Fiction Decimal System

So I've been thinking it might be fun to try to construct a fiction equivalent of the Dewey Decimal System.(1)

Why? Dewey work great for most libraries. But it's terrible at fiction, so most public libraries don't use it for that. More and more are going for a "bookstore" organization for fiction, based on the book-industry subject system, BISAC, or just using BISAC directly. (LibraryThing has the BISAC system here: https://www.librarything.com/BISAC.)

But Dewey and its variants, like UDC, has an simplicity and elegance those systems can't match. No, the stuff of the world is not actually cleanly divided into tens, but somehow it works. The numbers are simple, the hierarchy clear, and in three little numbers you can get 1,000 buckets. More importantly, since most people aren't aware that every DDC level has a "wording" or "schedule," they are good at putting similar books near each other. That's their whole point--they aren't subject systems, but shelf-ordering systems.

What would such a system look like? Here's a sample top level.

0XX — General Fiction
1XX — Classics
2XX — Romance
3XX — Science Fiction
4XX — Fantasy
5XX — Mystery
6XX — Thriller
7XX — Horror
8XX — Historical Fiction
9XX — Other Genres

Here's a proposed 3XX Science Fiction:

30X — General Science Fiction
31X — Hard Science Fiction
32X — Space opera
33X — Aliens
34X — Cyberpunk
35X — Dystopia and Apocalypse
36X — Time travel
37X — Alternate history
38X — Mixed genres
39X — Other Science Fiction

A few thoughts:

* Genres make people mad. I don't care. The point of the system should be to make people happy by colocating similar books. We know and accept that disagreement and antipathy cannot be avoided, if choices are to be made.

* Does "Classics" make you mad? It kinda makes me mad, but a LOT of people divide the book world up this way. Bookstores do it regularly. That matters.

* I'm being purposefully short in my labels. Thriller would include suspense. Cyberpunk would contain post-cyberpunk, biopunk, etc. Mystery would include crime. I just think labels like "Mystery, Detective, Crime and Courtroom" defeat the purpose, and also want to avoid unused terms like "Crime-Related Fiction." The map is not the territory.

* I'm purposefully avoiding identity and audience terms like Christian Fiction, LGBTQ+ Science Fiction, etc. There's a strong case for them, but they get messy quickly. Which identities matter? Christian Fiction but not Muslim? Yes, there are real genres here, like Afrofuturism, but also a very real danger of ghettoization. How gay does a science fiction book have to be before it's gay science fiction? And if we segment out such material, aren't we saying that the rest of the shelf is for straight white people? I think we avoid it.

* Note the "Mixed genres" section. One of the defining features of genres is that they mix. We could handle this with one-offs because not all mixtures take place. But I would consider having this be a fixed feature of the system. Under "Mixed" the system "starts again." So Science Fiction that's a Mystery would be 385. Sci-fi horror could be 387. In theory, time-travel horror could be 368.7. But we might also decide never to go past the third digit, because who needs 10,000 sub-genres?!

* Ideally, they would be a straightforward conversion table between BISAC and the Fiction Decimal System.

Okay, let the ten-minute hate begin!

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1. The idea is rather like the "Open Shelves Classification" that LibraryThing attempted 13 years ago, but focused on fiction. (And this time it'll work!)

Cool idea. I'm not opposed and would contribute.

Potentially tricky areas I can think of off the top of my head are drama / plays and non-Western genres. (Does poetry count as fiction? *ducks and hides*) Bookstores also make a pretty fundamental distinction between age groups.

But yes, sure. A division of fiction with a controlled vocabulary should be broadly feasible.

Where and how would this be used (and assigned)? It's not clear. Algorithmically? Or would there be a new classification field and people could assign their own?

I love classifications of all kinds, even though I'm acutely aware of their shortcomings and limitations, but they still make nice schemas in my mind. So count me in for playing around with this if it happens.

