Introducing GenreThing, Part 2

The link for the original topic thread should be above.

Tim Spalding's intro to GenreThing on June 22:

We've just launched "GenreThing," LibraryThing's attempt at high-level bookstore-style genres. Please read this whole post before commenting.

Genres do not replace tags and other systems, but offer a simple way to divide works into a small number of categories familiar to all readers. Genres are automatically calculated based on many different sources, including tags, library classifications (Dewey, Library of Congress Subject Headings), and bookstore classifications (BIC, BISAC). I'll write more about the method in follow-up posts here.

This mix of data allows us to generate genres for some books before they are released—and before members have added tags. Members can change genres for themselves. These decisions are themselves analyzed, and may affect the system for others too.

For now you can find genres a few places:

On work pages, on the right (example).
Genres also have their own pages, such as Science Fiction and Biography & Memoir).
You can see a breakdown of the genres in your own catalog.
To add the genre column to your catalog, go to Display Styles and then "classification."
The Genre Settings Page allows you to turn genres off and on, including several genres not included by default, or turn the whole feature off entirely.

Changing Genres

You can change a work's genre on work pages or by double-clicking on the "Genre" cell, once you've added it to your catalog (see above). Changes you make affect your account instantly. They will also be analyzed to change genres for everyone as well. The changing screen also gives you an option to "flag" a genre assignment. We intend this to be used for egregious errors—when no reasonable person would think the assignment is good.

Wait, that's WRONG!

We know you will find problems! For example, @KnerdKnitter just reported video-game guides in the "travel" genre. We'll be watching to see what member's de-select and flag, and adjusting things accordingly. The system will get better!

Irrespective of "problems," genres are a tricky subject. People get stabby about the lines between science fiction and fantasy. One person's core genre is another person's irrelevant one. If your objections are fundamental, we urge you to turn genres off entirely on the settings page. If your objections are specific, let us know and we'll see what we can do.

If you see assignment problems you want to talk about, especially more general errors, not one-offs, post the link or touchstone here.

The links that were in the original intro post are below.

example: https://www.librarything.com/work/2567%20

https://www.librarything.com/genre/16/Science-Fiction

https://www.librarything.com/genre/1/Biography-Memoir

https://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?specialpage=genre

https://www.librarything.com/settings/styles

https://www.librarything.com/settings/genres

This is great fun. Until the export formats are updated to include the genre information, I've just taken the information and put it into a static file, so I can play around with it outside LT.

I don't think a Police Procedural is in the Mystery genre, but I can see that all J. J. Marric books (about a police man in Scotland Yard) are. But maybe I'm wrong? Opinions anyone?

>3 bnielsen: To me, Police Procedural is a subset of Mystery, just as Amateur (or Professional) Detective are. I think of any narrative whose central question is "who done it?" as a mystery. But I freely admit I have absolutely no basis for that other than my own instincts.

>3 bnielsen: Think of "Mystery" as "Mystery, Crime, Detective and Police Procedurals" and not strictly as what a mystery will be. So with the genres we have, yes, these will be under Mystery.

>4 rosalita: Well, Police Procedurals sometimes focus less on "who done it?" and more on "how is it proven?" But I do think that most US mystery readers would put most of these in the Mystery genre.

It's definitely one of those edges where you can have books that leave you unsure "does this belong in Mystery or in Thriller?", and the answer in bookstores is often "wherever that author's books are usually filed" if it's kind of an even mix.

With GenreThing... it's totally resonable if it shows up in both.

>6 hypatian_kat: I really struggle with distinguishing between Suspense/Thriller genres, for sure. And some of the books I would file under one of those genres could also go into mystery, and others not so much.

I think this is why I am holding out hope that GenreThing will work out the bugs and provide a reliable "top-level" sorting for me, so I no longer have to stress out about the differences. :-)

>4 rosalita: >5 AnnieMod: >6 hypatian_kat: >7 rosalita: Thanks. I can see the "wherever that author's books are usually filed" effect in some of the other books where I can see that I differ from the current genre classification.

It's definitely a thing that some genre authors get around by using a different pen name, at least for a while until they can try to combine readerships for marketing purposes. :) (I'm thinking like Nora Roberts and J.D. Robb here.)

I see a lot of Portuguese novels getting put into “Romance” — presumably because that is the Portuguese word for novel and therefore appears in subtitles?

>10 thorold:

See also:

https://www.librarything.com/topic/333142#7547144

thorold (#10):

I see a lot of Portuguese novels getting put into “Romance” — presumably because that is the Portuguese word for novel and therefore appears in subtitles?

In addition to the comment that lilithcat links to in #11, see also Tim's response in https://www.librarything.com/topic/333142#7547376 (Tim's terrible about indicating what he's responding to, but reading the thread at the time it was clear that's what he was talking about)

>11 lilithcat: >12 lorax: Oops. That’s the trouble with 500-message threads…

I just read or skimmed both threads, and started examining the genres assigned to my library. Overall, I like it. Some more specific thoughts.

- please define the genres on the pages where they can be selected or on an associated help page and _make clear that some genres include other genres_ - and which ones they are.

- I'd personally be happier if genres did NOT nest that way, but since they do, that needs to be made clear to confused users who stumble on the feature rather than these threads.

- I have 63 in "Biography & Memoir", quite a few of which don't seem to belong. Examples include: Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, Forces of change : an unorthodox view of history, The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492 (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World), The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, Historians' Fallacies : Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, History and Historians: A Historiographical Introduction, A History of the Ostrogoths, A History of the Twentieth Century 1900-1933, Vol. 1, Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future

Pretty much all of these properly belong in history, and are also assigned to that genre. But they aren't biographies. It looks to me as if the selection criteria need some tweaking.

- The 40 reported as being in "business" are mostly OK, but when they are wrong, they are very wrong. Partnership Understandings is a book about the game of bridge, part of a large mini-genre of books written to help people improve their play. (I flagged it.)

- I'll probably check and fix genres when I add books, but not for books I've already catalogued.

About half of my books within Home & Garden aren't showing in Nonfiction.

How does everyone else feel about math books going in Science & Nature? That looks wrong to me.

>16 aspirit: Where else but in Science would you place maths in Tim's current scheme?

>17 anglemark: Only in Nonfiction (where many aren't currently going). That is, unless the book is focused on math for a specific science or nature topic (which a generic Trigonometry book isn't).

I think math belongs in science.

>16 aspirit: Somewhat uneasy - but I also sort of get it.

>16 aspirit:

How does everyone else feel about math books going in Science & Nature? That looks wrong to me.

Speaking as a person with a physics degree, physics is math. :-) So math has to go in Science unless physics isn't science. :-) The connection between the other sciences and mathematics is not quite as intimate -- but if something can't be verified mathematically, it really isn't science.

I agree that the marriage of science and nature is a little uneasy -- it's hard for me to believe that Birds of North America and the Principia belong in the same category! -- but any broad category that includes either mathematics or science really has to include both.

>21 waltzmn:

Quantum chromodynamics is science, but brane theory isn’t :p

I’d normally argue that mathematics isn’t science, but in the present context, unless there’s a specific mathematics section, a bookshop would surely shelve maths books with science.

>22 AndreasJ:

Quantum chromodynamics is science, but brane theory isn’t :p

And in saying that, you're just scratching the surface. :-) (Seriously, that's far over my head.

I’d normally argue that mathematics isn’t science, but in the present context, unless there’s a specific mathematics section, a bookshop would surely shelve maths books with science.

Exactly. And the link is genuinely intimate. I don't think the problem is the connection; it's the name. But I doubt calling this section "STEM" would help, and there really isn't another term.

Math is a language, one used in physics and other sciences, but it's also a language used in Art & Design, History, etc.

But I guess I'm in the minority thinking math books are currently misplaced in the LT genres.

>8 bnielsen: Like Maigret's non-detective books are filed under mystery

>21 waltzmn:

Obligatory xkcd:



Does, say, Jane Goodall use math in her work (beyond counting)? Is she a scientist?

>16 aspirit: Uhm - Math is science. Why would it not belong in Science and Nature?

>27 AnnieMod:

Google "Is math science" and you'll see some negative answers.

>28 cpg: Google also have positive answers to “is Earth flat?”.

>29 AnnieMod:

The featured answer for "Is math science" is negative and comes from a blog hosted by the American Mathematical Society. Any thing like that for "is Earth flat"?

>27 AnnieMod: I've having trouble figuring out why a scientific tool (and an art, design, and crafting tool) is being referred to as science. The argument that nature is mathematical makes sense, but "math is science"...?

>28 cpg: >29 AnnieMod: >30 cpg: Ah, apparently this is an established debate.

https://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/mathematics

ETA: To me, it's like seeing "language is science". Not linguistics, but language. No one seems to expect books for, like, college English classes to go into Science & Nature. It doesn't matter, though. I asked out of curiosity about how my perspective compared to others (which has been answered!), not because I expect to ever depend on GenreThing's classifications.

Math is not science. There are no physical measurements on the real world that would have any effect on the truth or falsehood of any mathematical statement. That said, Dewey put math as a subcategory of science, and I don't really expect anything different from this system.

Math is science adjacent

I’d look for a Math book in the science section of a bookstore if they have one. So would most people. Which is the point of the whole GenreThing.

If we go by strict definitions (or even arguable ones), 70% of what is now in Fantasy, Science Fiction or Mystery will need to be sent to General Fiction.

>34 jjwilson61: Still makes it science :)

>26 cpg:

Does, say, Jane Goodall use math in her work (beyond counting)? Is she a scientist?

At this point, she's not a scientist, she's a social activist.... But that's merely the autistic person's answer. :-) The question you of course mean is "was Jane Goodall a scientist when she was making observations of chimpanzees?"

The answer is, it doesn't matter if Goodall was using mathematics herself -- because observations that are not mathematically analyzed are not science. "The plural of anecdote is not data." If Goodall saw one chimpanzee attack another chimpanzee, that didn't mean anything. When Goodall saw bands of chimpanzees attack other bands of chimpanzees, and saw it repeatedly, and documented dates and times, she was gathering data for statistical analysis. The science is the statistical analysis, not the anecdotes. If Goodall didn't do that, she was still contributing the data for the statistical analysis.

If Goodall had rejected the use of statistical analysis, then (but only then) would she not be a scientist. Plenty of scientists consult other scientists to help them with their work -- and probably the most common sort of consultation is when one scientist takes a bunch of data to another and asks to have it analyzed mathematically. (This doesn't always involve going to a mathematician; it might be an experimental physicist going to a theoretical physicist -- assuming they're on speaking terms. :-p

>33 prosfilaes:

Math is not science.

No, it is not. There is abstract math which has no connection to reality (though I have never ceased to be amazed at how often abstract math turns out to have real world connections. Abelian groups? Quaternions? Pure abstract math -- until they weren't. :-) It makes me wonder if we can actually get our minds out of the, so to speak, dirt enough to produce truly abstract mathematics.)

But you can't have science without mathematics, although the reverse is not true. So a "science" classification would have to have some sort of tie-in to mathematics.

I would personally welcome a "mathematics" genre; I have plenty of mathematics books in my library that are definitely not science! Some -- the game theory books, e.g. -- are closer to sociology. But if there is to be no mathematics genre, then mathematics surely has to go with science.

And, to repeat something that seems not to sink in much in this discussion, the number of genres has to be fairly small -- small enough that we can keep most of them in our heads. Otherwise we won't use them or will classify books wrong. I know this, from work on classifying traditional folk songs! If a classification scheme includes too many items to remember, then each individual will unconsciously choose a subset and use only that subset.

So the question is: Is there enough demand for a "mathematics" genre to justify separating it from a "science" genre? Speaking for myself, as someone who has many books in both music and science categories... if the choice is between getting a "music" genre or a "mathematics" genre, I'll take music. If it's between a "folklore and mythology" genre and a "mathematics" genre, I'll take folklore and mythology. If it's between a "classics"/"pre-1800" genre and a "mathematics" genre, I'll take classics. And so forth. I'd like a maths genre -- but I need music, and I need mythology and folklore (and clearly won't get it), and I want a "classics" genre to get rid of all this new-fangled kinky stuff. So I'm not really campaigning for "mathematics" even though I concede its genre validity.

Engineering also doesn't fit in science & nature, but that's what I'm stuck with. :shrug:

I'm still waiting for whatever category we settled on for social sciences. Tim said he'd do it, then he didn't do it.

Whether or not nonfictional math books go into Science & Nature, I wish they'd all go to Nonfiction without manual selection in GenreThing.

Same as for Home & Garden.

>36 waltzmn: Quaternions? Pure abstract math -- until they weren't.

Quaternions have never been abstract math. They were designed because complex numbers are two dimensional, so there should be a three-dimensional analog to handle the three-dimensional world. Since there is no three-dimensional analog for him to find, William Rowan Hamilton found a four-dimensional analog.

>39 prosfilaes:

Quaternions have never been abstract math.

I will freely admit to not knowing that -- they were presented to me (very briefly) as an abstract toy that ended up having meaning (which doesn't contradict what you say, because they were an abstract toy to my particular professor...). I always wondered why they went with a four part unit and not three or five or whatever....

But this is additional evidence for my speculation that it's much easier to find mathematics with real world uses than purely abstract mathematics.

And it has very little to do with whether mathematics deserves its own category anyway. :-)

>36 waltzmn:

Since traditional folk songs can be subjected to statistical analysis, does that make traditional folk songs science?

>36 waltzmn: "Is there enough demand for a 'mathematics' genre to justify separating it from a 'science' genre?"

To be clear, I'm not asking for math to have its own genre. The numbers (sorry) wouldn't seem to warrant that. What I'd like is for math books not to be automatically placed into a genre in which they don't belong. If math isn't science, is it nature? And if it's neither science nor nature, why place it into the "Science & Nature" genre?

>42 cpg: Because people expect them to be in science. Which is the whole point of GenreThing - where books would usually be shelved.

>41 cpg:

Since traditional folk songs can be subjected to statistical analysis, does that make traditional folk songs science?

The songs would not be science, but the analysis might be. Depending on whether it's competently done. (If by chance you're thinking of cantometrics, from what I can tell from what I've read, it was not competently done.)

