Reviewing a series

Not sure if we got anywhere when it was brought up last. At least I seem to remember some discussion on this topic. I'd love a proper place to review or comment on a series as a whole. I've done it here and there, most recently for the Jack Reacher novels, but had to attach the piece to one book in particular. Not quite the best fit. Any thoughts on this from the developers? Would other users find this useful? Fun?

Useful? yes!
Fun? yes

Likely? not sure - I'm thinking this might actually be very difficult (though I am not a computery person and could be way off).

Currently all of our personal information about works is entered on our book page and linked to the BOOK entry. We have no personal series information - CK is shared by everyone and can be changed by everyone. So you would essentially have to create a personal series page like we have a personal book page (as opposed to the work page) - one could imagine that then you could tag/collect/rate/review your series in the same way you do your books - BUT I'm not sure that this would be of interest to enough LTers to justify the development time.

One possible way of doing this with CURRENT functionality would be to
A. Create a Group - Series Reviews.
B. For each Series that someone wanted to review - create a Thread in the Group for that Series. Each person wishing to review the series could post their review in the thread.
C. In the Series Description post a link to the appropriate Thread.

But this would not provide a way for me to easily see all the series I had reviewed or the other functions (thumbs/flags/sorting/searching) that the book reviews have.

(I'm still hoping for a "Members" section on the series pages - like we see on the author/tag pages - who has the most books in this series? which of my "connections" has books in this series? etc.)

good idea about the group. If this isn't on the radar for development, that might be a good way to go. I actively read and pursue many series and have abandoned some as well. It would be fun and interesting to see others' views as well as peremptory information for new series that I might want to take on.

This is a great idea - in whatever form it ends up. I always struggle with reviews of manga, which are many books, but basically one story. Do I just put the same review on each volume, or just one review on the final volume, or the same review on the first and last volume only? What's most useful to someone using the review?

If you put a review of the whole series on book 1, you risk to have way too many spoilers - manga or not. When I read a review of volume 1 of something, I expect to see what people think for this volume... not for all the 20. But it might be just me :)

I dislike series reviews appearing as reviews of one book - and even worse the practice of attributing the same review to all members of a series. I don't flga them, but I do find them borderline flaggable cases.

On the series page there is a 'series description' box, and this might be the best workaround.

>6 reading_fox:
Uh... no.
The series Description should not be a review but a description.

That's sort of what I mean, reading_fox, a space/field tied to the series that works as reviews work for individual works. Description might be a workaround, but I wouldn't want to encourage that since it has a specific function. I don't put series reviews into the book review slot often as I don't think it's the best place either. And yeah, I wouldn't want to ruin the experience of a series by including lots of end results that happen many books in. Ig. But if I wanted to get into a series, I might appreciate a 'world view' as it goes.

Anyway...I thought I'd throw it out again & see what the developers think of the idea and how/if it might work.

Not quite the same, but I would also like the option to favorite a series. I'm very fond of the "Pelican History of Art" series for example.

>5 AnnieMod: Thanks AnnieMod - it's good to know how other people do things.

Personally, I generally use reviews only to discuss my opinions, not to do a synopsis (I put those in the description), so generally I don't have spoiler issues. Certainly for something like Death Note, which contains a lot of action in each volume, I'd do different reviews for different volumes. But for something like Model, which is the equivalent of a single light romance novel taking up several volumes only because of the illustrations, there's nothing much different to say about the various volumes that isn't synopsis.

I'll have to ask the manga group how they use reviews - to decide whether to read something or after they've read it.

This has been suggested before - and while 90% of it would be really helpful, there's the 10% that needs some similar control to the reviews we already have...

Something that basically ensures that we're not doing "drive-by" reviews of a series. I'd just like to make sure that people own a certain amount of a series before doing a review - and that gets difficult on larger, informational series (even with the 12 volumes of the Thames & Hudson World of Art Series I have, I don't even have 10% of the entire series).

But I'd be willing to balance something that ensures we don't have people doing either bashing-style reviews (imagine the Twilight stuff - just read the 1st book) -or- those that will descend on obscure series and just do drive-by glowing reviews that seem like they might just be shills (you know that healing dog book is just aching for a sequel).

Just maybe something stricter in the flagging?

>11 stephmo:

What "control" is there on reviews of individual books?

I certainly don't think ownership should be a criterion. My review rate jumped with the advent of collections, because I could finally post reviews for over a dozen "read but not owned" books without hurting what I saw as the integrity of "my library."

And then comes the real problem with "How many books are there in this series". The LT series might have on;y 3 of the 5 volumes that make the full series but it might as well have 10 books - the 5 volumes + 5 short stories (or even 20 - the already mentioned 10 + every single of the 5 volumes separated into half volumes). So who can review the series - the person that has the 5 volumes but none of the stories or someone that have a single volume and all the stories? :) Or the person who has just one book but it happens to be a full Omnibus of all the novels (with or without the stories)?