I'm open to the idea. We might even end up with something cool once the dust from the inevitable battles settles down. :)

>1 timspalding:

Like >2 Petroglyph:, I mostly approve, and would try to help out, and I think your SF subclassifications are good (though I think most SF -- at least the kind I read, which is mostly hard SF -- will file under more than one).

I do think you need a longer title on 2XX, though. This isn't being nitpicky. Romance means two absolutely different things. One is the stuff that gets filed under Romance today. The other is medieval romance, the kind of romance that I read: Chaucer's "Knight's Tale," and "Wife of Bath's Tale," and "Franklin's Tale," and Sir Orfeo, and Sir Gawain and the Grene Knight, and the Lais of Marie de France, and Malory.

I suppose you could file those under classics, but then where do you put The Lord of the Rings, which was a deliberate, and successful, attempt to revive the medieval romance.

I'm not really trying to get a separate classification for medieval romance (though I have no idea where it would file under the above hierarchy -- maybe it should get its own category under 4XX), but I do think 2XX should be "Modern Romance," so as to not suffer any more trouble than you have to. :-)

>1 timspalding:

"1XX Classics" maybe could make me mad. But mostly it just makes me puzzled. Does it just mean "Books more than a generation old that people are still reading"?

I agree that hierarchical classifications are fun, and very satisfying to design, but I don’t see any added value in this in a home library over good old “alphabetical by author”.

My experience of using Dewey for non-fiction is that it has two big disadvantages in a personal library — one is the need physically to mark every book somehow so you know where it’s supposed to go (and the shelves too), and the other is that there are usually at least two different places where a given book might be shelved, so it’s hard to find a specific book without using the catalogue. I still like it because it’s transparent, a well-known standard maintained by someone else, and there’s no screamingly better alternative.

It might make sense to organise fiction in detailed ways by genre and topic for public or institutional libraries where patrons don’t know the books in the collection, but at home you are pretty unlikely to go to your shelves looking for “Classics - 19th century, UK, urban, London” rather than “D” for “Dickens”. (And, half the time, it would be shelved on the other side of the room under “General fiction - social issues - child labour” anyway.)

I’m sure it would be interesting to see what your personal library might look like organised like this, but I very much doubt whether it would be worth the inevitable years of squabbling over terminology…

>7 thorold: I think the benefit is mostly site-wide. Much like DDC currently, you could go to say 'biopunk' and see what's listed, sort it this way or that, filter most recently published etc.

>8 SandraArdnas: As Tim said, the point of using a decimal classification is that it gives you an unambiguous shelf-ordering system. If you just want to drill down into subgenres in a catalogue, simpler things like tags and the existing genre system would do the same job with less fuss.

So where would you put space opera with alien protagonists? Or indeed a literal space opera?

I'm not opposed to the idea, it's just like so many classification systems it fails on personal subjectiveness. What I would call (a) you may very well call (b) if not (d). That's why I have my library split into collection then tag (i.e. sub-collection) and I ignore genres per se. (In many cases, it's because I have a low number of books in that particular area.)

I like this idea! I think it would be useful, like tagmash, for finding books that are similar to others. Genres are nebulous but useful, and more granularity can make them more useful.

>5 waltzmn: Lord of the Rings clearly goes in the 400s, Fantasy—possibly 481, a fantasy classic!

I feel unconfortable with this, but I'm not sure why, other than how many books cross genres.

Gator Queen fits both mystery - cozy and romance genres. Murder by Memory is a mystery first and foremost, but it's also set on a spaceship and concerned with themes that flag it as sff. Do we err on the side of the publisher's usual fare? But Gator Queen is self-published.

The Husbands is.... I'm not at all sure. It wasn't marketed as fantasy when I read it, but the entire plot is fantasy. It's just the themes are more general/litfic? It's not a romance, at least.

I think perhaps the genres with clear rules and common themes are where this is the most useful, but like where do you put Salman Rushdie's work but not Vajra Chandrasekera's? (iirc they're not shelved together, though they're very similar magic-fantasy-literary)

>12 keristars: I suppose I should preemptively reply to myself that the non-fiction schemes result in multiple assignments per book, depending on the cataloguer's preferences/needs, so it wouldn't be a new problem.