I have in fact fiddled around with statistical analysis of English-language traditional ballads, studying the range involved, and the conclusion appeared to be that Scottish and English singers were willing to sing tunes with wider ranges than were American singers. However, too many tunes had uncertain provenance for me to feel much confidence in the results.

I think math goes with science and nature.

>43 AnnieMod: "Because people expect them to be in science."

Maybe we could poll people who have math books in their collection on this question.

>46 cpg:

The top 10 books tagged "mathematics" are all also tagged "science", if that's of any significance.

>47 lilithcat:

And the #1 book tagged "mathematics" is about connections between the work of a logician, an artist, and a musician. If that qualifies as science, there's very little that wouldn't, I guess.

>48 cpg: If a book that won the National Book Award for Science isn't Science in our classification, then we've gone very far astray.

(Godel, Escher, Bach)

>46 cpg:

Maybe we could poll people who have math books in their collection on this question.

I would strongly suggest not polling on individual genres. This is practical: If you let everyone vote on their favorite individual genres, the only ones who will vote on particular genres will be the people who have a lot of books in those genres, and every genre will be in, and we'll have a thousand or so genres and they'll all be useless. :-)

I would approve of a poll, but only one in which you get polled on all genres, and get to vote for up to (say) fifty. The fifty with the highest approvals are the ones we use.

There is, incidentally, another solution here, that has very likely been mentioned but not lately: Make the category "Science and Mathematics" (or "Mathematics and Science"), and drop or separate "Nature" into a separate genre.

FWIW, in my own tagging, I tag "mathematics" (132 books) and "science" (107) separately -- but I tag far more of the books by field within science than as "science" in general, e.g. biology (89), psychology (119, but a big chunk of those are about autism), physics (35), archaeology (29), chemistry (19 -- it's hard to find good mid-level chemistry books). However, I think of mathematics and science as basically a unit.

>49 melannen:

And I'm a mathematician in a College of "Science", so I've been checkmated, I suppose.

>50 waltzmn:

1) Nowhere have I proposed that "Mathematics" be its own genre. LT cataloguers tend to have so few math books that it would hardly be warranted.

2) I confess that I wasn't intending to suggest a systematic poll. I was reacting to being told where people go in bookstores to find math books by people with no math books in their collections.

3) I'm guessing that most of my math books wouldn't even be stocked by bookstores with just a handful of genres, so in some sense it's a tree-falls-in-the-forest question.

4) "Science & Math" is among the genres that appears in the list I posted in #56 in the original thread.

I have been reading through this thread with great interest, and have just one point to make:

It must be reasonably easy for average users to look at a work and know which top-level genre it should go into.*

If this fails, then large numbers of works will be misattributed.

I know Tim is intending to add explanations, and of course that will help a lot. But right now, for Maths, I (an engineer) would have trouble deciding between Science & Nature and Nonfiction.

* Agreed that there are plenty of works which fit under more than one genre, but that is a slightly different issue.

>51 cpg: Yeah, I would say that in the same way that music may or may not be Art but is definitely one of "The Arts", mathematics may or may not be Science but it is definitely one of "The Sciences".

(to be fair, G, E, B really is complicated because it's doing its best to fit into all nonfiction classifications equally well, I think. Most libraries have it under Math in Dewey but a non-insignificant number have it in the 100s for Philosophy or the 000s for "I dunno, everything?" Librarything, I see, has put it in Art as well as Science.)

>53 sarahemmm:

It must be reasonably easy for average users to look at a work and know which top-level genre it should go into.*

Hear, hear!

This is one of the reasons I am so adamant that the number of genres be small. If there are too many, average users will not even search the whole list and will toss things in genres that are at best tangential to the "ideal" genre. So genres must be broad in scope, intuitive in name, few enough that the list can be quickly scanned, and straightforward in content.

That, incidentally, might argue for renaming some genres that haven't been as controversial as mathematics. E.g. what age range is "young adult"? I know it's an established term among booksellers, but as to what it truly means I haven't a clue -- my feeling is that in practical terms it means "from the time they get interested in the opposite sex until the time they get married." :-)

To be sure, if others know better, that's fine. I can say with great confidence that I am not a young adult. :-)

>55 waltzmn: By that definition, I, at the age of over 60, am still YA! :)

My feeling is that it's principally marketed at young people aged roughly 16-25, so something of an overlap at either end. I find much of the genre to be simplistic in style and to have an overly black-and-white world view. The ones I like tend to the complex and are less simplistic, and I like them when I'm in the mood for a light read.

To be honest, I'd go for Picture Books (for the pre-literate), Childrens (aimed at pre-teen/new readers), Teen Fiction, Young Adult. Given there'd be a heavy overlap between Teen Fiction and either side I'd be happy with dropping Teen Fiction.

(Putting old lady hat on) In my day, the library I patronised had a children's section in a small room, and the large room was adult's. You started graduating to the adult side as you went into your teens, and the librarians would steer you away from anything they thought unsuitable for your age (or would refer your choice to your parents). I recall reading Sergeanne Golon's Angelique series which was a bit racy, and Maurice Druon when in my mid teens. Mum queried the Angelique series, but on being told it wasn't smutty, allowed me to read it. TBH, the raciness went over my head at that point - I was enjoying the historical aspect of the fiction.

waltzmn (#55):

my feeling is that in practical terms it means "from the time they get interested in the opposite sex until the time they get married." :-)


So, where do those of us who are married but have no romantic interest in the "opposite" sex fall in this oh-so-heteronormative definition of yours?

waltzmn already admitted to being clueless about YA, so arguing about that (grossly inaccurate) statement seems pointless.

With any luck, people unfamiliar with the category/genre aren't editing the selection in GenreThing.

Maths isn't science, and neither (but in a different way) is engineering. Both are STEM.

Interesting. I've been under the impression for years that "young adult" was intended for teens, in the same way that e.g. 17 magazine is intended mostly for pre-teens.

In my own catalog, I'm radically simplistic about books for non-adults, young adults, etc. I tag them all as "juvenile", and leave it at that. (I also give them the same topic tags they'd get if they were intended for adults.) But practically speaking, all those in my collection were potentially interesting to a highly intelligent, highly verbal ten to twelve year old (me), and some are books I've kept ever since. So no picture books, though if I still had a copy of Struwwelpeter I'd treat it the same as the others.

I guess in my tagging, "young adult" means "fiction aimed at non-adults".

>57 lorax:

So, where do those of us who are married but have no romantic interest in the "opposite" sex fall in this oh-so-heteronormative definition of yours?

I realized after I had posted that that was unfortunate in its orientation reference. And was not intended so. :-( Please note the smiley that I used!

The logician, of course, would say that if you are married, then you have met a sufficient criterion for not being "young adult."

But this raises another point, which I perhaps should not bring up after my previous mistake, but which possibly does need to be asked: The reason that I made my suggestion was to point out that much of the point of "young adult" is romantic relationships. But sexual orientation dramatically influences the shape of romantic relationships. Does that need to be figured into genres?

And, no, I wouldn't be likely to be editing Young Adult genre descriptions, because (a) I have very little if any such, and (b) I don't like dealing with things that I can't define.

>62 waltzmn: As someone well into adulthood who is not married and doesn't want to be, I object on further grounds! :P

YA these days covers a wide range of topics, and I wouldn't say that it's any more likely to be about romance than adult fiction is, for a given definition of romance.

Anyway, we have an LGBT+ section already for people who want books that don't make unfortumate assumptions about the genders involved in romance; beyond that I wouldn't say it *does* dramatically influence the shape of the relationships all that much. (Certainly not within the genre of romance fiction! Queer romance loves all the same well-worn tropes as straight romance very much, and I certainly wouldn't ever exclude it from the modern romance genre.)

>63 melannen:

Anyway, we have an LGBT+ section already for people who want books that don't make unfortumate assumptions about the genders involved in romance; beyond that I wouldn't say it *does* dramatically influence the shape of the relationships all that much. (Certainly not within the genre of romance fiction! Queer romance loves all the same well-worn tropes as straight romance very much, and I certainly wouldn't ever exclude it from the modern romance genre.)

Not quite the point I'm making. I agree that the orientation doesn't change the genre. But it might change who wants to read the work. Many of us find it hard to project ourselves into the heads of a person who, so to speak, cannot be us. I can't, for instance, sympathize at all with characters who say, "Oh, I can't do math, it's too hard...."

Also, I remember a case of a a writer with a strong conservative religious bent who tried to write about a same-sex relationship. Said writer was trying to be sympathetic, I think, but it made me very uncomfortable. He just didn't know how to do it.

This is, of course, not an issue of genre. It's an issue of a bad book. :-) But if one could find a way to filter that out, it would help. Although, on contemplation, that's probably more than a simple genre classification can handle.

Okay, fine, YA definitions is the discussion.

"The logician, of course, would say that if you are married, then you have met a sufficient criterion for not being 'young adult.'"

Logically, an adult may be married, and the term "young adult" is a vague term that often includes married people. In some areas of publishing, it's used for people up to 40 years old, which is beyond the average age for marrying. In YA publishing, the maximum age of the primary* target audience goes up to anywhere between 16 and 21, depending on the definition used, and that's regardless of the married status of the characters. Considering that a married eighteen-year-old would still be said to be as a young adult by nearly everyone who's asked means the logician sounds ignorant of societal norms.

(*The secondary target audience is 40-something-year-old women, the last I saw from publishers.)

The minimum age of the target "YA" reader is 12 to 16. YA books are sometimes equated to "teen books" (for 13 through 19 years); sometimes seen as a type of chapter book intended for middle and high schoolers, if in the USA; and sometimes seen as a genre with a distinct writing style, range of tropes, and main characters who are older teens not yet comfortable with all adult responsibilities.

As for "the time they get interested in the opposite sex", that's often as early as five, especially for straight kids surrounded by hetereonormative media that pushes sexualized romance (like Disney movies).

(edited to make the number style consistent
and again to more clearly mark what's a quote)

For reference, Tim said in the first topic page:

Young Adult. Young Adult is calculated largely independent of publisher age-and-grade data, as the genre has to some extent drifted away from being an age term to being a more general content- and theme-based term.

Three weeks ago, a few of us asked what the difference is between "Teen" and "Young Adult" in GenreThing. For myself, I reread what Tim in his first couple posts in the thread and realized "Teen" is an age category while "Young Adult" is to be viewed for this feature as a genre in the usual way. Presumably, most books calculated as YA may also be Teen books.

>65 aspirit:

"The logician, of course, would say that if you are married, then you have met a sufficient criterion for not being 'young adult.'"

Logically, an adult may be married, and the term "young adult" is a vague term that often includes married people.

Sigh. This seems to be devolving into a let's-see-how-much-nitpicking contest, and that's not productive, but let me remind you that my original quote was in practical terms (young adult) means "from the time they get interested in the opposite sex until the time they get married." :-) So, under that definition, being married is a sufficient condition for for not being "young adult."

My response was in the context of my quote.

My apologies to all any and all I have offended. I'm trying to think about the issue of genres, and I'm clearly not giving enough attention to things that are not really part of that issue.

Your quote from Tim (Young Adult is calculated largely independent of publisher age-and-grade data, as the genre has to some extent drifted away from being an age term to being a more general content- and theme-based term) does show why I brought the point up, though: If "Young Adult" isn't defined by age but by content and theme, then what are the content and theme that define it? The young adult books I see seem to be mostly about finding a life partner, but I'm not young, I don't have a life partner, and I read far more non-fiction than fiction anyway, so I don't claim to have much knowledge of the genre. Recall that I brought this up as a request for a name that explained what the genre actually was. :-)

I'm still not really sure what the point of this is. I think it's a language based classification scheme more rigid than tags, and less fixed (and more accessible) than dewey. But ti still needs to have a structure of nested levels. How many?

Fiction/Speculative Fiction/Fantasy/Urban fantasy/LitRPG

Is 5 levels enough? (I came across the sub-genre litRPG only yesterday, and my first thought was: I bet TIM won't create a genre for this). How many works should be the minimum to define a genre?
But if it's nested how to we assign books to multiple layers? or just accept some reside at different heights.

Other than the joy of another field to catalogue what do users get from this? If it's to help a potential reader choose a book then they need to be very specific sub-genre levels. If it's to help a reader find a book they vaguely remembered then probably also. If it's to drive AI suggestions, who knows what's needed, but finer granularity must be better?

>69 reading_fox:

Well, I am interested in genres to assist in choosing (in my case) books for two old ladies. I'm hoping they will be more all-encompassing than tags, which I can then use to refine where available and informative. I can tell immediately, if a (fiction) work fits in Historical Fiction, it will not suit the centenarian; if it fits in Suspense & Thriller, it will not suit the 92 year old, while Travel* may be just the thing.

Looking at my own books under Travel, I find the second one I check has only two tags: goodreads, to-buy. Not too helpful when looking for something new.

>69 reading_fox: I think Tim's intent here is that the classifications only have two levels, the broad fiction and nonfiction categories (although I think it's confusing for him to include both an everything-else and a kitchen-sink fiction category). When a work is in two non-top-level categories it's because the work has elements of more than one genre, not that one genre contains the other.

I think the purpose is for browsing but really fine categories probably isn't possible to do algorithmically

waltzmn (#64):

Many of us find it hard to project ourselves into the heads of a person who, so to speak, cannot be us.

Many of us had never had the luxury of having sufficient books about "people who can be us" to be able to avoid others. This is something that girls often start dealing with in early childhood; they're expected to read books about boys, while conventional wisdom long held, and still sometimes claim, that "boys won't read books about girls", and thus groups of mixed gender will get assigned books about boys. So, straight white men, with the luxury of being the unmarked default in books written in English, get to drill right down to "this person has similar mathematical abilities as me" as a deal-breaker, where Black people and non-men of all races are just expected to be able to realize that not all characters are going to look, act, or think like them.

>72 lorax:

Many of us had never had the luxury of having sufficient books about "people who can be us" to be able to avoid others.