I generally like the idea of series reviews... it just may turn out not so easy to be implemented and mainly controlled.

>10 Helcura:
Helcura, I also think a review should not contain synopsis unless if you need part of the story to explain your feelings (and then it should be controlled and not ruining the book). Unfortunately most reviewers seem to believe that it is ok to use a review to tell everyone that the butler did it and how obvious it was because of . Or even worse - telling everyone what happens in the novel/story with no word whatsoever on what they think.

Agreed about the no ownership requirement - I've read most of a series, but never bought it and still those reviews get thumbs and I don't think my lack of financial aid to the author makes me any less an authority.

I see where stephmo is coming from, though I think it's even less likely that a person will do a drive by on a series than they will on a book. The "controls" that exist for books are laughable and a determined freak will find a way around it, but it's a lot of work and for what?

I think that like individual reviews, the good ones will stand on their own merits. Crap reviews made by ignorant bigots will stand out in series just as they do for books.

>12 paradoxosalpha: That is the "control" on the review.

My concern is that if we have no ownership for series reviews - the drive-by reviews - that we'll see different behavior. Right now, we don't have a huge issue because there is the added step of adding the book to your library. It is one thing to do your funny ha-ha review on a book, it's another thing entirely to add it to your library.

I don't think I'm taking crazy pills as Tim's designed the system to do exactly this. And while Amazon's culture does lead to creative drive-by reviews, these aren't exactly the rule.

I'd want to make sure that we'd be really supplementing with genuine reviews and not the following kinds of bad things:

- Reasons why the entire Idiot's Guide to Series is horrible because a person found the information in Idiot's Guide to Philosophy to have not gone "in-depth enough."
- Endless debates on the His Dark Materials trilogy and how it's turning us all into atheists.
- Endless debates on Twilight and how it's turning all of our daughters into the would-be victims of abusive, hyper-controlling men that will suck the life out of them.
- Reasons the Lord of the Rings series is not a legitimate series in LT.
- Movie reviews for a few notable Marvel/DC graphic novel series.
- Publicity-hounds logging on only to do series reviews for books that don't have reviews when they figure out that it's easier to do.

To me, these are non-reviews of a series.

After all, if I'm committing to a series I want to know a few things.

For a publisher series (art, how-to, etc.):
- Is the formatting consistent?
- How in-depth is the subject material?
- How are the illustrations (are there any)?
- Binding/paper/extras quality?
- Who are the better authors (if there are more than one)?

I'll want to know a bit about subject matter if it's contained, but in a thing like the Idiot's or Dummies guide, that's a bit broad.

For a Series where I'm supposed to read in order, this is what I want to know:
- Is this series finished/continuing?
- How important is the order?
- To that end, how strong is the series aspect - is this really a series, or is it a sort of loosely connected stories that follow the same character around?
- How to the later books really fare? Am I reading something that got published because it was the next book in the series, or is it still really good writing, characters, development and story?
- How much mythology/history do I have to absorb/know?

These are the kinds of reviews I want to read from different perspectives. The rest, I'd prefer to chuck. And I most certainly don't want a regurgitation of "Best series Evah!!!111!!1! OMG!!"

If there were an easy way to get rid of the bad reviews and have the really informative ones stay, I'd feel more comfortable with a feature like this.

As it stands, I'd be really worried about a small number of really popular series getting a large amount of noise.

Eh...I guess I'm of a more flexible mind. I don't worry about this and gloss over it when it occurs. The wheat and the chaff separate themselves pretty quickly around here. Valid point, but I can't get that worked up over it.

I see the possible problems. But couldn't these partially be solved by limiting series reviewing to users who have catalogued some of that series? Open question, mind you.

As for "a small number of really popular series getting a large amount of noise" I can't see that as being really different from popular books getting a lot of noise.

Here's an ultra-simple workaround for "Series" reviews:

Create a new work that encompasses the series.

I mean, they already release box sets, which have their own ISBN, and everything.

So, for example, if you wanted to give a review of A Series of Unfortunate Events, just add The Complete Wreck and review it.

And for instances in which nobody else on LT has the book as an omnibus, add it manually. And then, fill out the CK field for series as something like "Omnibus" or some such similar, yet appropriate term.

Then, everything will get cleaned up when we have more refined work-to-work relationships.

>15 stephmo:

Ok, sure. But cataloging a book isn't the same thing as owning it.

I agree that reviews need to be "owned" by the person who posts them. And that's an obvious (though not insuperable) data difficulty, since series are a function of Common Knowledge.