(I just don't like how messy it is.)

I suppose it come down to what fiction readers' priorities are, and how their compass guides them to what they want to read next.

I don't segregate my physical books according to genre, as genre is one of the later decisions for me in choosing my next book, or deciding where I need to restock the shelves. My fiction is organised (physically) into five groups.

1: Serial paperback - Specifically books that I have got the first books of, or have got later books of and have read all the preceeding ones
2: Box set paperbacks - Not just a defined start point, but a defined finish point too
3: Stand alone paperbacks (and series that can be read out of order without spoilers) - Zero commitment, one-off indulgences
4: Quarantined paperbacks: These are books I got as random unresearched grabs, which turned out to be later in a series, which might be better off being read from the beginning. I know I need to "sample" these, and decide if I want to read the whole book as a standalone, or break off and hunt down the start of the series.
5: Hardbacks and Omnibus editions - These all sit on display (whether in a series or not) away from the paperbacks, but I have them tracked and logged as one of the other categories.

Once I've decided which of these I want next, and go to that clump of books, the next question I'll ask myself is whether I want fairly modern prose, or an older writing style. Essentially, do I want a quicker free flowing easy read, or something to take my time with, and absorb slower. Then it's big book or small book (page count), and then what I want it to be about (suspense, dystopia, action, adventure, etc).

In terms of looking to buy books, or seeking reviews, it can be problematic. There aren't codes for modern mixed-genre standalones. Random in person grabs will likely either be group 3 or 4, but I won't know till I get them home (I don't carry a smartphone),

As regards just focusing on genre though, as highlighted in the posts above, different readers classify books differently according to their own preferences and aversions. In effect, many books could do with multiple codes, in order for the right readers to find them. So to pick on waltzmn's question, The Lord of the Rings is romance, and classic, and adventure, and fantasy. Calling it just one thing is a coded system, might make it, and similar novels, harder to find rather than easier.

So combining all that (my preferences and others), we're looking for a decimal coding system which does two things. Specifies whether a book is stand alone or serial (and which one in the series), along with a "tick all that apply" system to capture all the genres that a book reader might look for that book in. So that's a series number and genre tag cloud combined into a decimal code...

Ignoring my personal quirks above, I can't help thinking a tag cloud type concept (albeit differently coded) would be advantageous, to allow books to be discovered by multiple appetites. Personally, I wouldn't browse romance, fantasy, cyberpunk, and other "genres" which others might be aligned towards, but that might mean I overlook books that I might otherwise really enjoy, due to other aspects of the book.

>1 timspalding:

33X Aliens and 33X Time Travel don't seem like genres to me. These are just subject matter that can be (and is) treated in various top-level sf subgenres.

What about YA? That seems to be a genre of its own in some respects, but I could see it being a top-level subgenre for each of the major genres you've listed here. There is certainly enough attraction to and aversion from YA works to justify making it a discrimination in the system. I could see the objection that "audience" is different than genre, but I think it's actually as closely related as subject matter is, because of the way that it determines plots, styles, and focus.

I'm not opposed to it, but I won't use it because I know that I will actively disagree with it just like I actively disagree with bookstore shelving choices.

I have some books that I consider to be science fiction which will probably end up being categorized as fantasy because they're mostly fantasy with less sci-fi, if they do get categorized as fantasy then then whole categorization becomes useless to me because I don't want to fight a site-wide classification system.

At least with the existing genre system I can "correct" things that I think are wrong (which is separate from flagging genres that are so wrong that they don't even make sense).

>11 Charon07: Lord of the Rings clearly goes in the 400s, Fantasy—possibly 481, a fantasy classic!

It surely would meet the criteria for the 400s. But its intended genre is medieval romance. As >14 WonkyBloke: points out, it fits well in multiple categories -- indeed, we should probably add Christian fiction. (I might drop "adventure" from the list, because of the deep philosophical element, but that's just me.)