If you read through this thread, you'll note that I have already mentioned that I have autism. I am not even, despite what you seem to think, a person who fits standard gender norms. I have sympathy with not being able to find books that are "for me." There are very few that are "for me." But I also get tired of being told "you should like this because everyone likes it and what's the matter with you?" That gripe is not directed at you (though I don't think I deserve your response); it's directed at a society that will not accommodate those who are different.

But there is a tension here that can't be resolved just by lecturing or by playing I'm-more-divergent-than-thou (which you may not have experienced but I have). You can't just create that content-for-the-not-typical just by saying people should have access to it. There have to be those who can create it, and there has to be a commercially viable way to supply it! I wish I had a solution to this problem; even if passing laws could solve the latter problem (which I doubt), they won't solve the former.

But it doesn't change the fact that I will never be the person that I cannot be.

I can speak only for myself, not for anyone else. But I will not tell you to be the person you cannot be if you will not tell me to be the person I cannot be.

>68 waltzmn: Much of Adult fiction is about finding a life partner. Romance is incredibly popular.

Most of YA involves conflicts in a variety of relationships: family (usually, yeah, not with the main character as a spouse or parent), romantic and/or sexual (not usually with the intent to marry, sure), friendly or formerly friendly, spiritual, and work (usually with the MC as a low-level employee or independent worker not yet established).

In Middle Grade, when they're not stuck at a strange relative's home learning about family secrets and trying to stay in contact with friends, they often go off adventures as if they're adults, despite probably only being tweens. But in YA, teenaged main characters typically fill in for domestic, job, and political duties adults in charge are generally expected to do, all while they're reconsidering who their peers are and the identity they want to have as older adults.

>73 waltzmn: There have to be those who can create it, and there has to be a commercially viable way to supply it!

You mean, like how the big trade publishers insisted LGBT+ books won't sell unless they fit the same tragic narratives of the 1990s, and by the same few authors, until indie ebooks written for queer audiences by a large variety of queer authors hit distributors' bestsellers lists enough time they finally decided to diversify their selections a little?

Or, like, how the same thing happened with novels featuring BIPOC written by BIPOC?

Yeah, I think it is. Ebooks have changed the definition of what's commercially viable.

Questions not directly related to current discussions: Something I've about GenreThing is how books with under... is it 100?... copies in LT aren't automatically assigned certain genres, even if those genres are how the books are marketed and tagged. Is that on purpose? If so, why?

>75 aspirit:

Yeah, I think it is. Ebooks have changed the definition of what's commercially viable.

Yes, they have. So has print-on-demand, which lets you produce relatively cheap books for those who won't or can't read e-books; I don't think most of us realize how many books are now published as print-on-demand because it makes it much easier to publish a book (the marginal cost of each copy is higher but the price for setting up a title to publish can be less than $500).

Maybe we should have a print-on-demand genre to let people know which books publishers thought were commercially viable. :-) <-- relevance to the Genre thread. I actually sort of mean this....

On the flip side, both have also changed the definition of how little editorial work is considered an acceptable level of editorial work. :-( I've seen plenty of books that I'd have been ashamed to push out the door.

But I stand by my point. The fact that the bar has been lowered does not mean the bar has ceased to exist; even an e-book needs editing and formatting preparation. (Or, at least, it should get those things, lest it be one of those books-to-be-ashamed-of.) And lowering the bar still does not create the talent. The LGBTQ community is actually pretty large -- a relatively small percentage of the population but large in absolute numbers. There was always a lot of talent there! The population I represent is not just a small percentage but is just plain small. Or at least untapped, as LGBTQ was a few decades ago, but I think it is truly small.

>76 aspirit: It's not that simple. I have some singletons with a pre-assigned genre.

>78 anglemark:

It's not that simple. I have some singletons with a pre-assigned genre.

Ditto. It feels as if it has some dependence on how well the books fit the genre scheme. Based on the small subset of my books I've looked at, it feels as if my unusual music books seem not to get a genre, but the history books usually do.

I'd guess that there is a level of confidence involved. If there is only one copy and there is no good genre fit in Tim's data sources, it doesn't get a genre. But if there is one copy and its metadata clearly makes it history or biography or whatever, it gets a genre.

>77 waltzmn: ". . . print-on-demand, which lets you produce relatively cheap books for those who won't or can't read e-books . . ."

And who are willing to accept whatever compromises POD entails. My students this fall who can't find an old non-POD copy of our textbook will apparently be stuck with POD copies made from scans that look like this. It makes me a little ashamed to look them in the eye.

>80 cpg:

And who are willing to accept whatever compromises POD entails. My students this fall who can't find an old non-POD copy of our textbook will apparently be stuck with POD copies made from scans that look like this. It makes me a little ashamed to look them in the eye.

I've seen worse. Several cheap book reprinters (the ones that spring to mind are Kessinger and Nabu, but there are others) seem to use screen shots of scans of books and print those. When one is dealing with, for instance, a book on early typography, where the length of a serif can be all that tells you whether this is Printer A's Textura 95 or Printer B's Textura 95, that renders the book completely useless....

In a sense, that's again the issue of editing. POD and e-books both tempt people to shoddy work. There is also the issue that POD can be pretty low resolution (a lot of them are 300 dpi, which will eventually cause people's eyes to suffer even if the book was typeset, not scanned).

Still -- if your alternative is the POD or shifting to another textbook, which would you do? Or, if it's a case of POD or not getting published, which would you take? Plenty of authors will accept POD if it gets them in print. :-)

Way back in the second post of the first thread
https://www.librarything.com/topic/333142#7536423
gilroy asked Tim:
"Is the genre page in the catalog supposed to change based on the selected collection?"

I don't think that question has ever been answered, and it seems really close to my own issue with this new feature: when I'm in my catalog and click the drop-down box for "Genre," it shows me the number of each Genre that I have in my LT catalog for All Collections. If I'm looking at the Collection called "Your library" as a list, when I click the Genre box, I only want to see the number of items in each Genre for the Collection "Your library."

Clicking that drop-down and selecting Tags, Authors, Series, Media, and Mevil Decimal, the resulting page shows me the info for only the Collection I'm looking at. It would only make sense, and be consistent, for the Genre results to work the same way.

Yes, I'd like some kind of Social Science genre added, and yes, I read the discussion about where Mathematics should fit with a lot of interest even though I don't have any math books. But my main issue is that the page isn't working the same way as the other options in that same drop-down box.

End rant. :-)

Technology genre, please? Automotive manuals don't go in Science and Nature. I guess they can go in Non-fiction, but I find that too general.

I would have put manuals in reference. Maybe they aren't that kind of manual?

>84 al.vick: It's my husband's collection of how to build an engine books, bicycle repair books, woodworking books, ham radio books: examples: the A.A.R.L. Antenna book, Anatomy of the Works Minis, Austin Morris 1800 Workshop manual, etc. He has a lot of them, and they're not all aimed at amateurs.

408 Old file
Tim

in all humility
1st) I read almost all of the messages (here and there).
Thank you for this new field. It is an undeniable plus and it could be very useful

2nd) Travel :
tourism and discovery
or =Tourism and exploration
??

See here to suggestion (it's in french but with translator, it's easyer) https://www.cnrtl.fr/proxemie/voyage

I could say a lot about the classification by genre because for many, many years if I am inspired by academic and / or official rankings (for example: National Libraries, Dewey, ...), I have established my own genres (

>85 tardis: As a techincal writer, I make a distinction between user guides and reference manuals. The first type contains instructions on how to operate something, the second one contains data about it. Many manuals are of course a mixture, but often a guide is geared towards one or the other.

Since the set of genres and their definitions seems to have stabilized (based on the lack of any staff comments to the contrary), can I re-raise the issue of search? I know I can navigate via the "Genres" button, or click on one in the column, but that's not adequate. To be fully usable, the field needs to be fully exposed to search, so that we can:

* Find books that are in two or more genres - do I have anything in both Fiction and Nonfiction, which is almost certainly an error?

* Find books that are NOT in a particular genre

* Find books that are in a particular genre and meet some other criteria - do I have any books in Fantasy genre that I have not tagged fantasy? Or vice versa?

And yes, I know that I can do at least the latter via URL hacking. That's hardly user-friendly.

>88 lorax:
Your list of genres includes "No Genre" (now the first item).

I do agree with the general point -- Genres should be included in the catalogue search.

This is just "Hmmm" comment: I went to my list of genres and found 21 "romances."

This is correct, because every book I have that is tagged with that genre is a medieval romance.

BUT I have 98 books which I've tagged medieval romances. So the genre tool failed to find three-fourths of my medieval romances.

And medieval romances have very little to do with modern "romance novels."

So either I should have no romances (most readers of romances would stay that I have none) or I should have about 98. :-)

A handful of examples of books of medieval romance that didn't get tagged:
Medieval Romances (er, um, there's a pretty good hint in that title :-)
Le Morte d'Arthur (not listed as a romance, but it is listed as a fantasy!)
Sir Gawain : eleven romances and tales
Middle English verse romances

Things that did get tagged:
Arthurian Romances
Six Middle English romances
Ywain and Gawain ; Sir Percyvell of Gales ; The Anturs of Arther (tagged with low confidence, but it's by the same editor as the preceding!)

I repeat, there is no magic answer about whether these are or are not romances, since people won't agree on the definition of "romance," but they should all be one or the other.

>90 waltzmn: It's very obvious that Tim intends "Romance" to stand for books with romantic love as a major motif. So, excepting books like Tristan and Iseult, you should have none.

>91 anglemark:

It's very obvious that Tim intends "Romance" to stand for books with romantic love as a major motif. So, excepting books like Tristan and Iseult, you should have none.

And I can of course turn the genre identifier off, but it's a glitch in the genre identification. Though it's probably a tricky matter, algorithmically. One could theoretically go by publication date, but of course all the editions are modern -- and the LibraryThing database doesn't seem to have any way to properly record the actual date of writing.

I have been absent from this discussion for a while, while I worked on an adjacent problem.

I have now released a first draft of a "big" non-fiction, entitled "Big Nonfiction (Testing)." It's intended to be everything non-fiction.

It's still in progress. It's a bit of a bear to change--it's 5m books!

Tim

So if "Big Nonfiction" is meant to be everything non-fiction, what is "Non-fiction" for? Just stuff that doesn't have a more specific genre?

Petroglyph (#89):

Your list of genres includes "No Genre" (now the first item)

Yes, I know, and I've used it extensively. It has no bearing on any of my requests.

Oh, I see. My second point was "find books that are not in a particular genre", not "find books that are not in any genre." This is most useful in conjunction with my third point - I may want to find books I have tagged "science fiction" that are not in the "Science Fiction" genre, for instance.

>94 lorax:

So if "Big Nonfiction" is meant to be everything non-fiction, what is "Non-fiction" for? Just stuff that doesn't have a more specific genre?

Nonfiction is the old one. I think we kill it once this is ready for prime time; it's not ready for prime time now.

This leaves fiction and literature vs. general fiction. I'm undecided on that.

>95 lorax:

I have logic for genre overlaps and exclusions, but I can't push it live now, because there's a lot of other things that need to go out with it.

re: Big Nonfiction

I would not expect that to include all non-fiction. Perhaps I'm too literal, but I'd see that and think "oh, that's for my book with high page counts".

You could also see it as "that's for Big Important Nonfiction, not for fluff or microhistories".

>97 lilithcat: I would be very tempted to use it only for my coffee table books and atlases that don't fit on the main shelf! (A lot of libraries actually do have a separate section for nonfiction above a certain shelf height, see my "Folio" tag....)

>97 lilithcat: Snort.

It's a placeholder name.

>93 timspalding:

Please tell me if this is somewhere on your radar:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/333532#7554197

I know it's not a big thing but I hate the inconsistency--that the drop-down box works one way for five of the selections, and a different way if you select "Genre."

Thank you.

>93 timspalding: Seems to work less than ideal on the non-English sites:

https://www.librarything.fr/genre/62/Big-Nonfiction-Testing
https://se.librarything.com/genre/62/Big-Nonfiction-Testing

So, "big nonfiction" has picked up most of my recorded music (mostly CDs) and at least some of my "graphic novels and comics" -
https://www.librarything.com/work/415775/book/540235
https://www.librarything.com/work/3633238/book/59202873 (it got all of this series)
https://www.librarything.com/work/389384/book/19391623 (this whole series, too)

And this one, which is ALSO in "Fiction and Literature"
https://www.librarything.com/work/3480711/book/450430

Big non-fiction did NOT pick up a few things it should have, e.g.
https://www.librarything.com/work/1287354/book/5044483
https://www.librarything.com/work/571076/book/699322
https://www.librarything.com/work/6451/book/9843223

Some of the stuff I had in "nonfiction" didn't get pulled into Big Non-fiction: e.g.
https://www.librarything.com/work/13353042/book/594255

Also didn't get 100% of my sound recordings, but I can't see why it picked up some and not others. I mean, it shouldn't have included any of them.

>103 tardis: Newspaper comics are going to be tricky because, for some reason, even libraries that have a separate comics section still shelve the collections of newspaper strips and magazine cartoons in nonfiction. Except the ones they don't.

“Big non-fiction” has reduced my “no genre” by half, but both In cold blood and Also sprach Zarathustra still seem to be “no genre”, even though they are both pretty mainstream works — is that because people have been changing them manually away from both fiction and non-fiction?

It would be really nice to be able to see at a glance which of my books are in "Big Non-Fiction" and not "Non-fiction" without going through all the 1000+ in "Big Non-fiction". Which is to say that promised "logic for genre overlaps and exclusions" sure would be nice. Or at least including "genre" in the export so I can do the checks on my end.

Most of what is still "No Genre" is humor. Hint, hint.

...I still have ~1300/20% of My Library in "No Genre". Are other people seeing that number drop more?

It would be really nice to either have a "does not apply" option or at least a "not a book" exclusion for things that have media type set to something other than book/ebook/audiobook (though that still wouldn't catch blank books.)

ETA: Wait, belay that, turning on "Big Nonfiction" dropped it to about half that. And half of what's left are in my "Has an ISBN/Belongs in a library but is not a book" collection...

>102 anglemark: Sorry about that. Fixed.

