Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Hi
As you have noticed there are many books that people bring into the shelves using other alphabet than latin, e.g, persian. Many of them are translations but some of them are originaly written in those laguages. Using of other alphabet make automatic classifications of the books very difficult and as a results we have many editions of the same book. I think only Latin alphabet should be used for name of the book and the author. However there should be a place to write name and tile in other alphabet for information. What can we do?

Yes, definitely there needs to be a way to add the name in the original alphabet as well even if it's primarily put in as Latin. Not all languages have a very regularized Latin alphabetization...

I think for timebeing all translation should be wirtten using original latin names for title and author. this enables us to combine all versions together.

I propose to put a hint for the people who add manually books, that to use latin alphabet for titles and authors. What do you think about that?

Books can only be combined if the primary author is the same.

Wait for the much-anticipated AKA feature? ;)

Otis, that's 2-3 months away, right? :D

At the current state of things, yes. We're hiring for software engineers now though, and that may change things :)

Abigail
I still think that persian and english version of the same book should be combined together if one of the is translation of another. As we are talking about the same content, no matter in what language.

Kserkses:

What do you mean by "original latin name"? The name in the original language of the book in latin script or the name in the translated language in latin script?

I'm beginning to feel there should be a more advanced database behind this, so that all names, editions, authors, editors, languages, whatever, could be grouped together under one id of a "book". One could maybe choose which language to show on one's own bookshelf, and such.

accepting that english is an international language, I think the main key word for autor and title should be in english, however there should be new boxes for equalant in other languages for example in persian or maybe chinese.

Kserkses wrote: "accepting that english is an international language, I think the main key word for autor and title should be in english, however there should be new boxes for equalant in other languages for exampl..."

Well, the thing is, if it's, say, in Chinese, then it's more difficult for the native speaker to figure out which book it is using only the English transliteration... I don't really have a set opinion on this, so I'm just pointing out some difficulties.