The point made in >14 WonkyBloke: is important, and picking on one of my examples misses the point. Either we need to allow books more than one category (and not just in one branch of the hierarchy), or the system needs to be sufficiently precise that one can pretty well guess where almost everything goes. In this age of philistinism about the contents of books, putting "The Lord of the Rings" in the 400s might work -- but that still doesn't do anything for Sir Gawain and the Grene Knight. There isn't much of a category for it in the list above, except Classics, but there's a pretty big gap between, say, the Odyssey and "Sir Gawain" -- and yet they're both old romances.

And by that system, what do you do with (sits here thinking of a really bad medieval romance) Guy of Warwick, which by any rational standard is the same genre as Sir Gawain (medieval knightly fiction with the hero under a bunch of obligations and fantasy features), and is of about the same degree of antiquity, but which no one is ever going to read for pleasure because it's long, dull, and not very good poetry. If "Classic" means "old," call the genre "old," but if "Classic" means "something that has survived because it's worth reading," "Guy of Warwick" isn't that. So then what is it?

Please understand that my considered answer is that every book needs to have as many classifications as it requires to cover all its attributes. If that's allowed, then the classifications can be mushy. If you want to put "The Lord of the Rings" in the 400s, and I want to put it in Medieval Romance (wherever that lands), I have no problem with your classification. It's better with both!

>17 waltzmn: Tim hasn’t discussed how the proposed Fiction Decimal System would work. As it is, I believe Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress classifications come from the source used to add a book but can be edited. Genres are more communal but can also be edited. Any of these classifications can be ignored by anyone who doesn’t want to use them. I imagine the Fiction Decimal System could work similarly.

>18 Charon07:

Yes, but I don't frankly need this for my books. I know those. :-) And my library is primarily non-fiction anyway. :-) What I'm interested in is the collective consensus, because that might let me find new things more easily.

This isn't entirely arbitrary, and The Lord of the Rings is a very good example. I keep trying new fantasies -- and, as often as not, I don't even finish the dang things. The ones I really like -- the Earthsea books, the Chronicles of Prydain, "The Lord of the Rings" itself -- are books which are both fantasy and medieval romance. On the evidence, if you're going to hand me the fantasy without the romance, I'll just go and read medieval history instead. The average quality is much higher. :-)

The power in any such system, I think, lies in its ability to manage mixed cases, and to let us learn how others classify.

>15 paradoxosalpha: Good point about YA and how audience can influence plot, styles, focus, and I'll add themes.

Time travel can be an element of SF or Fantasy, and the major themes of the book can determine which genre it fits, if the mechanism isn't clearly science/magic.

YA has thematic rules/trends, too. I read Some Desperate Glory fairly early, without knowing much about it, and was absolutely certain that it was YA because the themes were classic YA. So much is about coming to terms with adults who lie or perpetuate a negative status quo. Tesh's book in very broad terms is just The Giver with different setting tricks. (Not a bad thing - I loved Some Desperate Glory! But The Giver is classic YA themes, so I expected SDG to be classified that way, too.)

I think it depends on what's intended with the top level categories. But I would definitely include YA and MG as tertiary levels, at the very least.

I also still think well-defined genres like Romance and Mystery benefit the most here. Horror is a subtype of other genres, according to what the Recommendations keep giving me. But maybe it's just cross-genre contamination.

With many site users having heavy fiction libraries, this makes sense... I think, to have something geared towards that.

I was mildly scratching my head at a multi author series (horsey YA books I think) where the DDC was all over the shop, 823 mostly but 813 for a couple of US authors, and a Canadian (wrong?, if they were writing in British English?), and an Australian down in... it had a few 9s in it. These would happily sit in one FDS box, Other Genres > Young Adult > Adventure (or Modern, or whatever).

Is it useful to lump a Japanese language thriller in with a Swedish language one? If neither reader speaks the other's language and they aren't available in translation it's no use directly recommending as books for the other to read... but it can indicate the users have similar tastes if their FDS profiles are similar shapes, so it seems a useful thing to measure to drive similar-library recommendations and other user connections. And to have a piechart of what our fiction genres are.