>108 lorax: My "No Genre" includes essays, advice, psychology, and humor.

ETA: One of Emily Toth's books is in nonfiction and one is in No genre... they are extremely similar to each other, so why did one get sucked into a genre and one didn't?

A lot of my non-genre are vocal scores and libretti

Some libretti picked up the genre of "fiction".

Some but not all vocal scores have picked up "big nonfiction"
eg
https://www.librarything.com/work/2109959/book/112665998
https://www.librarything.com/work/9573826/book/118085402
https://www.librarything.com/work/7522711/book/112619593

A "music" genre, which could be broad enough to include scores and libretti as well as things like composer biogs and musical theory would be helpful

Half of what's left for me is sports, so I'm still waiting for the Sports & Leisure category that was discussed

Probleme. What happens ?
the genres "Big non fiction (Testing)" AND "Non fiction" are not offered in the drop-down lists in French version of librarything. They are set in my preferences

>114 JMK2020: I'm seeing this on .com, too.

To reproduce, for devs:
1. Go to "Your books" and make sure you have the "Genre" field on one of your display Styles. (If it's not there, add it from your Settings, under the Classification section of fields: https://www.librarything.com/settings/styles.)
2. View the display Style that has the "Genre" field.
3. Double-click to edit the Genre field for any item in your library. The "Edit Genres" lightbox will show up.

Bug: The "Big non fiction (Testing)" and "Non fiction" genres are not showing in the list of options when editing the "Genre" field.

>115 kristilabrie:
Neither Fiction, Nonfiction, General Fiction or General nonfiction show up for me (the latter two cover all of my book works with out genre).

Also all, bar a handful, of my poetry shows up as fiction (which it isn't) and a decent amount of it is also marked non-fiction.

On the plus side I can definitely start making 'Category Mistake' jokes now.

Are we ever getting that social sciences genre?

>115 kristilabrie:

I noticed late yesterday that "Big Non fiction" had appeared in my catalog view for several novels, and then when I double clicked to edit it, as you're reporting here, it wasn't there, so I couldn't remove it or flag it. When I clicked over to the work page to confirm that it was appearing there as well as my catalog--it was--I again tried to edit the genres, and same thing: "Big Nonfiction" was assigned to the book, but not in the "edit Genres" box.

Today, it's still there, I think, except it's only called "Nonfiction." One book page example: https://www.librarything.com/work/24468790/201744786

As tallpaul reports in >116 tallpaul: the "edit genre" lightbox appears to be missing "Fiction," "General Fiction," "Nonfiction," and "General Nonfiction."

This brings me to a related question:
Has the standalone "Nonfiction" genre replaced the "Big Nonfiction" genre category?

The "Fiction and Literature" genre is also gone, apparently replaced by a standalone "Fiction" -- which is not the same as "Fiction and Literature." That would explain why tallpaul's "Poetry" also has this standalone "Fiction" genre, if it *used to be* "Fiction and Literature." When the "edit genre" mess is fixed, I hope "Fiction and Literature" will be back.

If I sort on popularity, all the top 200 or so entries in my list for “nonfiction” are currently all novels, (starting with Harry Potter), which are also tagged “fiction”. Looks as though noise is being amplified somewhere in the algorithm.

>115 kristilabrie:
It was and it' OK
https://www.librarything.fr/catalog/JMK2020

I noted the bug to understand
Wait and see
;-)

>116 tallpaul: Hmm, now I'm wondering if this is a "feature" and not a "bug", being that the higher levels of genres are all missing. Maybe we're supposed to be selecting more specific genres, with our books getting auto-dumped into the bigger buckets. Going to check on that.

>120 thorold: My Nonfiction list is showing (less popular) novels and other fiction books, too. Examples: Stone and Steel by Eboni Dunbar, Mother of Souls by Heather Rose Jones, and old comic compilations.

I'm aware of some issues with fiction and nonfiction. We are in something of a weird spot right now—about to release a MAJOR feature. The feature has tendrils in genres, so it's tricky to work on genres alone.

Updates soon.

I'm currently regenerating all the data after some rather bad data movement. It will take 24h.

Tim

Thanks for the update!

>125 timspalding:
Good to know

>119 HeathMochaFrost: I haven't checked in here for a while, but when I saw the "Big Nonfiction" add, I wanted to take a look. I'm not seeing it.

I see "Nonfiction" and "General Nonfiction", but no "Big Nonfiction".

I also see "Fiction" and "General Fiction", but also no "Fiction and Literature".

ETA: Maybe this has to do with >124 timspalding: and >125 timspalding:.

Okay, recalculation has finished.

"Big fiction" has now become "fiction"
"Fiction" has now become "general fiction."
"Big nonfiction" has become "nonfiction"
"Nonfiction" has become "general nonfiction"

I believe I'm going to get rid of "general nonfiction." I can see a place for "non-genre fiction."

Also, maybe "Fiction" needs to be "Fiction and Literature" again, because it does include plays, poetry, etc.

The overall goal here is to have two supergenres--fiction and non-fiction. These will be visually separated, with another division between the genres and the age-related genres. This is all in the works in development.

>129 timspalding: I hope at some point there will be a table or chart explaining the *LibraryThing* definitions for these genres. Ideally it would be on the genres page in my catalog or linked to from there. It's just not realistic to expect that people will instantly intuit what the subtleties are, as evidenced in this very thread.

>129 timspalding:

I'm confused.

What the heck is the difference between "fiction" and "general fiction", and between "non-fiction" and "general non-fiction"?

>129 timspalding: The supergenres seem to be working, there's not much obvious overlap between "fiction" and "nonfiction" now.

I've only got two books with large numbers of copies that are still coming up as "no genre": Also sprach Zarathustra and In cold blood. Both are open to debate as to where they fall on fiction/nonfiction.

>129 timspalding:

The overall goal here is to have two supergenres--fiction and non-fiction. These will be visually separated, with another division between the genres and the age-related genres. This is all in the works in development.

Let me be among the first to cheer this broad classification. For me at least, this will be very useful, because of all the books I encounter which are blurbed as if they were non-fiction but which are in fact fiction and thus useless as references.

But I'd like to humbly suggest that there needs to be a third super-classification, "Other" (or some such). I know, we already went at this topic, but there are some works for which neither broad classification works, and where I for one wouldn't know how to file the book. Examples:

* Music, in the form of songbooks or sheet music. Is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony fiction or non-fiction? What about Woody Guthrie's This Land Is Your Land?

* Religious works. This would save you the issue of whether the Qur'an or the Biblical books of Esther and Jonah are fiction or not.

* Mythology and folklore. Is the Theogony fiction or non-fiction? It is not true but was written by someone who believed it true.

* Art collections.

I'm sure there are others.

For the third (fourth? nth?) time: Should we flag genre works that are classified as General fiction? Please reply to this!

>133 waltzmn: Personally, I don't think it necessary for works to belong to a supergenre if they fit into a genre. Out of those examples, music and mythology and folklore needs one. If Art & Design becomes Arts & Design, music can fit there if it doesn't get its own genre. Hopefully, we'll get Society & Culture eventually, so mythology and folklore would fit there.

Also, to me the fiction/non-fiction division is more about the type of read than nuances of whether we consider topic factual or not. I put all of my Buddhism and mythology books into non-fiction collection because we read non-fiction to know something about its topic, whether it's factual or not, wheres we read fiction to immerse ourselves into a story, even though those sometimes contain factually correct information.

>134 anglemark: Ditto for General Non-Fiction. Should we flag when e. g. history books are also assigned to general non-fiction. To me, it sort of defeats the purpose of this general genre if it is going to include books clearly in some other. Is it useful for Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution to have general-non-fiction genre on top of history? Do we flag it?

>135 SandraArdnas:

Personally, I don't think it necessary for works to belong to a supergenre if they fit into a genre. Out of those examples, music and mythology and folklore needs one. If Art & Design becomes Arts & Design, music can fit there if it doesn't get its own genre. Hopefully, we'll get Society & Culture eventually, so mythology and folklore would fit there.

I'd be happy with this, as long as it's understood that not everything gets a supergenre. If everything is forced to be either fiction or non-fiction, then it gets murky. :-) Even though I agree with your "sense" of where mythology fits in.

Also, I proposed Mythology and Folklore a long time ago, along with Music (I think I was the first to propose the former although not the latter; I'm too lazy to check :-). Music was deemed worth of consideration, but Mythology and Folklore went nowhere.

>136 waltzmn: I'm not holding my breath for a separate mythology and folklore genre, though my own library could definitely use it

>129 timspalding: Also, maybe "Fiction" needs to be "Fiction and Literature" again, because it does include plays, poetry, etc.

YES, PLEASE!!! And thank you! :-)

I still want a "technology" genre! Please?

And something like Sports & Leisure

>140 jjwilson61: Definitely! I've just removed a bunch of RPG books from the Home & Garden genre, flagging them as egregiously wrong. The reason? the RPG in question was Feng Shui, 1st and 2nd editions. Nothing to do with the harmonious living concept - unless you're set dressing for a Hong Kong action movie...

>132 thorold: I've only got two books with large numbers of copies that are still coming up as "no genre": Also sprach Zarathustra and In cold blood. Both are open to debate as to where they fall on fiction/nonfiction.

Yeah, tricky.

For the third (fourth? nth?) time: Should we flag genre works that are classified as General fiction? Please reply to this!

No, let me see what I can do to reduce it somewhat. It's not going to be a genre-free zone, but the goal is to have "genre" works with crossover appeal.

Feng Shui, 1st and 2nd editions

Ugh. I had no idea that existed.

"Fiction and Literature" is back.

>142 timspalding: Feng Shui, 1st and 2nd editions

Ugh. I had no idea that existed.

GRIN It's a fun game if you're into Hong Kong cinema.

The first draft of Technology is up. It's not a default genre, so you'll have to add it at https://www.librarything.com/settings/genres . I'm interested what people find wrong with it. I've flagged a few of my own books, and will look into yours and mine tomorrow.

See also https://www.librarything.com/genre/63/Technology

>145 timspalding: "Technology" picked up 33 of my books — I flagged two, both maths books, but the rest seemed correct. I had a quick trawl through my "no genre" bucket and manually added another eighty or so it didn't pick up, mostly things with low numbers of copies. There are probably more hiding under other genres.

Most of what I've got left in "no genre" is now maps and guides that could go into travel, but that can wait until you enable Power Edit.

>145 timspalding: I expected to see just my computer books but I also see a lot of biographies of scientists or technologists, like The Wright Brothers. While not egregiously wrong I don't believe the histories and biographies belong in the technology category.

Re: Technology -

The literate person's guide to naming a cat!?!

>147 jjwilson61:

I expected to see just my computer books but I also see a lot of biographies of scientists or technologists, like The Wright Brothers. While not egregiously wrong I don't believe the histories and biographies belong in the technology category.

I can't really speak about computer books -- I have a fair number of them but don't catalog them (a fifteen year old JavaScript book is hardly relevant today, and a forty year old Pascal book is even less so!). But I certainly got some very strange ones in technology:

Atlas of Michigan
Bright Earth (this is about materials for painting, so I suppose it's technology, but it feels very strange. Similarly:)
The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting
An Atlas of English Dialects
Iterative Solution of Large Linear Systems
Voyager's Grand Tour
Applied Boolean Algebra
The Limits to Growth
Atlas of American History
Small is Beautiful (perhaps defensible, but not where I'd put it)
Discrete Mathematics
Mathematical Methods in the physical sciences
Numerical Analysis (I can't put a touchstone for this one because I can't identify which of the dozens of books with this title is the right one -- apparently the newer editions have changed authors. Suffice it to say that it's a text for junior or senior math majors)

It also hit most of my code and cipher books.

Note that this isn't even a tenth of my mathematics books, and it's not all my atlases, either. Apart from the inconsistency of listing only some of them, I don't think atlases should go in "technology." I could perhaps understand listing all mathematics books (though I'd disagree), but I truly don't see anything that would put this handful in technology but ignore the rest.

>149 waltzmn: I think anything "atlas" should be better placed in reference (unless we're talking about the mythological person, of course)

So happy for Technology! I looked at what it picked up initially - the only one I consider completely wrong is https://www.librarything.com/work/663245/book/538782 (Herbs by Lathrop - correct touchstone isn't coming up)

It did not pick up a lot of the metal-bashing stuff like Automobile sheet metal repair,
Design and Behaviour of the Racing Car, The Bicycle Wheel, and quite a few others. I don't mind changing them myself, though.

>150 Nicole_VanK:

I think anything "atlas" should be better placed in reference (unless we're talking about the mythological person, of course)

Or the Atlas mountains....

Note that I didn't put those atlases in "Technology"; I found them there. They were one of two classes of oddities in my "Technology" list, the math books being the other. I certainly agree that "Reference" is a logical plae.

>149 waltzmn: >148 lilithcat:

Excellent. Thanks. A number of inappropriate BICs and BISACs (two bookseller systems) were being used. This helped me track them down; all are now good.

FWIW, The literate person's guide to naming a cat has a general science BISAC. Which makes no sense, but is why it's still part of the science genre.

Okay, first draft of a "sports" genre is up. It needs more work.

>154 timspalding: Just Sports? Not Sports & Leisure or Sports & Games? That was surprisingly narrow.

Are we ever getting that social sciences (or whatever Tim decided to rename it) genre that we were told we'd be getting?

>154 timspalding: I understand why all martial arts books were grabbed by Sports and that someone will argue they all belong there, but some books look to me like examples of what shouldn't have the label.

• Bruce Lee's Fighting Method: Self-Defense Techniques by Bruce Lee
• Bo: Karate Weapon of Self-Defense by Fumio Demura

• The Book of Five Rings: The Classic Text of Samurai Sword Strategy by Miyamoto Musashi
• Weapons & Fighting Techniques of the Samurai Warrior 1200-1877 AD by Thomas D. Conlan

I realized, perusing this thread last night (on my phone, so I didn't comment at the time) that I apparently have no idea when to flag wrong genres.

