Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

I hope this hasn't been asked elsewhere; I did only a cursory examination, and apologize if this has been covered.

Different "versions of the same book" are to be merged. Is an Nth edition considered the "same book" as the originating 1st edition? Is this true even for heavily-revised books, especially those from the sciences?

I understand that translations are to be grouped, and understand the reasoning behind considering these the "same book" (they're a hopefully-lossless (unlikely) encoding of the original text), but I have a hard time swallowing this for revisions. If one takes it to its logical conclusion, what happens when an author expands, say, a novella into a novel? A doctoral thesis into a general-use textbook?

I can think of several titles:
- CLR's Introduction to Algorithms,
- Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming, and
- Stevens's Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

which are the same book across editions in name only. Whole chapters are purged, added, and moved around.

I just merged the first and second editions of The Phish Companion, and realized it might have been faulty. The semantics of the merging guidelines, however, are a bit ambiguous regarding this topic.

Thanks!

--rigorously, nick

There has been some debate on this, but I think we left it that we will continue to combine in these cases.

(There are many things that make sense in the specific but don't when taken to their logical conclusion. It's called a slippery slope argument, and it's generally considered to be problematic.)

Thanks for the confirmation, rivka!

And yes, I'm aware that qualification (binding) of existential (free) variables fails to exhibit closure under the operation of implication. But thanks for the link! =)

It's Sunday. Sentences that makes me work that hard to parse oughta be illegal on Sundays. ;)