At Bookogs, we treated different printer’s keys as unique editions, which I thought was quite ambitious. I could go either way on this one. What do you all think?
Printer’s keys are not a reason for submitting a unique release on BB.
I suggest you have a read of https://bookbrainz.org/help in particular: “When should I create a new Edition of a Work?” and “When should I not create a new Edition of a Work?”.
It gets tricky because these rules presume the contributor knows a lot about the preceding editions.
If for example, you have an edition that was first published by Penguin in 1988, and your edition is exactly the same in most details, but is a reprint from 1992, then you record the Release Date as 1988 in the submission.
You can mention in the Annotation section that it is a reprint (and I wouldn’t see any harm in adding the printer’s key alongside this detail).
I just learnt something. I thought the help page gave advice on ‘when and when not’ to add a new Edition, but this refers to the Work. Sorry, I can’t answer your question, however I do agree adding a new Edition for every printer’s key variation is going to result in a very full DB.
Just an idea, but in the annotations for any given edition, we could put something like “The Printer’s Key for this edition ranges from ####### to #######”. That annotation can grow over time as we learn how far the Printer’s Key goes.
From the help page:
When should I not create a new Edition of a Work?
- Minimal changes as in proofreading errors
- Minimal changes on the cover
- Reprints of the same Edition. You can mention “Reprint – [date]” in the annotations.
- When the edition uses the same ISBN (with rare exceptions)
So different Printer’s Key’s go to the notes…
On second reading that does refer to the creation of Editions. I convinced myself it was all about the Work. My excuse is it was way past my bedtime when I commented😴