I thought this was only intended for, as the text says, truly egregious mistakes. Erotica in "Children's", or a dictionary in "Science Fiction". And, influenced in no small part by the use of flags elsewhere on LT, where guidance is to be very, very, VERY careful with their use and that incorrect use is a TOS violation, I have thus steered clear of using it here. And now I'm seeing people cheerfully flagging left and right for minor errors where I've just been clearing the label - a SF book in general fiction, or vice versa. Or even things that seem correct to me - a book in History and Non-fiction. If "This looks wrong to me" is in fact a flaggable issue, here, then why does the "flag" versus "remove the label from my own view" distinction even exist?

>159 lorax: Same here, I thought flagging was for "concerningly wrong", not just incorrect

To me genres are interesting for fiction, but for non-fiction I think the library of congress classification does a better job.

Flagging is for when something is truly wrong. Hot billionaire erotica in "Children's" would be wrong, but so would anything else that everyone would agree is off—cooking, gardening, etc. When you think something doesn't belong, but other reasonable people would disagree, just mark it as wrong. For example, I would not mark Harry Potter as "fantasy," and I wouldn't put Star Wars in "science fiction," but others do. But we can all agree they're not cooking, sports, technology, picture books, etc.

>154 timspalding: timspalding: Just Sports? Not Sports & Leisure or Sports & Games? That was surprisingly narrow.

I'm of two minds. It currently including hiking, which is more "leisure" than "sport." I am going to add hunting and shooting today, which are similar. But I don't think it makes sense to add board games, video game walkthroughs, etc.

Here's one way I'm thinking about it. Sports doesn't go with games because there isn't much in the way of transitional material--few books that are halfway between sports and game playing, either in content or in how people classify them. (People sometimes call chess a "sport," but that's about it.) Such transitional books exist abundantly for my other lumping choices. So there's a large, disputed gray area between biography and memoir, graphic novels and comics, home and garden, religion and spirituality, science and nature, suspense and thriller.

Are we ever getting that social sciences (or whatever Tim decided to rename it) genre that we were told we'd be getting?

I did one genre two nights ago and one genre last night. They take several hours, and twice or three times that fixing bugs. So give it a little time.

I'm still very uncertain how to handle social sciences.

Yeah, but upthread people are saying they're flagging History for being in Nonfiction. That....doesn't seem egregious, to me?

Yeah, but upthread people are saying they're flagging History for being in Nonfiction. That....doesn't seem egregious, to me?

Yes, I wouldn't agree with that.

>162 timspalding:

Flagging is for when something is truly wrong.

When you think something doesn't belong, but other reasonable people would disagree, just mark it as wrong.

I think I'm missing something. I don't see a way to mark something as "wrong", other than by flagging it.

Another reason I kept it sports (and leisure): There are a lot of books. It's currently at 98k.

>166 lilithcat: Same way you add Genres - click on a non-selected one, it gets selected; click a selected one, it gets deselected. Then Save the whole thing.

>168 AnnieMod:

But that just de-selects them for me, right? It doesn’t let anyone else know they’re wrong, doesn’t mark them in any way.

>169 lilithcat: Nope... it is global. That's why you can do that even if you do not own the book.

>163 timspalding: Please rename it from “sports”, if hiking and cycle-touring are going to stay, otherwise you will be getting a lot of flags and confusion. A walk in the woods and Dervla Murphy’s Full tilt are about as far from the conventional idea of “sport” as you can get…

I didn’t see anything egregious apart from Bradford Corporation Tramways, which I felt safe in flagging. But it only picked up a small proportion of my hiking books.

>163 timspalding:

I thought you are going for easily recognizable genres that you'd see in a small bookstore. I think Sports & Leisure fits that definition and most Americans at least would intuitively know that it includes both baseball and board games.

ETA: And hiking

>170 AnnieMod: That seems way more drastic than flagging it since it changes it for everyone. If it's not egregiously wrong do we want people just changing the genre?

>173 jjwilson61: That's what the instruction say though:
"Click to select or deselect genres. Flag genres that are egregiously wrong."

It is like CK and Series and so on - you change if for everyone. My understanding is that flagging helps the algorithm and/or Tim.

The "bookstore-style genre" description hasn't made sense to me since the first week of the GenreThing rollout. What type of bookstore? I think we're all imagining different styles. The disagreement is why I stopped flagging and deselecting anything that could conceivably look correct to someone (such as cooking and gardening books in the Children's genre).

Maybe links to BIC or BISAC classifications would help establish what should be expected.

Some of my comics ended up in nonfiction and arts & design, so I flagged those genres and selected graphic novels & comics. When I look at those works when I'm logged in to this account they only show the genre I selected, but they only show nonfiction and arts & design if I'm logged in with my other account. Shouldn't a genre that's been flagged not show? Is there some threshold, like with spam flagging?

example: https://www.librarything.com/work/22172327

>175 aspirit: Maybe not. The list isn't comparable to what's currently in GenreThing....

BISAC

Antiques & Collectibles
Architecture
Art
Bibles
Biography & Autobiography
Body, Mind & Spirit
Business & Economics
Comics & Graphic Novels
Computers
Cooking
Crafts & Hobbies
Design
Drama
Education
Family & Relationships
Fiction
Foreign Language Study
Games & Activities
Gardening
Health & Fitness
History
House & Home
Humor
Juvenile Fiction
Juvenile Nonfiction
Language Arts & Disciplines
Law
Literary Collections
Literary Criticism
Mathematics
Medical
Music
Nature
Performing Arts
Pets
Philosophy
Photography
Poetry
Political Science
Psychology
Reference
Religion
Science
Self-help
Social Science
Sports & Recreation
Study Aids
Technology & Engineering
Transportation
Travel
True Crime
Young Adult Fiction
Young Adult Nonfiction

Source: https://bisg.org/page/bisacedition

vs.

GenreThing

No Genre
Fiction and Literature
General Nonfiction
Nonfiction
Art & Design
Biography & Memoir
Business
Christian Fiction
Fantasy
Food & Cooking
General Fiction
Graphic Novels & Comics
Health & Wellness
Historical fiction
History
Home & Garden
Horror
LGBTQ+
Mystery
Poetry
Reference
Religion & Spirituality
Romance
Science & Nature
Science Fiction
Sports
Suspense & Thriller
Technology
Travel
Children's Books
Picture Books
Kids
Tween
Teen
Young Adult
Recent Fiction
Recent Nonfiction

Source: https://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?specialpage=genre

>170 AnnieMod: and >176 amanda4242: I thought Tim said flags only change what you see in your own account until he does something on his side to approve the removal.

ETA: It's in the first post: "Changes you make affect your account instantly. They will also be analyzed to change genres for everyone as well. The changing screen also gives you an option to 'flag' a genre assignment." (Original source: https://www.librarything.com/topic/333142#7536307)

>164 lorax: I think you're referring to my comment. It was a question. I asked because flagging them might help diagnose issues, whereas just removing them for myself I assume is not that noticeable for developers. I haven't flagged them (or removed the genre for myself as yet). Several of us ask for feedback on such cases precisely because we want to know whether flagging is desirable in such cases or not.

>178 aspirit: Then why can I change them on books I do not have? :)

I am staying away from the whole GenreThing outside of my library for now and even there, I am only clearing the really bad ones.

Flagged 7 RPG books that got the Sports genre.

Apart from GURPS Martial Arts (which is kind of understandable), the others were all scenarios and source books from Night's Black Agents.

>180 AnnieMod: No idea. All of this is confusing.

The classifications are improving, though. That's for my books, at least.

The discussion here must be helping.

It looks like all my copies of Shakespeare's plays have been put in the Poetry genre. I can see the argument for this, but it doesn't feel right to me.

>184 cpg: You are, of course right, and those assignments are wrong. Verse and poetry are not synonyms.

>185 anglemark:

FWIW, I wouldn't agree with that. Shakespeare's plays are poetry as far as I'm concerned. Obviously this is something people can disagree on, though.

>145 timspalding: Thank you. My computer programming books really needed a home. And it looks like it correctly picked up various books from my collection focussed on other technologies, and/or on their history.

(That said, I haven't looked for surprising omissions. But I'm happy not to see any obviously wrong inclusions, at least on a quick scan of my collection.)

>178 aspirit: In that case I'll go ahead and remove all the books that I don't think are really Mysteries from the Mystery genre and the same for Horror.

At present additions, removals and flags only affects your own book-genre assignments; they do not do anything to the larger system. The exception is that I *look* at them, especially the flagging to spot problems with the system; for that they are very helpful indeed.

>189 timspalding: So why then you can change them on books you do not own? Where is this saved (as there is no book on your account for it)?

So why then you can change them on books you do not own? Where is this saved (as there is no book on your account for it)?

Because I will be using this data. I'm just not using it now, except by personal inspection.

I have added to genres as an experiment for myself. I'd have hid them, but it'd be extra work, and you may be interested.

They are;
Sports and Leisure -- Hunting and Fishing
https://www.librarything.com/genre/65/Sports-and-Leisure-Hunting-and-Fishing

Sports and Leisure -- Hunting and Fishing -- Falconry
https://www.librarything.com/genre/66/Sports-and-Leisure-Hunting-and-Fishing-Fal...

They are my attempt to use the logic I've built for making these and extending it to smaller genres. In some cases, I may make the smaller genres and roll them "up" into the larger one. It may be easier for me to make "Hunting and Fishing" and then roll it into "Sports and leisure" rather than trying to make the entirety of Sports and Leisure.

Anyway, I'm playing with them. Don't rely on them staying.

>191 timspalding: Ah, I see. Thanks for the clarification! :)

Once again, this GenreThing project has allowed me to see my book collection with new eyes. When I bought it, I wouldn't have guessed that The Deepening Complexity of Crop Circles would be a Home & Garden book.

>192 timspalding: The latter category worked perfectly in my catalogue - the one book I would expect to see in that genre did indeed appear: The Art of Falconry.

I have some books in the Business genre that are about the economy and it makes sense to me for those subjects to be together. Could you change the name to Business & Economy?

>194 cpg: Hahaha!

Does a biography of Marco Polo belong in the Travel genre too? What about a biography of Einstein? Would you say if a person is known for travel then their biography would also go into Travel? What about Columbus and Cortez? Neil Armstrong?

Or would you not expect to find biographies in the Travel section of a bookstore at all?

>194 cpg: LOL!

>198 jjwilson61: No, I wouldn't expect to find biographies in the Travel section of a bookstore. But maybe a biography of Newton in the Science section.

That might say something about my local bookstores :-)

>192 timspalding: Hunting and Fishing mostly looks good but it's pulling in general anthropology case studies about "hunter-gatherer" cultures and making me go "....I guess." I suspect it's just pulling on the word "hunter" in the subtitles, though, since it's not pulling in other books about cultures that have hunting as a major element, and that's kind of problematic. It's also pulling in a couple books about Native American crafts and artifacts - I assume because of the bows? - but not any of my other books on weaponry/artifacts/crafts in general.

I like the idea of building the big genres out of small ones, even if the small ones stay hidden forever!

Are books about tv shows, like Dr. Who, in the Art or Leisure genre?

>192 timspalding: >200 melannen: The one book “sports and leisure - hunting and fishing” picks up for me is about the history of commercial fishing communities on the Zuiderzee — the “leisure” bit seems to have got lost. It doesn’t pick up any “sporting” fiction, though (Surtees, John Buchan, etc.).

thorold (#202):

The one book “sports and leisure - hunting and fishing” picks up for me is about the history of commercial fishing communities on the Zuiderzee — the “leisure” bit seems to have got lost.

Dewey's distinction between commercial fishing (in 639) and recreational fishing (in 799) may be useful in making that distinction.

The wider Sports and Leisure has picked up 6 from my RPG collection - of over 1200 works...

I'm not convinced that Food for Free counts as Sports and Leisure, being focussed on foraging and hence more like a field guide cum cookery book.

>202 thorold: A lot of my books in that category actually don't fit a distinction there, come to think of it, so I didn't even think about that! - with the way my library trends it's catching a lot of things like The Foxfire Book or books on Native American weapons that are probably mostly read by people today for hobby reasons but the books are from people doing it to live.

But I think a lot of hunting in particular it would be hard to make that split - people in hunting areas around here who hunt for sport and people who hunt because that's the only way they can afford meat aren't really well separated.

Commercial fishing does seem like a particularly bad fit though! (It didn't catch any of my books about watermen on the Chesapeake, but none of them use the word "fish" in the title.)

I'm loving the GenreThing just because it allows me to make new TBR lists!

The Top 250 Fantasy Books to Read...

The Top 250 Romance Books to Read...

The Top 250 Mystery Books to Read...

And it will change as new books get popular.

I'm hoping for eventually getting more narrow subgenres like paranormal, "billionaire erotica," (You been peeking in my ereader, timspalding?) or cozy mysteries.

>206 Morphidae:. Nice! I'm using it to find books, that are "Genre: science fiction" that I haven't tagged as such. Same with mysteries, etc. I.e. all the edge cases. Lots of fun!

I’ve finally had a look at my books and it generally looks good. A few minor things I don’t quite agree with, but not much “egregious”.

A few things, though:

Under “No genre”, I have four books, two of them poetry collections in Swedish so I’m guessing there isn’t enough data for them to be pulled anywhere (though the author almost exclusively wrote poetry and is very famous for that). One Katitzi i skolan is a children’s book and part of a series - the other books in the series have been pulled into “Fiction & Literature”.
The last one is In Cold Blood, which is a tricky case.

Otherwise, one of my yoga guidebooks is under “Science & Nature” (the other more appropriately under “Health & Wellness”).
Three of my knitting books show up in “Art & Design” (fair enough, there’s a lot of design elements in them), but only one in “Home & Garden”.

Lastly, Fiction and Literature and Sports and Leisure should have ampersands like the other genres do.

I have a lot with no genre, but they are mostly movies. I don't think you are worrying about those.

Movies and music--when we can detect it--have been intentionally excluded. I think we should just make a genre for them and for them alone. Doing genres for them is just impossible--we'd have to make a whole new system, and with much less data.

>210 timspalding:

Movies and music--when we can detect it--have been intentionally excluded. I think we should just make a genre for them and for them alone. Doing genres for them is just impossible--we'd have to make a whole new system, and with much less data.