I'm starting to wonder if there wouldn't be value in making a book/work type distinction with respect to series. The CK-generated series are quasi-work-level data. I'm imagining a system in which a user who has cataloged one or more books in a series can click a button to "Note this Series," with the effect of creating a quasi-book-level record unique to that user.

One benefit of such a system would be that it would allow me to see a page of "Series you Note," like the current "Series in your library," but not littered with things that I (as a user) consider to be irrelevant pseudo-series--like the "Charles Eliot Norton Lectures," or series in which I only have one book and no interest in acquiring more.

The other obvious benefit, of course, would be providing peg on which to hang my series review. These could then be aggregated up to the quasi-work level of the series page similar to the way that they are for individual books.

Honestly, I'm just tossing stuff out. Frankly, it could be as simple as it being a paid-member only feature to post a review of a series.

That would at least stop a lot of free-advertising type stuff. And it should stop quite a bit of the drive-by stuff where people would want to remain anonymous.

I think it would go without saying that you'd have to have some relationship with the series...

ETA - Clarified what I meant by paid-only.

#18, OH GOD NO!!!! Sorry for shouting but please, please no. There's been many a discussion about how to get rid of these already present phantom book work-arounds in Combiners! for whatever reason people use them. They mess up author pages, they're not a real work, the reasons not to do it have been thrashed over in the past many a time.

(Sorry, not being personally critical aethercowboy, it's just that creating these phantom works is not a thing that I like to see encouraged ...)

16>

The wheat and the chaff separate themselves pretty quickly around here.

I know that's gospel, but other than for extremely popular works I have to say I haven't seen it. Look at a work with half a dozen or so reviews -- you'll see a couple links to people's blogs, a non-review-review, a couple useless one-sentence reviews, and an actually useful review or two. And unless you want to devalue thumbs-up so completely that the legitimate reviews here get thumbs-up just by virtue of actually being reviews, the "wheat" and the "chaff" don't get separated. Because God forbid we be able to say "this review is not helpful".

>21 klarusu:
And then someone decides to combine all these strange works with the first volume of the series or people assign a single volume ISBN to these lumped works and the things start getting even worse :)

Not to mention people that have volumes 1-3, then buy volume 4, change the title of their book to say volumes 1-4 ... and this 1-4 remains combined with the 1-3 until someone sees it and fix it.

>21 klarusu:.

I understand the plight, and it irks me that though I have The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King, I still get recommendations to get The Lord of the Rings. Even if I bought a box of books, and there was an ISBN on the box (like there is with the aforementioned Complete Wreck), I enter each book individually. However, if I get a single-bound omnibus, since I'm against tearing it into different works, I enter that as a single volume, so since I own The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide, I still get recommended So Long, And Thanks for All the Fish.

I'm a silver-level combiner (last time I checked), so, I'm very familiar with the frustration involved with uber-works.

Being an armchair taxonomist, though, I would LOVE for LT to have a feature in which I could take one datapoint and designate it as a subset (though not necessarily a strict subset) of another datapoint, particularly with works (well, to be honest, I'd like all manner of work-to-work relationships). I'd also like to see the taxonomy work on the "Important Places" CK field, but that's an entirely different matter which may be outside the scope of LT...

That way, I'd stop getting recommendations for LOTR and SLATFATF, and people could review on whatever level they'd want to review, and the author pages could be a whole heckuva lot smarter, with little + button expansions and whatnot. Heck, a robot could go through the system periodically and clean things up, even (it would be leaps and bounds easier if relationships were present).

And further, in that case, the series information could then itself be a modified work instead of a CK field, and in that case, would encourage the generation of "phantom works."

In my humble opinion, though, I believe that though these phantom works are a total PITA to the combiners, they are just as valid as any other work, as per the definition of a "work."

I'm a silver-level combiner (last time I checked), so, I'm very familiar with the frustration involved with uber-works.

Oh, I know, that's why I was surprised that you suggested it. Didn't mean to imply that you weren't aware of the issues, just didn't want to totally hijack the thread rehashing stuff that's been done to death elsewhere. Like I said, not personal. Lack of work-level relationships bugs the hell out of me too. If I had to pick one thing that I wanted to be the 'next big thing after collections', that would be it.

I guess, Lorax, that I meant that I could separate the wheat from the chaff, not that the system would. Those types of unhelpful reviews are easily ignored by me and yes, I wish the romper room coddling would stop and we could say this review is unhelpful or sucks or whatever. But, given that it's all supposed to be sunshine and puppies it's up to me to discriminate. Some days I feel as though I'm the last person who can.

Phantom combining isn't the answer either. We need a database construct that represents a series and has many of the same features & benefits as a work and book. I don't know if such a thing is on the radar.