be a misunderstanding concerning the meaning of “reprint/ new edition” here.
The concept of “reprint” does not exist in every country.
In Germany, for example, there are no “reprints”, only editions. This means that every reprint counts as a new edition. Maybe that’s why there are misunderstandings.
Like in MB, you can set start and end date to the same date to indicate a specific date, not a time span. I’m assuming that’s what @aabbi15 had in mind, adding the same kind of dates to BB relationships.
Yes, but I don’t see how that’s relevant. The edition doesn’t end when the new edition is released. When the second release comes out, the first editions don’t get unreleased. You just have another edition.
There may be some difference, but I don’t think it’s relevant, because I don’t disagree with this. In my experience, a book can have multiple editions, which generally something changed. The same edition can also be reprinted many times from the same plates, which prevents any change. Sometimes the dates of the reprints are listed in the front matter, sometimes not. I also agree we shouldn’t create new editions for each reprint, but we should for new numbered editions. If for no other reason, because most people will have only one edition, and the only way to know if there is any difference is to compare them page by page. Maybe that doesn’t apply to printing in Germany, I don’t really know.
I added the first edition from 1986 a long time ago.
I recently had the ninth edition from 1996 in my hands. The only difference between the two editions was the font on the cover.
That didn’t seem to be enough for a new BB edition.
So this BB edition has a start point 1986 and a preliminary end point 1996.
It seems to me that the description of the release date as a period of time (1986-1996+?) is more correct than a point in time (1986).
But is the 1986 edition discontinued from selling after the 1996 one was released? I don’t think a font change would make the 1986 edition obsolete. I don’t know exactly in this case but I know of examples where there are multiple editions of the same book co-existing in the market.
Also I don’t quite understand the difference between book edition and BB edition. What makes one book qualify as a NEW BB EDITION?
Of course. They printed 20000 Books of the first edition (The 200 in the printer’s key). When they had been sold out they printed the 2. edition and so on (technically these editions are all reprints)
Any change to the content, ids, credits or graphics leads to the creation of a new BB edition (we haven’t defined this exactly yet).
Yes, but the books weren’t destroyed, they still exist. They didn’t become unreleased. Reading your previous posts, I think maybe there’s a bit of confusion. Do you maybe mean we should accept multiple release dates (like in MB)? This makes more sense to me.
I actually think in 99% of cases there should be a single release date, but an exception would be a company publishing the exact same book in different countries at slightly different times (e.g. a German company publishing the same book [from the same printing] in Germany and Austria a couple of days apart).
We don’t currently have a field for reprints, but we should and these should definitely allow for multiple values, as there can be dozens of reprints.
I would say these should definitely be different editions. Any difference in the artwork should a separate edition. This is similar to what has been decided for MB.
Well, yes that’s in fact what I’m trying to do here
The release date is the date for the first printing, but doesn’t cover the date of the reprints.
I thought we could just do this by setting a start date for the first printing and and an end date for the last reprint.
Of course, we can also solve this with a multi value field for reprints. That would be more precise.
And the fact that we Germans don’t use the term “reprint” in our books but only “edition” is our problem - we have to deal with that on our own
Nice to see there isn’t as much disagreement as it seemed.
I understand what you’re trying to do, but this would really work better with multiple dates. Otherwise, all dates but the last would be lost. And, besides, we don’t generally know the date of the last reprint, just the one we currently have (often not even that). Especially with MB’s precedence, I think it just makes more sense to allow multiple dates.
Germans sure are very particular about an awful lot of things, aren’t they? But eventually we should have documentation pages for each language/country. We have that in MB, and with books this kind of thing is probably more common.
I actually misread you as saying “The only difference between the two editions was the font and the cover” — I thought you were saying the artwork was different. I still think it should be a different edition, but it’s not as obvious…
There is no relationship, at least currently. And I think in the end we agree this would be better defined with multiple dates, not start/end dates. It seems we got a bit off the track.
Kindly check it out and list if you think something is missing or if something that should not be there is. I have listed the names of relationships to help you out as well.
I’m late to the party but I think the discussion was fruitful and most of the points I had in mind were said.
@blackteadarkmatter could you please point me to a good example or two of a release with multiple release dates in MB?
One thing I wonder is if it would be helpful to have the printer’s key for example or other identifiable reprint information attached to a particular release date.
For @aabbi15 on the technical side: I’m not certain yet, but we might need two different attribute types: single date and date range.
That being said you might be able to describe both in the same way with extended ISO 8601 format dates: ISO 8601 - Wikipedia
Something for you to investigate: can we use a single attribute type (“date”) but somehow mark whether it is a punctual date or a range? (we will need to know that for the UI part)
I don’t know if these are good examples, but this, this, or this are examples. I feel this is probably very rare for books, but it’s possible, so it’s a good idea if it is supported. And for reprints there are definitely multiple dates, so it’s a good to model if we want to support this.
Define “other identifiable reprint information”… In most cases the only useful information on the printer’s key the printing number. E.g. if you have a book with the printer’s key “17 16 15 14 13 12”, you know there are at least 12 printings to this edition because that’s the one you have. Sometimes it also has the year of the printing which is useful information. I also feel the printer’s key is mostly used in English books, I couldn’t find it on any non-English book I have at hand, and very recent English books also sometimes don’t have it (maybe due to differences in printing technology?) In any case, it’s not universal.
I guess the info various a lot from country to country and from publisher to publisher.
Sometimes there’s only the example @blackteadarkmatter mentioned: 12 11 10 9
meaning in Germany: This is the 9nth edition (can be the 5th reprint of the 4th edition or the 9th reprint of the 1st edition (that is not recognizable).
Sometimes they are combined with the year: 86 87 88 04 03 02 (means 2. edition from 1986).
But sometimes we also have information about the amount of printed books:
a) the example of my post above (used by only one publisher): 100/85/xy/2 (meaning 10000 printed books for the 2nd edition in 1985.
b) A range like : 7. edition May 1967: 12th - 17th thousand
c) The total amount of printed books so far.
The amount of printed books is interesting data but I’m not really sure how to add this correctly to the BB editions.
