Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Here's a question: do y'all think we can use the new series objects to handle books published in parts? For example, if Moby Dick is published in large print as Moby Dick: part 1 of 2 and Moby Dick: part 2 of 2, should we create a "Moby Dick" series and list the half-books as being in that series? Or should we leave the partitioning information in the title the way we used to leave series information?

Examples of books in parts:
El Código Engima (Criptonomicón, #1)
Les Misérables, tome 2 : Cosette
Moby Dick part 1 of 2

I have mixed thoughts on this, but would personally lean toward yes we should use it for that. The "series" would presumably need to be the name of the full book, with some indication of the total number of parts (because I can think of books which are broken into 2, 3, 4, or 5 parts depending on who published it when). So you might have as the series name:

* The Count of Monte Cristo (2 volumes)
* The Count of Monte Cristo (3 volumes)
* The Count of Monte Cristo (4 volumes)
etc..

Not sure if we want to use "volumes" or "parts" or something else.

I'd rather see multiple volumes of a set retained as information in the title than treated as a series. To me, it's mixing apples and oranges. Wouldn't it also complicate the issue when the set is also part of a series?

For example, Augustine's City of God, issued by Catholic University Press in three volumes. It's vol. 6-8 in the series Writings of Saint Augustine and vol. 8, 14, and 24 in the series Fathers of the Church. In addition, each volume contains a range of numbered "books" from the original work. (Here's the middle volume of this set, which appears to be the only one in GoodReads yet: The City of God Books VIII-XVI. Here it is at WorldCat: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/807084.)

I am running into this while trying to fix a particular book series I read (the audio books of each novel have been split apart into as many as 5 or 6 parts!).

I was going to come here and ask this very question, so quite timely.

Much as I love the idea of just creating a "series" to encompass all the volumes of one novel, I also agree with Catherine-- a single novel split into parts does not a series make!

(Using novel for simplicity's sake-- obviously this situation can arise with non-fiction as well.)

On the other hand, I don't particularly like the idea of a series having 12 different entries all listed as volume 1 because one of them is the entire book and the other 11 are different subsets. This is part of the reason we don't combine subpieces with the whole...listing them each as the full entry in the series would be equally problematic.

This Is Not The Michael You're Looking For wrote: "On the other hand, I don't particularly like the idea of a series having 12 different entries all listed as volume 1 because one of them is the entire book and the other 11 are different subsets. T..."

Oh man, I just got what you're getting at here. Hmm. But if a book in a series is split into parts, isn't the series usually renumbered for that whole printing? Like, if there's one run that's books 1, 2, and 3, and there's another run where book 2 is split in half, isn't the whole series in the second run numbered 1, 2, 3, 4? Which would actually kick us over to a new series object, as we've been discussing matters....

Something like À la recherche du temps perdu is especially problematic. I gave up trying to reconcile it with the previous system because not only was it a lot of work (nearly the whole thing is still a complete mess), but it was ridiculously complicated.
Ostensibly it's a series of 7 novels, or one novel in seven parts, depending on your view point.
But sometimes just one section of one of these seven volumes is published (like Combray, the second part of the first volume), and not as part of a run of the whole book, but independently. Combray is definitely part of À la recherche du temps perdu, but it's hard to label it.
Any guidance on how situations like this could be better dealt with within the new system?

Cait, in foreign language versions, yes, but for others not always. For example, audio book versions are often split into parts without renumbering the entire series. (On the other hand, Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle was renumbered when split into smaller parts, so you can find it both ways).

Here's an example of a series which has: single books, boxed sets, publication with each book split in two but not renumbered, and publication with each book split in three but not renumbered.
http://www.goodreads.com/series/43067...

This feels a little cluttered to me, but I'm not sure that it would make sense to do things any other way....

Cait wrote: This feels a little cluttered to me, but I'm not sure that it would make sense to do things any other way...."

Exactly.

It looks perfect to me. And it wasn't confusing or anything.

Nice example. I like how you put "5 part 1/2" as the "number" for parts of books which are in the series. Seems to work fairly well and allows us to NOT necessarily build mini-series for fractionated books.

Yes, agreed. Excellent way of dealing with that issue.