If users' own classification can bubble to the work level, being able to see the variation of numbers could be interesting:
- 99% of owners call something 481, it's probably 481.
- but if 40% call it 280; 20% 283; 18% 484; 16% 797, ...
A little piechart, table of data at the work level, etc.

On an author page, a primarily fiction author would be interesting to see if they write in 481, and 527, and 214, vs another author who writes 606 full stop and that genre only.

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There must be a Dewey/Melville subtable relating to fiction genres, because delving down in the far decimals of, for example American fiction in English (813.08), beneath there is:
813.08 American fiction in English > By Type > Genre Fiction
813.08 1 Historical fiction
...
813.08 7 Adventure fiction
813.08 76 Speculative fiction https://www.librarything.com/mds/813.0876
813.08 762 Science fiction
813.08 7621 Time travel
813.08 7622 Post apocalypse
...
813.08 766 Fantasy
813.08 7661 High fantasy https://www.librarything.com/mds/813.087661
813.08 7662 Sword and sorcery

etc.

The same pattern in other languages, here Chinese fiction (895.13), and its ...08 division:
895.1308 76 Speculative fiction
895.1308 762 Science fiction
895.1308 766 Fantasy
https://www.librarything.com/mds/895.130876

So it might be you'd essentially be setting up an alternate "in fiction –3, after by genre –08, use table..." (or whatever) instruction. You may want to take a look at what Dewey uses as genre top level divisions, subdivisions in such a table (or not, copyright!, or if things like BISAC are more relevant).

>11 Charon07:
>Lord of the Rings clearly goes in the 400s, Fantasy—possibly 481, a fantasy classic!

I noticed when looking just now, that 1,737 copies have it as DDC/MDS: 813 American fiction in English ...!
https://www.librarything.com/work/1386651/classification

>17 waltzmn:
> Sir Gawain and the Grene Knight.

Sounds like horsey things (joking, see above post, para.2). I'd hope the system would allow you to file it as Classics, I might file it as Fantasy, we both do, and then it's a joust at the work level, the most used then shows up (like DDC/MDS does). (Edited for improvement)

OMG! Something else to argue about…
Have fun people!

I cannot comment on the difference between genres and themes, as I am not sufficiently familiar with the subject.

However, I suspect that the way the distinction is drawn might vary across different language groups. It seems to me that the "suspense" category (e.g., crime fiction, thrillers, horror, spy novels, war stories) is defined differently in German than in English.
In my opinion, the term "mystery" is also used differently in English compared to German. Is it correct that in English it applies to the crime fiction genre, whereas in German it tends to refer to the supernatural?

>24 birder4106: I'd say the modern usage of 'mystery' is primarily in the 'crime' genre (in the puzzle sense), but there's a secondary element of supernatural. However, further back the usage is primarily supernatural - think J S Le Fanu. The modern crime novel didn't get its start until The Woman in White.

>25 Maddz:
Thanks for pointing out the term puzzle. I think it describes the current usage quite well.

My library contains books for various age groups.
To my knowledge, the system does not currently prioritize this distinction. The situation appears to be much the same with the BIASC system.

If I understand the BIASC system correctly, it is structured hierarchically.
I could envision the following pragmatic solution:
An age code would precede the BIASC code. To make the distinction clearer, I would use letters (e.g., A–?) for the subdivisions.

During the previous discussion on introducing genres, there was considerable uncertainty regarding how to delineate the individual groups. Distinguishing or defining categories based on age proved particularly difficult. It also proved hard to standardize differences between school systems and specific linguistic or regional characteristics.

Nevertheless, I would welcome a unified system that allows for filtering and sorting both with and without age-related criteria.

I hope the LT community can agree on a system and that the developers can implement it.

I'm enjoying the various inputs thus far.

