There is a joke book that is often gifted to people interested in maritime law/policy, Liechtenstein Maritime Law. The joke being that Liechtenstein is tiny and landlocked, so they do not have any such laws. The book consists of a short explanation of the joke; the rest is a notebook.
How should this be added to BookBrainz? I think the explanation of the joke would count as an introduction. Maybe there could be a “blank” work since there are other novelty books that make similar jokes. That would cover the majority of this book’s “content.”
what, a special purpose work [blank] or [no work] or something? I could see a benefit to having this for cases like this
don’t know if it might also apply to notebooks that have quotes on the pages (like short poems or Bible verses), but that’s something similar to consider too
There certainly is a case to be made for “blank” publications. The notebook I linked to is completely blank inside. It’s styled in Suhrkamp’s trademark cover design and even has ISBN.
[Edit 2] It seems ISBN are common for notebooks. My point with the two linked notebooks is: they’re both styled as official publications by the respective publisher.
A joke isn’t a work… but many works can be created based on jokes.
It’s possible there are multiple novelty books with different content called Liechtenstein Maritime Law, each of these would be a different work. Even if there are different blank books with different covers, IDs, etc., could arguably be added as different editions. It should be enough to explain in the annotation that there is no content, it’s just a novelty blank book.
If you or anyone else have an interest in these, you can make Liechtenstein Maritime Law collection for all these editions.
A second issue is whether we need a something like [Blank work]… but it seems to me you should just not add any work to an edition that has no work.
I don’t feel these belong here… this is BookBrainz, not StationeryBrainz.
Having an ISBN is irrelevant: most books published don’t have them (as they’re relatively recent), and lots of things that aren’t books have them, not just stationary (music CDs, DVDs, CD-ROMs, etc.)