FWIW, I agree with your logic, and don't think the same genres should be placed on music or movies as on books. I'd be inclined to think you could do a (separate) set of genres for music based on what the record companies say, but I also think people can figure it out for themselves. :-)

I can also think of another, to me even better, reason not to use the same genres for books and movies -- and that is the problem of movies based on books. Movie people being movie people, they can't seem to leave something good alone. So the movie version of a book often changes genre.

An extreme example is Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers. Like it or hate it, it's basically a political work. But the movie versions have mostly existed as shoot-em-up video games. Perhaps the genre "science fiction" applies to both (though not my definition of science fiction :-), but the secondary genres are different.

Or The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien's work is a romance (in the medieval, not the modern, sense). But the movie -- which, as with "Starship Troopers," ignores the politics and sociology and, above all, the ethical theory -- is much more a fantasy adventure.

Even the movie "King David," which tried to pretend it was Biblical history based on 1-2 Samuel, was not good history and certainly made fervent Christians very upset. :-) I doubt anyone would assign the same genre to "King David" as to the Former Prophets. :-)

I'm sure many others could list more examples than I can, since I've pretty well given up on movies after repeated disappointments. :-) The most recent movie version of Great Expectations was simply maddening, e.g. I won't belabor it any more than I already have. :-) But by not having the same genres apply to the two types, you spare a lot of arguments over just how badly Hollywood has messed things up. :-)

An extreme example is Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers. Like it or hate it, it's basically a political work. But the movie versions have mostly existed as shoot-em-up video games. Perhaps the genre "science fiction" applies to both (though not my definition of science fiction :-), but the secondary genres are different.

Hard disagree. Verhoeven's version was absolutely a political work!

>212 timspalding: Agreed. It's political, but in a very different way.

>212 timspalding:

(Re: Starship Troopers movie.) Hard disagree. Verhoeven's version was absolutely a political work!

I will accept this point. I only saw one of the two that were apparently made, and I don't know which one. And it was so flat-out bad that I stopped watching. :-) I had understood the other was also pretty bad, but I can't testify.

Still, I stand by my point: The one I saw was not the same story, or the same (sub-)genre, as Heinlein's book. (Which was thought-provoking even though I disagree with it: The question of how to make one a responsible citizen is certainly with us today!) There are genres that work in books that either don't work in movies or that movie-makers won't make, and that means that a book made into a movie often changes genres.

And that will cause arguments if you try to use the same genre scheme for both.

>210 timspalding: I agree, I came across Avatar in my library yesterday categorized as Children's Books and Picture Books.... Movies and Music would be good here, I think.

From what I remember, the anime series of Starship Troopers I saw a long while back deemphasized the confusing civic duty message, kept the Catch-22 feel, and emphasized moral issues that were kind of sideways passing in the novel (bringing the story closer to Ender's Game except with adults who know they're being manipulated). It's an interesting sequel that showed the writers paid close attention to details of the book. It's also a niche work that wouldn't go into General Fiction, as Heinlein's Starship Troopers has. But so what? The Science Fiction label fits both. We don't expect two related books to have exactly the same genres. Mixing movies and shows into Fiction and Literature, though....

I don't have a preference either way. I just don't understand the argument that videos should be excluded from GenreThing (as it is today) because some are based on books that would go in different genre categories.

>216 aspirit:

I don't have a preference either way. I just don't understand the argument that videos should be excluded from GenreThing (as it is today) because some are based on books that would go in different genre categories.

Note that that's not what I said; I don't object to videos having genres. On that issue, I merely agreed with Tim that the list of genres should be different.

The point about books and movies having different genre categories is secondary: it's to prevent confusion. Some people, if they look at a book in a particular genre, will probably expect the movie to be in the same genre -- and it may not be. A better example than Starship Troopers might be all the King Arthur movies based on Le Morte d'Arthur. Clearly there are genre differences there! If the list of genres for movies is known to be different from the list of genres for books, then people will be less confused when book and movie don't get the same genre.

>217 waltzmn: I mean it's certainly true that there are Arthurian movies loosely based on Le Morte d'Arthur that aren't the same genre as the original! But that applies to books based on it, too - there are "adaptations" of Malory in book form in pretty much any fiction genre you can think of (and a few nonfiction, and all of the neither-one-or-the-other genres.)

I agree with Tim's point but it's more that traditionally movies are divided into different genres than books are. It wouldn't be *factually* wrong to stick an Action movie into the Suspense & Thriller genre, I suppose, nor would it be flagging-level wrong to make an "Action" genre and stick Clive Cussler books in it, but as Tim has said, the point of the genre-level classes is to make broad, well-recognized categories that people can quickly look up - and the established, well-recognized categories are different for books and films. (A more obvious example: "Animated" is a base-level category on all movie sites I know of, and that doesn't belong in a book genre list*. Nor do Disney films belong in "Picture Books".)

*we can argue about pop-up books but I direct you back to the point about putting things in broad established genres where people expect to find them. :P

I was bummed when I realized that adjusting genres in your catalogue only adjusts them for you. It seems like 1) the kind of thing that is work-level information, and 2) the kind of thing that benefits from crowd-sourcing. I don't want to go through all 4,475 books I own to see if their genres make sense, but I would happily work on some, knowing other Thingamabarians are working on others, as we already do with Series and CK. This is usually one of the things that makes LT work so well, and doing it on an individual level seems contrary to the entire spirit of LT.

>219 Stevil2001:

I was bummed when I realized that adjusting genres in your catalogue only adjusts them for you. It seems like 1) the kind of thing that is work-level information, and 2) the kind of thing that benefits from crowd-sourcing. I don't want to go through all 4,475 books I own to see if their genres make sense, but I would happily work on some, knowing other Thingamabarians are working on others, as we already do with Series and CK.

I second this. Possibly it should be one of those things that should be determined by enough votes. If enough people believe (say) that Le Morte d'Arthur is fantasy, it's fantasy, whatever the algorithm said.

This probably does need some sort of weighting system depending on number of people with the book, though. If only one person owns the book, that person's genre is law. :-) But if fifty own it, then you need at least five, or some such number. Based on the log of the number of owners, or some such.

>220 waltzmn:

Possibly it should be one of those things that should be determined by enough votes.

Except that one should be able to change it for oneself, if one disagrees with work-level genre designation.

>221 lilithcat:

Except that one should be able to change it for oneself, if one disagrees with work-level genre designation.

It seems to me that that would be inherent in the system: If we're all voting on the genre, then you have to get to say what you think the genre is. The consensus is the default genre, but you can override locally.

Although, in something with relatively few options, I'm not sure how useful that would be. Is the goal to list all the (say) biographies in your library based on your definition? I've no problem with that; I'm just not sure I would do it.

>222 waltzmn:

Frankly, I don't find the genres particularly useful, period. But it still bothers me to see that a book of mine has an egregiously wrong one assigned.

I agree that we need to start moving personal decisions to the global level. But I need to do it carefully, noting where people disagree.

It's probably been addressed an buried in some thread, but I'm confused about Genre Not Set. I have several books that fall into this category, but when I look at them, the Genre is set. Sometimes in List view in my catalog, the genre bar will have a little bit of blue and sometimes it will be blank, but it is there. What gives?

>225 Bookmarque: Are you talking about Not Set in the Fiction vs. Nonfiction chart? Because that refers to books where neither "Fiction and Literature" nor "Nonfiction" are set on a book.

Yes, that's it. So I'd have to go and select...what? One of the super-genres, or the demi-super-genres (Fic & Lit or NF).

>227 Bookmarque: Select "Fiction and Literature" or "Nonfiction"

Stevil2001 (#219):

I was bummed when I realized that adjusting genres in your catalogue only adjusts them for you.

I had been under the impression, which I now know is incorrect at this time, that adding or removing genres was purely personal, and that flagging affected them globally, which is why the threshold for flagging was "no reasonable person could possibly think this is correct". However the UI was confusing and a lot of people have been flagging for anything they disagree with - removing SF from Fiction, or changing edge cases between science fiction and fantasy, which makes the "this overrides for everyone" less useful.

timspalding: Any chance of a Periodicals genre? I have RPG magazines that are turning up in the Fiction & Literature genre, which is a bit of an uneasy fit for them (given that a small bookstore would not carry them, and they're specialist enough that a large bookstore also likely wouldn't carry them even if they're still available in print editions). I'll need to move them to the Sports & Leisure genre at some point, and it would be useful to have a Periodicals genre as well.

Periodical isn't a genre, anything can come in a periodical form.

>231 Aquila: Meta-genre, then, like fiction or non-fiction. Yes, I know that periodicals can sit in the various genres or in fiction or non-fiction but I just think that if I went into a bookstore looking for a magazine it would be shelved apart from other fiction or non-fiction, if it was a store that carried periodicals in the first place.

It's a funny one - it just doesn't seem right to put a magazine in with books... They don't really fit with Comics & Graphic Novels which is the closest I can see in the list.

>230 Maddz:

Periodicals (or magazines) is a format, not a genre. "Genre" refers to the subject matter, not the binding.

Graphic novel isn't a genre either, but here we are.

>234 reconditereader: Neither are Comics for that matter. In fact, they would mostly fall into the periodicals set with an appropriate genre.

Whoever does the LibraryThing Twitter feed just posted this:

In honor of the coining of the word 'folklore' in a letter published on this day in 1846, August 22nd is World Folklore Day. What sort of folklore do you enjoy reading? Do you have a favorite folktale, or folkloric collection?

So why can't we have a folklore genre? :-p

FWIW, I can't really answer what I "enjoy," because it's too big a part of my life; I enjoy whatever particular research project I'm doing at the time. But if someone wants key references, the reference I personally use most is Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud's A Dictionary of English Folklore. (Disclosure: I correspond regularly with Steve Roud.) The works of Katharine Briggs are a wonderful reference as well. Iona Opie and Peter Opie's Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes has no parallel as a reference for children's folklore.

I'm most interested in musical folklore, and the most important book(s) in the field remains Francis James Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. The works of Malcolm Laws are also indispensable. As a Minnesotan, I treasure Franz Rickaby's Ballads and Songs of the Shanty-Boy. Kenneth Peacock's Songs of the Newfoundland Outports is a terrific collection of material from one of the most musical places in the English-speaking world. And Peter Kennedy's Folksongs of Britain and Ireland has a lot of great texts, although he sometimes combines song that really should not be combined.

I'll stop now. :-)

Well - I just read through both threads - that was fun!
I will wait to check on my books until things settle down, but would second the suggestion somewhere back there that the list of Genres be presented so that the Fiction ones fall under the Fiction & Literature meta-genre, and the Non-fiction ones similarly, instead of being mixed up alphabetically. That might also clarify the confusions about General Fiction and General Nonfiction, as being catchall Genres underneath the top-level classifications.

I hope I got that right :) (see 129 Tim)
https://www.librarything.com/topic/333532#7566538

IMO, I like having the two BIG metagenres, so I can see the balance between them at a glance, instead of having to add up the sub-genres to get the totals. However, a NEITHER or OTHER genre (not the same as "No genre") is also a useful idea.

It would also be helpful if the Age designation was a secondary label, independent of the Fiction/Nonfiction genre (noting the discussion above about Teen vs YA, having them under separate headings would make that clear; ditto fiction vs nonfiction Picture Books, etc.).

I vote for having Music as a distinct genre of printed material.

Can the discussion over Maths and Science and Computers and so forth be reducted to a STEM genre, as that seems well understood these days?

>192 timspalding: "In some cases, I may make the smaller genres and roll them "up" into the larger one."

I was intrigued to see Falconry as a Genre, but mostly because I didn't have any books in that bin; obviously, a situation that must be rectified.

If you do stick with this plan, it might be nice to have the underlying subsets visible by clicking the "rolled up" Genre.
At the moment, I'm attempting to do something like that with my tags, and it would be fun to see how mine compare on a Work level.

>225 Bookmarque: "Sometimes in List view in my catalog, the genre bar will have a little bit of blue and sometimes it will be blank, but it is there. What gives?"

Tim said something way earlier about this being a signifier of "confirmation" or "confidence" or something like that.
I suppose that means he has some feeling of assurance that the Genre in LT really matches the genre of the work.
Is there a meaningful relationship between the length of the blue bar and the degree of confidence that we might be able to relate to in evaluating the information?

>236 waltzmn: Will you move (or copy) your response to a new thread, please? I'm sure other members would like to share their favorites.

>230 Maddz: - 235 FWIW, these kinds of Formats are covered in the Media field, but can always be added as a Tag as well (which is what I do, to make finer distinctions of "paper" and "hardcover" books).

>236 waltzmn: "August 22nd is World Folklore Day"

Huzzah!
I also have been in a quandary about tagging my folklore-legend-myth-etc. books. I dumped them all in fiction eventually, with the appropriate tag, but I appreciate the points you have been making.

>82 HeathMochaFrost: "Clicking that drop-down and selecting Tags, Authors, Series, Media, and Mevil Decimal, the resulting page shows me the info for only the Collection I'm looking at. It would only make sense, and be consistent, for the Genre results to work the same way."

I agree, but I did find out that IF you have a Collection already selected, and THEN click on the listed Genre, you only get the books for that genre in that Collection. Similarly, IF you click on the genre, and THEN select your Collection, same results.
So, two steps right now, but the list is available.

I didn't see any later comments on this topic, if there are any, and that's the way it worked as of my posting.

Incidentally, I was able to locate two books that I hadn't yet assigned to my own Collections for Fiction and Nonfiction using this feature, so I see some real potential here for cleaning up my records!
However, the reason that worked was because "LGBTQ+" includes both F and NF works, as do a couple of other genres, if I remember the discussions correctly.

It might be useful, then, to have another column of genres that most commonly overlap BOTH meta-categories (as opposed to being listed twice), because LT should not privilege either F or NF for those genres (Poetry and Religion were the ones I remember being mentioned).
This could be the same as the OTHER column in my previous comment; NEITHER somehow doesn't seem to fit.

