Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Hi all,
I'm quite new here and I don't want to mess things up, but I have this question for you all:
The guidelines state that for series, the book number should be indicated between brackets like so:
Wizard And Glass (The Dark Tower Series, Book 4)
What bothers me in this approach is that the books of a series will never show up in their correct order when you sort a list because you can only sort on the whole title.
Is there a way to tackle this or am I just too picky? ;-) I would just like to see the series appear in their natural order...
In my own database, if I had to include the series title and/or number in the book title field (which I would not do), I would use a convention like:
The Dark Tower Series, Book 4, Wizard And Glass
That way, they would sort correctly...

I would like to hear your views and ideas about this...

It's true. They don't sort in order.

However, your method would make finding individual titles far more difficult. I like the current method better.

I can understand that, so to solve both problems, an extra field would be great...
That way, finding titles remains the same as now, and sorting could take the series-field into account...

I agree that a separate field for that information would be a better way to deal with it, especially for series that contain a lot of books. However, it's pretty low of my list of "most wanted features" right now.

The ability to put books in a series is definitely a feature we want to add. And thanks for the feedback about the sorting - we'll have to figure out a way to make that work.

I and my friends read mostly romance novels. We would love to see a searchable field for series names and numbers.

Please be aware that a book can have 2 "series" designations. i.e., "Silhouette Desire No. XXXX" and "Dynasties: The Elliotts, Book XX." Fantasy series have similar numbering.

Perhaps one series name field plus one series number field would suffice. The suggested use would be for the brand line name (Silhouette Desire) and the series number (XXXX). The 'sub-series' information could continue to be provided in the title field in parentheses.

For books not published as part of a brand line series, the name and number fields would replace the parenthetical reference. i.e., Series Name: Tempting SEALS and Book Number: 4.

I won't tempt fate by suggesting that the series name field be a link to a page displaying all the books in the series with links to the book info pages...

Thanks so much for the awesome website. I and my fellow Amazon Romance Forum boardies are loving it!