To simplify my earlier thoughts, I would not personally adopt this as a shelf ordering system. How I want my books physically organised, differs far too significantly. They are collated via altogether different attributes, and each collated shelf here is mixed in genre and age/writing style. My standalone paperback shelves have Dickens, Orwell, Frederick Forsyth and Gillian Flynn. My box sets have Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ian Fleming, Colin Dexter, and Douglas Adams. My "Series in order" shelves have Patrick O'Brian, Jacqueline Winspear, Anne Cleeves, and John le Carre. If I decide to keep books once I've read them, whether standalone or series, they go on completely separate shelves.

There may still be some merit for me in this digital system though, if it helps me navigate from one enjoyed book, to discovering other I may enjoy too. That said, I'd still need to research the book to see whether the coding given relates to the writing attribute I hope to discover more of, and also still need to research it along my own classifications to see if there's a place for it here. If it's book 12 of a series, I probably don't want it, unless I have the other 11.

Better sf categories:

30X — General Science Fiction
31X — Hard Science Fiction
32X — Space opera
33X — Planetary Romance (Sword and Planet)
34X — Alien Invasion and First Contact
35X — New Wave and Social Science Fiction
36X — Cyberpunk
37X — Climate Disaster, Civilizational Collapse, Dying Earth
38X — Military Science Fiction
39X — Other Science Fiction, including multi-genre

I feel like like "mixed" and "other" are both fudge categories, and having both seems like a waste of a valuable slot.

See the bottom row of the MDS grid here (which is pretty good, but I think oversells the sfnal salience of steampunk): https://www.librarything.com/mds/823.087626

>28 paradoxosalpha: All of your categories are clearly valid, and I agree that "mixed" and "other" are fudge. But I do think we need a Time Travel category. And Alternate History, too.

And, as a serious question, where would you put Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye? It's emphatically a first contact novel. It is pretty hard SF -- it uses a doubletalk star drive, but it's the most thought-through star drive I've ever encountered, And Pournelle's CoDominium series, to which it belongs, is mostly military SF. Oh, and it's about a civilizational collapse. Two of them, in fact -- humanity had one, and the "Moties" had many.

It quite plausibly could be regarded as a Future History, too.

(I hope you'll understand this as a real attempt to figure out how this works. This is a very important book that has a lot of different major themes.)

If I had to choose one, I'd put it in Alien Invasion and First Contact, but that's very weakly descriptive. If ever there was a book that showed you have to have a way to assign multiple categories, that's one.

>28 paradoxosalpha: Where would you put post-apocalyptic hope-punk? At first glance, 37X, but hope-punk is about coming back from the collapse? I would merge Space Opera and Planetary Romance into a single slot and split them out at a lower level. So both the Lensman series and the Viagens series would be in different subdivisions.

>29 waltzmn: Alternate History and Time Travel could theoretically be subdivisions of a single slot.

>30 Maddz: Alternate History and Time Travel could theoretically be subdivisions of a single slot.

Hm. Yes, given that we only get nine subcategories. But we do need at least one.

cool cool cool. I know it always sparks debates because many books can go in multiple categories, but I would love to see how this works out, and would be willing to help with my catalog.

Perhaps what we really need to do, re: tricky choosing categories, is to turn to the 55 Dramatic Situations for guidance.

Start with the Dramatic Situation (1A, 4B, etc) and then the genre.

(this is mostly a joking reply, on account of something in the last few posts reminding me of the chart)

((pps: it's from The Areas of My Expertise)

Maybe using hexadecimal numbers would help

>34 jjwilson61: Maybe using hexadecimal numbers would help

I'm not opposed to a non-decimal system, but if we're going to use one, it would probably be easier just to go full alphabetic. It makes the sorting easier -- you don't have to parse the hex numbers; you just do an ASCII sort. And that would give us even more categories and subcategories.

