Douban To Add Book Series

Written by Luyi Chen on April 4, 2009
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doubanDouban, the book reviews and recommendation service, has just announced a new expansion of book attributes, series. Via Wikipedia, a book series is a sequence of books with certain characteristics in common that are formally identified together as a group.

Book series look like a public and collaborative version of another more private feature — book lists. According to douban, some initial data coming along with the new features would have been converted from a group of well maintained book lists. Contributors to the book series would be listed on the according page in the same way like other wiki services.

What’s not clear is who has the final decision of the qualification of those series. Apart from those formally identified by publishers, you can group book series according to topic or author. Is there minimum number of books for a qualified series? In theory, any author with multiple publications would eventually have a series named by his name. By adding another dimension to the data, the management would become more challenging.

Book series is also a feature used in recommendation. Douban mentioned that since books in the same series will be listed on book profile, they won’t include them in recommendation any more.

One Response to “Douban To Add Book Series”

  1. Brant on April 5th, 2009 2:56 pm

    Luyi Chen, once a douban user updates a book series, the new information will be verified by editor first.

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