Obviously, the vast majority of genres will not overlap to that degree; however, my tags sometimes include such indicators. For instance, my novels by Dick Francis are tagged "fiction-mystery" as well as "sports-horseracing."
Their meta-genre would clearly be Fiction, and I would select the appropriate NF genre as a secondary classification, because it would be useful to other readers to know that is a major element of his books.

>237 librisissimo: somewhere back there that the list of Genres be presented so that the Fiction ones fall under the Fiction & Literature meta-genre, and the Non-fiction ones similarly, instead of being mixed up alphabetically

Thanks. Yes. Thats's coming soon.

It would also be helpful if the Age designation was a secondary label, independent of the Fiction/Nonfiction genre (noting the discussion above about Teen vs YA, having them under separate headings would make that clear; ditto fiction vs nonfiction Picture Books, etc.).

Yes, coming soon.

Just because Tim & Co. don't have enough things to do already ---
My experience at >243 librisissimo: prompted me to check on the records in the Poetry genre. Of the 149 for All Collections, 88 were in my collection Fiction, and only 1 in my Nonfiction.
Since I also Tag my books as F or NF (and some Others), it occurred to me that being able to see the Tag page for the Genre page for the Collection page would be a really quick way to find the records that were not fully, or not correctly, placed in my Grand Scheme.

However, just by looking at the list, most of the un-Collected books were also un-Tagged, so I used Power Edit to throw in my usual list, with the appropriate tags set for Poetry and Fiction/Nonfiction, the rest to be corrected later. That brought me down to only about 48 records that were Tagged but not Collected, and I was able to find them fairly easily.
There is work to be done still, but that was a lot completed very quickly.
So, Genres was a great help in at least one instance!

>244 timspalding: "Coming soon."

I suspected you might already be working on that, but hadn't seen any explicit mention of it so far. Huzzah!

One more thing occurred to me as I was working on my records:
some of the discussions seem to be generated by the collapsing of genre, subject, format, and age-range (this last one already covered).

For instance, in Fiction, the Genre (mystery; romance) can additionally have a Subject category (horse-racing or medieval monks; contemporary or historical period).

However, in Nonfiction, the list we have been chewing over is really about Subject matter. Genres would actually be something like Scholarly or Academic, Popular, Reference, Instruction Manual, and maybe some others.

IMO, "Music," when referring to a printed score, libretto, or recording is not either a genre or a subject: it is a format, as used in the Media field. Instrumental music is neither F nor NF; it is just Music. The story-line of a song or opera is generally Fictional in nature, and can belong to a Fiction Genre (romance, mystery, even science fiction (Filk songs, anyone?)) and possibly have a Nonfiction Subject (history, politics, horseracing, drinking).

Most people would use the style of the music as the Genre: Classical, Pop, Rock, Blues, Country, Big Band, etc.

And then any and all of these can be targeted to Juveniles (and subranges) or Adults.

Ain't taxonomy grand? ;)

>239 librisissimo: Thanks much. I thought as much, but wanted to understand it better.

"Is there a meaningful relationship between the length of the blue bar and the degree of confidence that we might be able to relate to in evaluating the information?"

I hope this is true and the bars actually mean something.

>244 timspalding:

Having read through most of the discussion, I can't help feeling that the solution could be a genre called Not a Book genre, into which periodicals, DVDs and any other non-books could go. No reason why, say a National Geographic magazine should not be in that genre and also in Science (or whatever it is now). Alternatively, a way of looking at one's genres by media type might satisfy those who get upset by seeing things they don't expect in a bookstore (though I have seen NG magazines in the scondhand booksops in Hay-on-Wye).

I think the dithering over how much data is personal and how much affects global calcs isn't helping. Perhaps we can look at that as a separate issue?

One guarantee - this is LT: we will never all agree ;)

>240 aspirit:

Will you move (or copy) your response to a new thread, please? I'm sure other members would like to share their favorites.

Understand that I made my post as an appeal for a folklore genre. My first statement was:

So why can't we have a folklore genre? :-p

The argument being that if LibraryThing thinks folklore important enough to tweet about, it needs to file somewhere logical in the genre system. It's not fiction. (Many ballads and legends, e.g., are reports of real events.) It's not history. (Many ballads and legends, e.g., are reports of unreal events. :-) Etc.

I realize we can't all have our choices of genres. But I really think that Folklore (and Music) are important and have no other logical homes.

I then posted the rest because, well, if I quoted the tweet, I had to respond. :-) But those who care about the topic probably don't need my advice.

And I'll confess I don't know how to move a post to a different thread.

>249 waltzmn: You can't move a post. aspirit meant "re-post that as a new discussion".

>250 anglemark: Yes, that's what I meant. I'm sorry I wasn't clear.

>249 waltzmn: My request was from being bummed that we didn't have an appropriate place in Talk to respond to the tweet yesterday. I could have started a thread but then that would be missing your answer.

On topic: I agree that folklore needs to be addressed in GenreThing, not because it's already a topic of conversation elsewhere but because books on folklore, which often include nonfiction sections, often don't fit well in the current GenreThing options.

>251 aspirit:

My request was from being bummed that we didn't have an appropriate place in Talk to respond to the tweet yesterday. I could have started a thread but then that would be missing your answer.

I hate starting threads because I don't like pushing ideas on people, but I have followed your suggestion, and posted an expanded version of what I wrote. (Much expanded, for better or worse.)

It's in Book Talk, and the title is "LT Twitter: World Folklore Day."

Apologies to all whom it bores.

I'm going to work on social sciences tonight. My decision is to create a "narrow" social sciences category--minus history, especially, since we have such a category. If anyone has any strong opinions on what should be "in" and what "out," let me know.

>253 timspalding: Just a proposal

Anthropology + Ethnology +Sociology (see criminology)
Economic science
Political science
Psychology
Education
Geography
Law
Psychiatry
Religion
History**** (apart as said))

If the social sciences contain the disciplines devoted to the study of the human being, his culture and his economic, political, and social relations with his environment.

That's from :
4 areas (according to some academics):
- Physical science,
- Biological sciences (or natural sciences)
- Social Sciences
- Letters and human sciences

Grouped (reduced) to 2 categories :
- Hard sciences
- Social sciences

nb : the object and the content can be very different according to the people and the countries (education and culture) but the convention on LBth should be able to find a compromise

Okay, I'm going to do this one in pieces, and then roll them up. I may or may not keep the pieces. Here are three:

* Anthropology https://www.librarything.com/genre/69/Anthropology
* Sociology https://www.librarything.com/genre/70/Sociology
* Economics https://www.librarything.com/genre/71/Economics

Anthropology - excellent concurrence with my non-fiction tagged anthropology, and didn't pick up my fiction tagged anthropology, which it shouldn't.

Economics seems a bit more hit and miss - Pride, well it is about a mining strike? and Jaguar only if you say everything is Economics at heart.

>255 timspalding:

I would likt that.

Most of my books that are currently in Economics make sense there. I'm a tad disturbed The American Family: A History in Photographs is in the list, but apparently that's how the book is tagged. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest's inclusion in Economics is leaving me baffled, though.

>258 aspirit:

Probably from the DDC: 333.75 — Social Sciences › Economics › Economics of land & energy › Land, recreational and wilderness areas, energy › Forests & Rainforests

These look mostly good!

- Economics has a bunch of ecology books for some reason. I guess I can kind of see, like, land use, conservation and resources as economics at a stretch, but it's not something I'd expect there, and something like a field guide to wildlife of Chicago seem like a super stretch. (Also, my outright forestry books aren't there, which you'd think they would be if we were going for that sort of thing as econ.)

- Sociology didn't have many that looked like outright wrong, but it was also a huge overlap with Anthropology, and a near-complete overlap if you filter out Anthropology, History, Economics, and LGBT+. It did catch a few pure sociology, so it's probably useful if you're planning to combine with an umbrella, but I don't think it's doing much as a stand-alone.

Anthropology!
-Included all of my archaeology stuff, which is great if you're American, but is super US-centric. I think if you keep this you should at minimum rename as Anthropology & Archaeology because of the US/rest of world split over where Archaeology goes.
-It caught some of my SETI books and some of my Bigfoot books, which is sort of a "...well, I *guess*", but if you're doing that it should catch all of them!
- It caught a very small subset of folklore and a very small subset of religion, which, ditto
- It caught some books on dinosaurs, presumably because people still don't know the difference between Archaeology and Paleontology.
- It caught some general evolutionary biology books, which they do often include some bioanth and some evopsych, so it's a maybe, but a side-eye maybe - that's not where I'd look for those, and it may just be people thinking dinsoaurs are archaeology again.
- It caught Ozy and Milly comics, but only Ozy and Milly comics, which I'm assuming is because I'm one of the only people who owns them, and, uh, my Anthro tag applied to comics and fiction does *not* mean Anthropology, it means the other genre abbreviated Anthro. So that's a thing to keep in mind!

After the publication of the new classification pages, I encountered some inconsistencies which occurred during the translation into the German version of LT.
I'm not fluent in language, but I suspect that at least similar problems arise when translating into other languages.
My point of view refers to the German LT version. It deals mainly with the literature from Germany, Austria and (the German-speaking parts) of Switzerland. Already in these three countries, the concepts are based on cultural and pedagogical reasons (e.g. the schooling age), variously understood.

I see two main problem areas:
The fact that there are greater overlaps in the definition of age-based genres cannot be avoided.

However, I have not been able to find German terms for the English terms of age-based genres.
Assigning Picture Books still seems easy. However, I could not find any, even a few clear features, for the distinction of Children's Books to Kids.
For Tween, I have found a classification of (8) 9 to 12 (13) years, but no corresponding German term.
The definition is similar between Teen and Young Adult. Age data for both denominations range from 13 to 19 years for teens (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teenager) and 12 to 18 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_adult_fiction).

A very good overview is shown in the opposite and in comparison of the following two pages:
https://www.librarything.com/genre
https://www.librarything.de/genre

I would suggest assigning the original classes (.com) annual numbers (e.g. 12-18J). In my opinion, these may even overlap.

A further ambiguity refers to the categories "recent fiction" and "recent nonfiction". In German-speaking areas, the term "New German Literature (-Science)" refers to German literature since the 15th century (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuere_deutsche_Literatur).

It is therefore not clear to me whether the two genres refer to recent literature, which has appeared since a certain period (e.g. 1945, WW2), or since a certain number of years (ie within the last 10 years). Books categorized in this way will fall out of the respective category after the defined deadline and must be removed.

If the .com part of LT could not agree on more precise definitions, this would greatly detract from the usefulness of this very good feature for non-English speaking users of LT.

What do you think about it?

For Tween, I used a Swedish term that translates to "the book-devouring period" ("slukaråldern"). We use it for those years between learning to read and the early teens, typically when attending die Mittelschule, when kids read absolutely everything they encounter. There's no corresponding term in German?

>255 timspalding: Some but not all of my Psychology books are in Sociology. They are not the same thing.

Paleontology and evolution are not anthropology even if some part of the works are about humans. Perhaps this is another case where using tags is unreliable because people sometimes use tags to indicate that a book contains some subject instead of that it's about a subject

Went only through anthropology so far. Mostly it's accurate, but it also pulled all of the Stephen Jay Gould books, of which only one has to do with humans too. The rest were natural history of non-human species, so not anthropology (or any social science for that matter).

All of the mythology books are included in anthropology too. This is generally fine by me given the existing genres, but I suspect it relies too much on people tagging something mythology because history books with slight references to mythology of the area also ended up within anthropology genre.

>262 birder4106:
It' more or less the same thing for french.

So period, or age/date are surely better than some words/expression wich coulb be understood very different between countries/cultures.

Continued from GenreThing, Part 2
(https://www.librarything.de/topic/333532#0263)

> 263
Even my wife, a former elementary school teacher, couldn't think of a good translation for "Tween", "the book-devouring period", "slukaråldern". She would most likely refer to it as "Bookworm Age". Which in turn would correspond to an age of 9-13 years.

> 267
Thanks for the support.

LT-community shows once again that the demands / needs of other languages, countries and cultures are second or even third.

(This is not meant as badly as it might be perceived. I really appreciate LT.)

>255 timspalding: These seem a bit hit and miss. I have a fair amount of books covering anarchism, anti-fascism, labour history, squatting, communes, utopias etc as well as urban studies and it seems to be wrapping these all up and scattering them between these categories (except Anthropology, though that also has a lot overlap).

All of the ones I have checked also appear in history, which is fine, and a decent home, but having Against the Fascist Creep and Utopias in the Puget Sound 1885-1915 also appear as Economics doesn't seem to add much. I suspect references to Capitalism plays a big part in this and that would be hard to do much about.

I'm curious to see what happens as you introduce more categories I have a lot of books on these, and related topics, that are clearly linked ( and shelved together) that have yet to appear under a single genre heading.

Against the Fascist Creep
Utopias on Puget Sound, 1885-1915

A random thought. A while ago someone suggested Society and Culture as a category, which I liked the idea of, rather than using academic subjects, but I couldn't quite put my finger on why. It occurred to me the corollary is with history which is the thing being studied not just the name of the subject. Sociology, Anthropology etc only refer to the academic subject and will likely always prove an awkward fit for non-academic books. Whereas Society and Culture is what they study and will happily hold academic and non-academic books.

>271 tallpaul: I would not expect to find any of these under a Society and Culture heading. They may be studying them but if a category needs an explanation, it is not a good one.

Are social sciences going to eventually be joined into a single genre or is the plan to retain the current separate ones? Either way, politics is sorely missing among them

>272 AnnieMod: Why not and what would you expect in a broad category for anything related to society and culture?

>268 birder4106: Honestly, the age-group categories have been confusing and hard to understand for the monolingual English speakers on this thread too? I think they're just kind of a mess for everyone. I say this as a library worker who has to deal with them professionally, all versions of them are confusing.

>273 SandraArdnas: I like "Society and Culture" in theory, using the academic disciplines isn't a great fit, but with Society and Culture I do think first of the way it tends to be used in periodicals, where "Society and Culture" = what used to be the "Women's Pages" = celebrities, pop culture, and homemaking, basically.

