There are many short stories, novellas, novels, etc that have been revised (either lightly or heavily), or expanded with new material and republished.
Are these considered part of the original Work or do they qualify as a unique Work?
That is a tricky problem.
If we consider small changes as variants and large changes as unique works we have to deal with the Sorites paradox or paradox of the heap. At what point small changes grow into large changes?
I have no idea at the moment.
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It was always a problem on Bookogs and much of what I did with Works was subjective (not a good idea).
Someone once commented that eBooks are frequently updated with new information. The end result might be nothing like the first publication.
I don’t even want to think about that…
But thinking again about your first post: I guess we’ll need something like an alias + comment.
Original version
Alias (revised 19xx)
Alias (expanded 20xx)
That is one solution, but there are some science fiction works that were so heavily rewritten that they almost don’t resemble the original. The only connection might be the title and a few character names and the setting.
I will think about this further.
I think it would totally be acceptable to have separate Work entities if there are major rewrites. The question is, as @indy133 says, where do we draw the line?
We would have to list broad types of editing, and figure out which ones are deserving of a separate Work and which ones constitute Edition revisions or annotations on the Work.
For example, I would not consider posterior copy editing (spelling, grammar, fixing word repetition or inconsistencies,…) to be sufficient reasons to create a new Work, while on the other end of the spectrum major plot changes and turning a short story into a novel would.
As for in between, for example various degrees of structural changes, I think it would depend on if 1. the revised text is largely considered to be different from the original and 2. if the BB editor considers them to be separate (as loose as that sounds, having editors make a thoughtful assessment could just work)
Exactly.
This situation also requires the contributor to have a high degree of knowledge about each variation. It would be advantageous if the contributor has read each of the works, so that they can discern whether the difference is a minor tweak or a major rewrite.
I had this problem with some Dean Koontz works, and luckily I found someone who had an encyclopedic knowledge of his books. These differences weren’t mentioned in any of the online resources that I found.
It all comes down to subjective appraisal of when an original work transforms into something different.