>35 waltzmn: I'm not opposed to a non-decimal system

Tell us that your field involves math without telling us :D

>36 SandraArdnas: Hmph. I didn't even mention the radix point. :-p

I did talk about ASCII, sorting algorithms, and parsing. You had a few other hints. Arguably, though, my field is the history of traditional folk song. My training is in physics, mathematics, and (now-antique) computer languages. But that's just training. :-)

1. Sorry for the delay in my responding. I have been at a library conference all weekend.
2. I'm going to refer to it as FDS, Fiction Decimal System, from now on. That doens't have to be the name forever.
3. If I didn't make myself clear, my primary audience for this is public libraries. It's crazy that everyone knows about Dewey but Dewey only covers a fraction of a library's holdings because most holdings are fiction. For fiction libraries play it by ear and while there have been many attempts to standardize, there is no solid system. I think that a system that mirrored Dewey has many advantages for libraries. I also think that many members would enjoy using it, in whole or in part, and especially arguing about it!

>3 SandraArdnas: Where and how would this be used (and assigned)? It's not clear. Algorithmically? Or would there be a new classification field and people could assign their own?

I'd like to have a preliminary number to be assigned algorithmically, but this will mostly be a cross-walk from the BISAC code, which include genres, to the Fiction Decimal System. Members could then change them, on the work and/or book level.

>7 thorold: there are usually at least two different places where a given book might be shelved

This is both a weakness and a strength of DDC. I think it will NEED to be true in the Fiction Decimal System (FDS). There are books that cross genres and people will disagree about which is more important.

I think we need to have mixed genres as a basic element of the system. I laid this out in my idea as follows:

Note the "Mixed genres" section. One of the defining features of genres is that they mix. We could handle this with one-offs because not all mixtures take place. But I would consider having this be a fixed feature of the system. Under "Mixed" the system "starts again," using the first-level numbers. So Science Fiction that's a Mystery would be 385. Sci-fi horror could be 387.

I like this idea anyway.

>2 Petroglyph: Potentially tricky areas I can think of off the top of my head are drama / plays and non-Western genres. (Does poetry count as fiction? *ducks and hides*)

>2 Petroglyph: Bookstores also make a pretty fundamental distinction between age groups.

Classification can be conceived of involving a number of facets, like topic, audience and medium. Some systems take this on directly. Thus, in S.R. Ranganathan’s "Colon Classification" (1933), every book belongs to five independent classifications, separated by colons. (The divisions are "Personality," "Matter," "Energy," "Space" and "Time."!) Such syststem are elegant, but rather weird and have not become common.

Dewey (DDC) by contrast puts all books about volcanoes at 551.21, whether they are for adults or kids, are books, large-print books, Braile books, ebooks, etc. Libraries that use it will generally separate these books, but they do so by putting them in different "collections," often marked by a prefix, like "J" or "Juv" for "Juvenile."

Things change, however, when dealing with differences of "form" (not "audience" or "carrier"). Thus films about volcanoes are in a different place, as are albums about volcanoes, should such a thing exist.

My strong preference would be to keep this "fiction by genre" as a common-sense thing.

That means:

*No consideration of format.
*No consideration of audience. If a library wants to separate out YA or middle-grade, that's there thing, and they do it with a prefix.

As for things outside prose fiction, either:

1.
*Picture books, plays and poetry are not covered.
*Comics and graphic novels are not covered.

or,
2. We put them all in one number, like 8XX or 9XX.

>6 paradoxosalpha: "1XX Classics" maybe could make me mad. But mostly it just makes me puzzled. Does it just mean "Books more than a generation old that people are still reading"?

I get your frustration but bookstores have this as a section all the time. It's a basic way that many people think about books. I could totally see someone deciding not to use it but I don't want our objections to stand in the way of the system that makes sense to most people.

>10 Maddz: I'm not opposed to the idea, it's just like so many classification systems it fails on personal subjectiveness.

I hear you and I think it would necessarily be more subjective than the Dewey Decimal System but I would love to come up with a system even so. I think public libraries would love it, as would at least some members, and it would be fun to debate, and we would get a sense of accomplishment as the system grew.

>12 keristars: I feel unconfortable with this, but I'm not sure why, other than how many books cross genres.

I think we would have to provide the option to have other numbers for a book. Some people will want to put a book in fantasy, others in mystery, or whatever. This is how Dewey works too. Every book sits at one space on the Dewey line but there are often several options as to that one space.

