I feel this is a question that will keep coming up. MB is quite a mature project, but you won’t have to scroll for a long time to find questions about what belongs and what doesn’t. A couple of things I think most people can agree on is:
- ISBN/ISNI (or any other code) is irrelevant. You should remember most of these codes only started being attributed in the past few decades, we have centuries of books without ISBN or similar code, and no one would argue shouldn’t be here. Even now noncommercial books can be published without ISBN. Also, remember not all countries implemented ISBN/ISNI at the same time, and the cost (or lack thereof) also depends on the country.
- The content matters more than medium. There are previously traditionally published novelists now publishing books chapter by chapter through Substack. It’s still a novel if it’s published on Substack (or a website, or a blog, etc.), and it probably still belongs on BB.
Yet, that doesn’t mean all Substacks and blogs and websites belong here. So that’s something that will probably be discussed for a long time here, and it will take time to reach anything like a rule. It’s also easier to talk about specific examples, so if you have some particular work in mind, we can also discuss that.
One thing to keep in mind is that BB is very green, and we still have to work on supporting better even more traditional works, so I don’t think these cases are a priority.
This is a different issue. By “single poetry”, do you mean a poem? And “a larger work” would be a cycle of poems? Then, yes. You can also look at previous discussions on what counts as a work, and our discussion about work types. Before there was no definition, but now we have a list of well-defined types. BB’s documentation also includes a definition of what a work is.