Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Hi,
I noticed an error in the page numbering of "A Dream of Red Mansions [4 Volume Set:]." It's listed as 1,887 but it should be 2,549. I applied for librarian status so I could change it myself, but for some reason it didn't work. And I want credit for reading such a long book. If someone could fix it for me, that would be cool.
Thanks,
Steve

Steve~

Just changed the page numbering for you.

I'm thinking the single volumes need to be "uncombined" from the book you mentioned that is volumes 1-4.

What do others think?

|243900]

I agree Kathrynn.

I separated them.

The author's books are kind of a mess, but I'm going to defer to someone who knows more about the various volumes.

Perhaps, Steve, the originator of this discussion or someone else in the know, could work on this author's books.

There's another copy of the same book that indicates 3500 pages and I'm wondering if it, too, is Volumes 1-4 or incorrectly numbered.

The author has several other books that are in volumes (some are indicated; some are not)as well. It's hard for me to tell if they go together, so... :-)

I know something about Cao Xueqin's work -- the problem here is that his single novel (Hong Lou Meng in Chinese) has been translated by a number of authors, and the volume divisions are arbitrary. So the contents of volume 3 in translator A's work are not the same thing as the contents of volume 3 in translator B's work -- and thus we get 4/5/6 volume editions. But it's all the same novel!

I'll start going through & adding appropriate 2nd authors as translators when I can figure out who they are. Once the various translations are figured out, then we can combine editions appropriately.

Okay, I've made some progress on this, but a lot of the random versions Amazon lists have no translator listed, despite being identified as an English-language version. This is exacerbated by the fact that some of the early translations are now in the public domain, so there are lots of print-on-demand companies picking them up.

But while puzzling over this... the librarian manual says that we're supposed to combine different editions of the same book, including different translations. All of the entries under Cao Xueqin are different editions/translations of the same single novel (the only novel he ever wrote), despite the enormous variations in volumes, pagination & naming. So should all of these actually be combined into one, except perhaps for
Selected Readings from the Story of the Stone? It's not really an ideal solution from the perspective of differentiating between translations, but the manual says that's what reviews are for...

Of course I can't quickly find anything to back this up, but my answer is no, Cera. Someone who read the first volume of a work isn't qualified to review the entire work, and that's basically what would happen if we combine all volumes and editions. I can sort of justify this as falling under the don't combine "2-in-1 books or boxed sets that include the given book." The entire work contains 4 volumes, so you could look at it as a 4-in-1 set.

I think I've just confused the issue, but I'm in a hurry and no one else has answered.

No, works shouldn't be combined across volumes, but if a volume contains the same part of the text in different translations, that should be combined. So if there are editions that are the whole novel, those should all be combined, and if you know for sure that two different "volume X" editions contain the same section, those should be combined.

Thanks JG & Cait -- this makes complete sense, and I'm glad for the clarification! But I'm afraid I now have another question -- I was going trying to figure out what had given me the idea that we combine individual volumes of a novel, and after some browsing realised that it was Charles Dickens; some multi-volume publications of his novels (for instance, _A Tale of Two Cities_) have been combined under the whole novel. So should those eventually be separated out? (There are also lots of multi-volume publications of his novels which have been treated appropriately.)

They should be separated, but it will have to be done by someone braver than I am!

Basically, I think it's safe to say that combined editions should have the same content, aside from differences that arise from different translations. That's a very general statement, and I'm sure there are some exceptions, but that's the very basic idea.

Thanks for jumping in there, Cait. You answered much more clearly than I did.

You folks are great! Thank you for taking this on.

Cera--

I was going trying to figure out what had given me the idea that we combine individual volumes of a novel, and after some browsing realised that it was Charles Dickens; some multi-volume publications of his novels (for instance, _A Tale of Two Cities_) have been combined under the whole novel. So should those eventually be separated out?

I think that answer is "ouch!" :) Yes, those do need to separate, but it's quite the daunting task for authors like Dickens, isn't it? (I'm tempted to make a pun along the "hurts like the dickens" line....)

I actually think the new separation tool makes separating a large number from the whole more time consuming and difficult, but it can be done. There are many incidences like A Tale of Two Cities, I am sure.

I rather like the separation tool for this sort of work -- which I suppose means that I just volunteered for it, didn't I? ;)

Have fun Cait. ;-)

Yes, I don't like the new separation tool, but I will use it. In other instances.

...oooh, I'm as far down as H and I'm remembering all over again how much I hate Dickens....

Cait, My sincere condolences. Thanks for doing it!

You're a brave woman, Cait! Thanks for tackling that!

And thank you *all* for bearing with me as I figure out the intricacies of Goodreads; I haven't been on this site very long (a month? six weeks?) but I've really fallen in love with it, and part of what I'm enjoying is being part of this librarian community, with everyone working together to figure things out & make the site better.

*flops down* Oh, wow, that was awful. It looks like someone had hit Hard Times and Nicholas Nickleby with a "separate all" and never recombined them, among other woes! But it's in a little more order now.

Cait, Thanks again. Grateful for the work. Then: Brace yourself. Somehow, there are certain authors where their books continually get messed up. The work is not in vain however.

Hey thanks for the updates! The trick with this book is that it's ONE novel, but printed in four sections for binding purposes (otherwise it would be six inches thick and the spine would crack easily). The four sections don't have seperate titles, they just continue with the next chapter where the last one left off. Also, as mentioned, there are several different translations that divide the novel in different ways (I think the David Hawkes translation divides it into 5 volumes and even goes so far as to title them individually). But it is just one novel, not a trilogy or tetralogy or pentalogy. It's just a single novel, even more so than Proust's massive book (which I guess is technically a heptalogy). Hope that helps stem some of the confusion.

A general page count question--Do we only put the pages for the actual text, or do we include indexes (I know that's incorrect but it's too late to think of the correct word) and bibliographies, and do we include "Keep reading for a sneak peak of the next book" pages?

For nonfiction books, I include the Index in the page numbering because I see it as part of the book.

For fiction, I only put the page numbers that coincide with the actual story--not the lead in for the next one.

Curious to see what others say about this. Good question! ;-)

I second Kathrynn's assessment.

:)

I agree with Kathryn as well, although I would include an index (or references) for a fiction book, in the few cases that is relevant. But yeah, not the blurb or summary for the next book, no ads, etc.

Makes sense to me. Thanks for weighing in here. :-)