Add the Your books catalog field "Number of copies of this book catalogued in LT"

I suggest that the "Your books" list have a catalog field option that would provide the number of copies of that work that have been cataloged by all LibraryThing users. This data can already be seen when you go to the author's page and look at that work. For example, when I go to J.K. Rowling's page, I can see that there are at the time of this post 115,778 copies of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. I would love to be able to sort my collection by the level of obscurity, just because I am curious which books I own are the most/least popular in terms of ownership quantities.

I am thinking about adding/prioritizing reviews of "under-performing" books that I think deserve 5-stars and more people should buy/read.

But you can sort your catalog by that - it is one of the fields that are not fields on their own and hiding at the very end of each line in your catalog (together with total reviews and the edit/delete and so on buttons). Hit the sorting button on top of your catalog - the field is hiding under the name "total members".

You can see the number of total copies for a particular book in your catalog on the far right side. It has a little icon of a person next to it and it says "members" when you hover over it.

To sort by this field you can click on the blue up & down arrows at the top of your catalog and then sort by "total members"

If you look all the way on the right side of Your Books, there should be a box with a bunch of icons. One of the icons is a little generic head with a number next to it, that's the number of members who have also catalogued that work. And if you click on the "edit sort order" button at the top of Your Books (it looks like a little square with a down arrow and an up arrow), one of the options to sort by is "total members".

There's also a speech bubble with a number on the right side of Your Books for number of reviews attached to that work. If the bubble is filled in, that means you've reviewed the work. If it's not filled in, you haven't. And you can also sort by "total reviews" using the edit sort order button.

It's a little less intuitive since you can't click on the right column to sort by number of members or reviews like you can do other columns.

It's possible to sort "Your books" via the URL as well, for example your library >1 ChristinasBookshelf::
descending owner numbers: https://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=ChristinasBookshelf&viewstyle=...
ascending owner numbers: https://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=ChristinasBookshelf&viewstyle=...

There's a permanent link at the bottom left in "Your books" that lets you grab the URL, or bookmark it, after doing any customisation of the sorting.

Edit: added post number.

What is needed is a way to sort an older book, especially a classic, so that you can see how many copies of a certain edition are listed. When you look at the listing for some titles, there are so many books grouped together that you can not tell how many copy of a specific edition are listed. For example, how many N. C. Wyeth illustrated copies of The Odyssey are listed.

>6 Bernarrd: There's no such data because there's no edition layer. Those grouped under editions are just entries in the same form, but the system cannot recognize what other groups are the same edition

That is the point, people list a specific edition with a certain translator or illustrator and what you find in the statistics is some huge number of all copies grouped together. Some titles have quite a variety of editions. Everything from the original edition to an severely abridged children's edition. You could not really call those two things the same book, except that in a way they tell the same story. The reader will definitely come away with a different experience reading one versus the other. While I understand the grouping of various editions into one item, they should be able to be separated also.

The problem is that people enter books without carefully checking the information. LT has no way of knowing what edition most copies refer to because many members don't care whether or not their books are accurately entered.

>8 Bernarrd: Abridged editions are not the same work. If you find that a work contains abridged books then you should separate them.

Translations are a big issue for some authors like Jules Verne:

A: “What did you think of Verne’s decryption on the Nautilus interior in chapter 11?

B: “My copy didn’t have anything like that.”

The original / revised texts of Nancy Drew are often radically different.

Despite the cocktail party standard, LT doesn’t help us with thiese important distinctions.

James

>11 Keeline: If you can distinguish which books in a Nancy Drew work are original and which are revised then you should separate them. Ditto for Jules Verne

>12 jjwilson61: Not for Verne. If you separate every translation which skips a scene/paragraph/part of a chapter, almost no translation will remain connected to the original.

>13 AnnieMod: As a translator I'm dumbfounded that there is a practice of skipping paragraphs. Is it an issue just with Verne? And does anyone know the reasoning behind it?

>14 SandraArdnas: I wish it were just Verne. Some of the older Verne translations into English are notorious for their changes (see https://amp.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2007/sep/11/julesvernedeservesabette... for some examples) but almost any Victorian translation from French has issues as well (as one other example). Not that translations into other languages are better - I grew up in a small language - some translations were creative to say the least without being marked as abridged or changed. And then you have translations of translations which add to the problems and multiply the losses.