>273 SandraArdnas: Books about current celebrities, current movies, current music - things like that.:) I would not expect to find an anthropology book in it for example... or a sociology one...

>274 melannen: Tween never made any sense to me - in any language. Where do you draw the line between children books and YA books so you can fit a Tween category in there somehow. Are these Middle Grade? Later than middle grade but before YA? Something else? Even Middle Grade is a bit... problematic but I can understand that (post elementary, pre-YA). Translating into another language is a different question (I had been thinking on what I would use in Bulgarian and I am drawing a blank).

>276 AnnieMod: As a library worker: people constantly come into a Place Where Books Are and say "I need a book for an X year old" or "someone in X year of school" and they don't know anything else at all about what the kid likes or what level they read at. So you need these broad-but-not-too-broad age categories in order to point them somewhere.

When I was that age, we basically had Picture Books and YA and then Adult. And that was pretty simple, if it had chapters and didn't have a picture on every page but it wasn't for adults, it was YA. But there's been a huge boom in YA marketing, mostly since Harry Potter came out, that has lead to the age range and difficulty level of YA drifting way up (most of them would probably have just been filed with General Fiction thirty years ago) so we needed a way to distinguish easy-to-read chapter books for younger kids from full-fledged novels for actual teenagers.

Every kid I have ever talked to just calls them Chapter Books and always has, because at least in the US the point when you are old enough to read real Chapter Books is important, but for some reason no adult ever wants to officially label them that? So we have all these workarounds, Tweens is just the most recent, and all of them are bad.

But they are all very specifically Marketing Categories Used By English-Language Publishers above all, so whether they translate to different countries probably depends entirely on what Marketing Categories you use. I would not be surprised that a lot of countries did not have the thing where the age range for YA shifted, so they are still using some equivalent of YA for all not-picture-books for kids.

>277 melannen: I understand why we need the categories, I just cannot order them properly in my mind, let alone find their translations :) And the reading level deferring for the kids the same age is a very American thing (or Western one?) and took me a long time to figure out. It is becoming a thing back home as well but... Not that everyone could not read on different levels back when I was growing up but the kids that actually did check out books were moving at the same speed while still in the kids section so if you are in the 3rd grade, you are in the elementary books, ready to start moving across the isle to the real books.

When I was in school, there was a children section (split into two - on one side the kiddie's books (picture books and then more and more text up to what would be called chapter books I guess - the elementary school section in essence), on the other everything up to YA, including YA (we even have a word for that. Once you are post the last of the YA books, you get moved to the adult section - although they had a minimum age for that (14? with 16-18 being a lot more common at least in my town's library) - unless you are too annoying and really have nothing left to read. :)

Oh well. I went on a tangent again. And I still have no clue where Tween fits in an age range :)

is Origins: The Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists really sociology? It is kind of biography, kind of science. I just wondered what others thought.

I think Illustrated History of NASA: Anniversary Edition is pretty obviously not economics.

I think Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind is psychology not anthropology.

I flagged those last two.

Those are the most egregious of the social science genres that I find wrong. Many of the others I can at least envision arguments about.

>278 AnnieMod: I don't think it's really American, just a grown-ups who don't spend time around kids thing! People who understand how kids read don't assume age range means anything - actually, increasingly, kids in school are tested and given a specific reading level for books they should look for, although that's much more fine-grained than the categories we're talking about here (and has its own problems!) But a ton of adults just have no idea, and they're the ones who buy a lot of books, so it's oversimplified in marketing genres.

Assuming Tim is using Tween to mean Chapter Books (And I think that's the case? Though I'm not super familiar with Tween myself - we still call them Juvenile Fiction at my library, though we're on the verge of switching to Middle Grade, I think Tween is just supposed to sound "cool"er) it just means harder than picture books, easier than YA. So the age range is going to be something like 8-12? Although some kids are reading them at 6, and some still haven't moved past them at 14. And there's always going to be wobbly places in the middle, we have books that have moved back and forth between the categories multiple times as our catalogers change their minds. But if your language has any term for that category of books, it's probably good enough.

>280 melannen: " actually, increasingly, kids in school are tested and given a specific reading level for books they should look for"

Maybe in the States. Not so much in some other countries - Bulgaria for example. :) The lists and the tests are based on the class you are in, even this year. That's part of the cultural problem when translating these categories, even when they are the broad marketing ones.

Hunh. I would not have thought that Tween means chapter books... I would put them between Middle Grade and YA while chapter books are before Middle Grade... But then Middle Grade is confusing enough (isn't this 8-12 actually? Most of the books marketed as Middle Grade I had seen seem to have an age range printed on them as 8-12.)

Anyway... I will just ignore these for now (until I get around to translating these... then I need to figure out something).

I would not have assumed that was what Tween meant either, but looking at the books that LT sorts into it (although it is generally not very good, especially with comics, I see) it covers the whole range of what I would call Middle Grade/Juvenile/Chapter Books, and some easier or less recent YA. I think Tim was aiming for a less jargon-y term for Middle Grade, and overshot.

>274 melannen: >275 AnnieMod: Thanks, I was not aware of the magazine use of it at all.

>279 al.vick: Lightman does have a philosophical/humanistic bent in his books, but I wouldn't classify it as sociology.

Psychology, sadly, has nowhere to fit, which is my biggest peeve with genres right now. Philosophy too.

>262 birder4106: "but no corresponding German term."

I am not fluent in Deutsch, but have studied and read intermittently.
It seems somewhat impossible that there is ANYTHING without a German word for it.
;)

>271 tallpaul: "Sociology, Anthropology etc only refer to the academic subject and will likely always prove an awkward fit for non-academic books. Whereas Society and Culture is what they study and will happily hold academic and non-academic books."

Sounds good to me.

>277 melannen: "Every kid I have ever talked to just calls them Chapter Books and always has"

What happened to "Junior" as a category between elementary and YA?

Edit: I saw this in your later comment "we still call them Juvenile Fiction at my library" which is the equivalent IMO.

I generally add (juvenile) to my genre categories if needed. E.g., Agatha Christie writes a "mystery," but Nancy Drew books are "mystery(juvenile)."

There are six categories that my books fall into today. I don't know what the discriminators and algorithms are, but they don't seem to give consistent results in throwing some of my books into the buckets.

Maybe I have just missed some explanatory comments somewhere, and will be glad to have that pointed out. I just wanted to think things through based on my own library to see if the algorithm structures (whatever they may be) are working correctly or not with my books, so I can adjust my age-range-tags accordingly.

Children's Books (979)
Picture Books (472)
Kids (270)
Tween (214)
Teen (178)
Young Adult (165)

Some books are in more than one "bucket" but there doesn't seem to be any hierarchy, because there is inconsistent labeling, at least on a sample of my books.

What I'm wondering about is the structure of the buckets: Is Children's Books intended as (a) a strictly separate category, being books that are picked out as being something that is "not adult," but can't really quite be put in one of the age-range buckets for some reason; or (b) does it actually INCLUDE all 5 of the next categories, or (c) perhaps just the next 4, 3, 2, or 1 for a rough split between younger and older readers?

As for the Kids bucket: is it (d) a separate age range generally between Picture Books and Tween, or is it a collective bucket that (e) excludes Picture Books but includes the next 3 divisions; or (f) includes only the next 2 or 1 (again a rough younger-older split)?

For example, using books that have no kind of genre-sort-of-thing tag on them, so they are being judged strictly by LT's internal labeling algorithms:

One of my books in Picture Books ("Animalia") is also in Children's Books and nowhere else (structures b or c); but another one in Picture Books ("Animal Counting") is NOT in Children's Books (structure a).

"Anne of Green Gables" is in Children's Books & Kids & YA.
That looks like structure (b).
If Kids is a range between Picture and Tween (d), it shouldn't be there, because the gap is too wide; if Kids incorporates the next three levels (e), that's okay (although I would have placed it in Tween and/or Teen).

Two of Brandon Sanderson's "Alcatraz" series are BOTH in Kids & Tween, but only one is in Teen (possibly correctly, although I thought they were on par with each other in complexity) neither is in Children's Books.
That looks more like (structure a), so if either (b) or (c) is the structure, they should both be in Children's Books just as "Anne" is.
If Kids incorporates the two older buckets (e or f) then that's okay, as with "Anne."
However, if (d) is the structure, then I would argue that the labeling is only okay for the first book, and the second book should NOT be in Kids ,Tween, AND Teen.

I don't have a problem with a book being in two adjacent age ranges, because age-appropriateness is a "grey area." Some books could easily be grouped with either a higher or lower age range than others in that same general bucket.
However, I doubt there are any books that can stretch to 3 or 4 buckets, so if Kids IS a separate age range (d), then any books in Teen or YA should not also be in Kids.

Also, I have found a couple of books that are in both Teen and YA, "Briar's Book" and "Daja's Book" in Tamora Pierce's "Circle of Magic" series, which are not in Children's (consistent with structure a) OR in Kids (consistent with structure d); but, that is not what's happening with the other examples.

"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is only in my Children's Books and nowhere else (a). However, I would certainly have expected to find it in either Teen or YA, so it may need to be looked at.

>288 librisissimo: It's not just you; nobody can tell the difference between Children's Books and Kids. I gave up.

>289 reconditereader: >288 librisissimo:
If I remember correctly, after several people asked why there was both a Teen and a YA, what was the difference, Tim said that Kids, Tween, and Teen were meant to correspond to approximate age groups rather than proper Genres, while Children's Books and YA (and I guess Picture Books?) were the Genres. I've unchecked those age level distinctions in my Genre preferences, but I do have Children's Books and YA checked to see in my catalog.

Counting up the books (still "thinking out loud").
If Children's Books and Kids are separate buckets (structures a and d), then {adding up all 6 categories} would give a rough total of the non-adult books in my library, allowing for a high count because of books double-counted because they are in two adjacent age ranges.

If Children's Books is inclusive (b or c), and Kids is not (d), then every book should only be counted once there, regardless of other double-bucketing, and so the {all-the-other-groups-total} may be greater than the total of {Children's Books plus any unincluded bucket(s)}.

Analogously for an inclusive Kids bucket (e or f), either under structure (a), or structures (b) or (c).
This is where it gets really confusing.
The number of branches for the totals is much too large for a simple comment, but could be worked out in a table.

Without knowing what structure Tim has envisioned, because several of the structures I've identified are reasonable to implement, and he may have a different plan altogether:
I would probably use "Children's Books" as a strictly binary division (call it structure g): a book is either in there or it's not, and subtracting that number from the total number of records in my library would tell me how many are "adult" books.

Then I would use Kids as a specific age range (structure d), and add a bucket "No Age Range" for "books that are probably Children's Books but we haven't figured out where to put them" (similar to what I called structure a), analogous to the "No Genre" and "No Tab" designations (and any other "empty set" labels).

If books are dropped into two age buckets (and those would have to be adjacent), then they should only be counted once in the inclusive bucket Children's Books.

Well, that was fun.
It reminded me of a lot of the programming design I did back in the dark ages of my remunerative employment.
I hope it makes sense.

Jeeze. I don't think I have ever been in a public or school library that distinguished more than three age categories by shelving area, including "adult." The finer distinctions might be helpful to someone (bookstores selling gifts?) but since I was reading books from the adult shelves of the public library when I was in grammar school, I have always been a bit dismissive of such categories. The six classes in >288 librisissimo: seems crackers.

PS - if all of that doesn't look like fun to you, that's because I'm one of Those Kids who read dictionaries and encyclopedias for entertainment, and actually liked diagramming sentences.

Not all of us became computer programmers, but I suspect a lot of us did.

If Kid, Tween, and Teen aren't genres, what are they doing in GenreThing?

Like paradoxosalpha, I dunno if I'ver seen more than two non-adult age categories in a bookstore. (And if I saw a section labelled "Adult" in one, I'd assume it contained specifically erotica rather than simply books meant for adults.)

>294 AndreasJ: If Kid, Tween, and Teen aren't genres, what are they doing in GenreThing?

For starters, "GenreThing" is a misnomer, as Tim has said that the divisions are supposed to correspond to sections in a bookstore, not to genres.

In Sweden, the majority of the bookstores divide children's books into age brackets of 3 years (0-3, 3-6, 6-9, 9-12) and above that there's "ungdom" (youth, roughly the same as YA).
Libraries that I'm familiar with do similary (pekbok, bilderbok, nybörjarböcker, kapitelböcker, ungdomsböcker).

>296 PawsforThought:

It looks like Amazon has similar brackets:

Baby-2 Years Old
Ages 3-5 Years Old
Ages 6-8 Years Old
Ages 9-12 Years Old
Teen & Young Adult

Age-straightjacketing advances apace. Eventually it will be permissible to converse only with those who share your date of birth.

Where I work we actually have Board Books, for people too young to handle paper pages; Picture Books, for people learning to read, to read along with an adult; Easy Readers, for people learning to read to read independently; Juvenile Fiction, for young people who are becoming confident readers; and Young Adult, for fluent readers who may not be interested in adult genres; and Adult Fiction, for fiction aimed at adults. Those are actually pretty good categories, I think, at least for what's currently being published here, and aren't particularly age-bracketed. JE overlaps heavily with Picture Books and Juvenile in terms of intended age, and Juvenile and YA also overlap, and so do YA and Adult.

It becomes a problem when reading skill doesn't correspond to age at all - there are adults who aren't confident readers in English, and we don't have anything aimed at their age range; there are 7-year-olds who are fluent readers, and ditto; there are picture books aimed at adults reading with other adults, that we don't have a place for.

LT's categories don't really solve any of those problems, unfortunately! Which it could - it would be neat to have a Picture Book category that included Picture Books for all ages (and that is its own genre by any standard, I think) which you could then cross-correlate with Adult or Child and get pictures books for a certain age range. Or Easy Reader, for books intended for learners, that you could cross-search with Adult and get books intended for adult learners. It doesn't seem to be set up that way though.

>298 paradoxosalpha: I'm an adult.

Yesterday, I read a children's picture book. Today, I'm reading YA science fiction meant for teens. Tween books can be seen roaming through my house. These have all been catalogued in my account.

No one's running after me with a straightjacket yet.

I think we're going to be okay.

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