>14 WonkyBloke: Specifies whether a book is stand alone or serial

I don't think that series can be a basic part of the system because many books only turn into series when they are successful! Case in point in my recent (re)-reading: The Girl with All the Gifts would never have become a series if the book had not become so popular!

>28 paradoxosalpha: Better sf categories:

A few thoughts:

1. I agree on "Alien Invasion and First Contact," but I'd prefer something broader with a shorter name, like "Aliens." Then it could include several alien-related genres that aren't first contact per se. (Ender's Game could fit, but what about Speaker for the Dead?)
2. I favor genres that people readily identify. No one going into a Barnes and Noble is going to look for a "Planetary Romance (Sword and Planet)" section. But everyone knows about Dystopia, Post-Apocalyptic and time-travel.

>30 Maddz: Where would you put post-apocalyptic hope-punk? At first glance, 37X, but hope-punk is about coming back from the collapse?

I would have a "Cyberpunk and related" level, and it could be a subset of that, along with solarpunk, etc.

>34 jjwilson61: Maybe using hexadecimal numbers would help

There's no base that would "cleave nature at the joints." Not ten, not 16, not a million. Dewey could be hex too, or base 7, or whatever. Hex is fun, but most humans don't understand it. Working just like Dewey is a real advantage.

>38 timspalding: A resource for public libraries clarifies much of this for me! I had been thinking much more general, to build upon the current genre system.

I wonder if tag clouds would help with identifying categories and subcategories, or do they get too uneven on the long-tail?

>39 keristars:

I wonder if tag clouds would help with identifying categories and subcategories, or do they get too uneven on the long-tail?

No, I think they would. A lot could be done automatically, but automatic would only be a first cut. BISAC would do a lot of the work.

I would even use AI to assign them for tests, giving Claude or whatever the tag cloud, BISAC and summary--not for real and to stay, but to run rapid tests against proposals. You need to run tests on big numbers of books, so you don't end up with lopsided categories—where 90% of books are in 30X, and 10% are spread out across 31X-39X. People keep proposing genres that sound good, but I'd want to see evidence there's enough to have them so high on the system. I suspect members would object to this, but I would hope people would understand if such a thing were done purely for testing purposes. That said, I don't want to kick a hornets nest!

>40 timspalding: I like the idea. I've just picked up a book that is sort of Stainless Steel Rat meets Forensic Profiling. I.e. it is a spoof at Forensic Profiling. So a mixed genre that I doubt holds other books :-)

>38 timspalding: Tim,
I agree with most of your suggestions.

There is just one point where I hold a different view: the categorization of age groups. I am not aware of any (Swiss) bookstore or library that lacks separate sections for children’s books, young adult literature, and adult books. Recently, even "TikTok books" (Young Adult) have started to be shelved separately.

As you suggested, I propose using a prefix separated from the actual FDS code by a delimiter.

To clearly distinguish it from the standard FDS code, I would suggest using letters.
Personally, I could even live with symbols (though I’m not entirely serious about this)—for example, 👶🧑🏽‍🎤👩🏼‍🦰👨🏾‍🦳 | α Start, β, γ, μ Middle, Σ*, Ω* End (*uppercase letters).

I hope the FDS system could be programmed to allow sorting and filtering both with and without the age classification.

Admittedly, not everyone will welcome or desire this proposal. However, I can imagine that an FDS expanded in this way might gain broader acceptance.

>38 timspalding:

"If I didn't make myself clear, my primary audience for this is public libraries."

Thanks for clarifying. I hadn't picked up on that.

"I don't think that series can be a basic part of the system because many books only turn into series when they are successful! Case in point in my recent (re)-reading: The Girl with All the Gifts would never have become a series if the book had not become so popular!"

I fully appreciate that. I suppose a better way of expressing what I was hoping for, is something that prompts a thought of "There are earlier books in the series that you might want to read first" when picking up an interesting book, but that's book labels, not shelf labels, and so probably not applicable in this project.