Sometimes the translator skips a part of the text (from a phrase to a whole scene) because it is too complicated or because they think it is unneeded or offensive or who knows what. Sometimes an editor cuts parts to fit into a format or page number or because they were following the rules of their publisher on what they can have in a text.

It does not happen as much lately as it did in the 20th century or before that but complete translations can be a misnomer. And even today… Depending on the publisher, “complete translation” means different things. As late as 2000, a novel came out in Bulgarian missing around 1/3rd of its length (including the solution to the murder mystery inside of it) - not marked as abridged and from a reputable publisher and translator (that one is an extreme case these days; smaller issues and shorter sections missing happen a lot more often). The publisher never explained what were he thinking with that book. It is still considered a complete official translation.

And yes - no professional translator will ever think of doing that today. But between cheap translations by non professionals and old practices and editorial work, things can be interesting.

The Lewis Mercier translation of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea omits many things, including all of the chapter that describes the interior of the Nautilus It is a significant omission. The restoration tends to come in the newer translations starting with the Walter James Miller translation of 1965. Miller later write the Annotated Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1976) which detailed the translation issues. I recommend reading it.

There are sloppy translations of Verne stories that invent whole sections that Verne never wrote.

Sure many translations of works are very similar and it is probably just as well to treat them as the same work. But there are some Verne examples where the gap is pretty far, not just the usual omission of a paragraph as has been characterized above.

As I understand it, Swiss Family Robinson is another story where the content has changed radically with different editions and translations with many omissions and additions. I'm not an expert on this story, however, so I can't address those changes. I do have more than a few copies of it but have not made a paragraph by paragraph comparison of them. Others have, I believe.
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As to the Nancy Drew books, the first 34 volumes had original texts with about 214 pages, 25 chapters, and copyrights between 1930 and 1957.

The revised texts are 180 pages, 20 chapters and have copyrights between 1959 and 1977.

A few stories are cut down in length from the originals. However, many are in the "extreme makeover" category. My favorite example of this is The Mystery of the Moss-Covered Mansion where the original story from 1941 is about stolen heirlooms. The revised story from 1971 is about stolen missile parts at Cape Canaveral and there is a scene with a crate of oranges that is set to explode. Only the volume number, the title, and the character names are the same. The plot is completely different. I have a little about this on my Stratemeyer.org site:

https://stratemeyer.org/def/original-text-vs-revised-text/

Since ISBNs came into common usage in 1967 for this publisher (Grosset & Dunlap), a copy from that firm with an ISBN should probably not be combined with a copy with a 1941 copyright that does not have an ISBN.

But how do we know this from the data provides on the combination page? We don't. We can't. It is insufficient for the task.
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If the cocktail party discussion is real, and not merely a platitude, we need to look at these significant boundary cases. There are a lot of people who have read and cataloged Verne and Nancy Drew (and Hardy Boys) books. Knowing one from the other is more significant than the Norton annotated edition (is that the right one?) that is usually mentioned as a "thou shalt not combine" example.

James

The big difference is that people with the Norton editions (mostly) care, and make sure that their copies are entered in such a way as to make them easy to recognize. This is not the case for most of the people who have entered Verne, Nancy Drew, and such.

>16 Keeline:
>Since ISBNs came into common usage in 1967 for this publisher (Grosset & Dunlap), a copy from that firm with an ISBN should probably not be combined with a copy with a 1941 copyright that does not have an ISBN.

>But how do we know this from the data provides on the combination page? We don't. We can't. It is insufficient for the task.

The ISBN would be shown on the LT-edition, so in a case like this (if you had the time!) it should be possible to separate any ISBN copies to make a second work for the revised/adapted/completely-reimagined text, and probably some other LT-editions would be identifiable as one or the other. Though surely there would be some/many ambiguously catalogued copies that it would as >17 MarthaJeanne: says depend on the commitment levels of the owners to care, and a separation is bound to be imperfect due to cross-contamination. However probably if that example was a work I had, I'd not want it combined if I knew there were two such very different versions.