The author is the last to know

[rolanni]

Frequent readers of this journal will recall that The Nice Editor Lady (TNEL) at Ace had back in April given us a schedule for the mass market reissue of the Liaden books. According to that schedule, Agent of Change was to be published in December 2008.

So, over on Amazon.com, Agent is listed as hitting the shelves on November 25.

Bn.com, in the meantime, is positing a publication date of October 28.

The Ace online catalog, which one would think would be the Definitive Source for information of this kind, shows two Lee and Miller titles -- Crystal Soldier and Crystal Dragon.


If anybody sees a copy of Agent on the bookshelves in the next couple weeks, sing out, OK?

Comments

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Oh, and the usual Amazon.com confusedness -- if I search for AoC + Sharon Lee I find it (and the others), if I use Steve Miller instead then I don't, if I just use either name without AoC I don't get the new editions at all, and if I tell it to search on publication date I get all of them in totally random order. Someone should really fix their database system (I'd volunteer but (a) they couldn't pay me enough to work that side of the Pond and (b) I don't do databases anyway if I have any choice)...

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

I'm told that there is something Very, Very Difficult about having one book pointing to two (or more) authors. LibraryThing has the same problem.

Clearly, I'm clueless as to what causes the problem database-wise, for a database wiz I am not -- maybe the necessity for keeping a double set of records for each book, one under each author's name?

[ckd]

Warning: Completely Pulled-From-Rump Speculation Follows.

It sounds like an underspecification to me, where the database design was done with the assumption that each "book" record just needs a pointer to one "author" record.

One approach is to have three tables: books, authors, and book-author links (where each book can be linked to multiple authors, and multiple books to the same author or authors).

Another would be to have an "author" record which represented a collaboration, and that itself linked to multiple authors.

(I'm not a database designer, but I did take a DB design class in college, and do some relational DB stuff now and then.)

[keristor.livejournal.com]

I don't think, from using it, that they have links at all. From the time it takes and the irrelevance of many of the results I suspect that they just do a search on the whole text (or at least title and author as a string). But why they sometimes can't get a publication date sort right I have no idea (I mean, I'd already done the search, all they had to do was sort the results, right?)...