Title Pages: Provide a link from books/short stories to Shelfari (or LibraryThing)

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  • Updated 7 years ago
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Along the same lines as my soundtrack suggestion, but this time for books, as a lot of people might be interested in reading the workNow there are problems, like the fact that there can be multiple editions of books and short stories can appear in a number of collections, but (as came up in a previous discussion on an IMDB-like book database) Amazon own 1.4 book databases which link on to Amazon and other sources (but not competitors) - all of Shelfari and 40% of Library Thing. So all you'd need to do is link through to one or both of these sites and let them do all the hard work.As there are less books listed in the IMDB database it'd be easier to get the links in and finetune any - you can, for example, add a link for an author search from the writer's page. Of course, you'd need a way of identifying who wrote books, as opposed to the screenplay but this needn't be rocket science and I'm sure a solution can be found depending on the structure of the data.The one problem is with short stories (there are quite a few films based on the short stories of Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick) and you'd need to have a rummage around to find out how best to work this out - I am currently struggling to find an example that doesn't work because the shorts tend to have collections named after them (because being the basis of an adaptation tends to encourage people to release a book with the same name), like "The Colour Out of Space" or "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale." Ah, LibraryThing doesn't cope well with WCRIFYW (oddly, as it is listed there) but does include entries for some short stories, like:http://www.librarything.com/work/1188... also seems capable of finding short stories if they are mentioned in the description:http://www.shelfari.com/search/books?... not the table of contents. Which is fixable, as you could put a list of the stories into the description, if a title/author search wasn't bringing it up. The bonus of using another site like that is that it'd be easy enough to get in and edit the data in order to fix any problems that are thrown up (where linking straight to Amazon may be trickier).Although I haven't looked too hard this also seems to work for comics, Blade II (but not Blade) is credited to Marv Wolfman (the original writer) and Gene Colan and the first Shelfari result is the collection of their first comics for the character:http://www.shelfari.com/search/books?...
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Emperor, Champion

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Posted 7 years ago

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Dan Dassow, Champion

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I like this idea.