HelpThing›Profile›Stats›Series

From WikiThing

[edit] Overview

The Series in your library page (part of Your Profile Common Knowledge) will give you more information about series that your books belong to, plus the books you own and don't yet own from them.

It's important to understand that LibraryThing has a special definition for "series;" this definition is different from what librarians and publishers call series.

[edit] Concepts

Series information is entered by LibraryThing members as part of Common Knowledge on a book's work page. A good rule of thumb is that series have a conventional name and are intentional creations on the part of the author or original publisher. For instance, all of the Harry Potter works form a series, since they were written by the same author about the same set of characters. If someone else wrote a book about Harry Potter and didn't get sued, it still wouldn't be part of the series even though it would share characters. On the other hand, there are many authors licensed to write Star Wars books, and there are many series (and sub-series) in LibraryThing for those books.

A "work" can only be counted as part of a series if every single edition of that work belongs to that series. Some publishers like to create special series names to market their books, but these aren't usually series in the LibraryThing sense. Unless the publisher has a true monopoly over the "works" in question, it won't count as a LibraryThing series. The Dummies guides were written specifically for one publisher, so they are a series. But the Loeb Classical Library is a series of editions, not of works, because other editions of the same literary creations are not part of the Loeb Classical Library. Similarly, lots of books say "Penguin Classics," but you can get those books in other editions, so they are not a series.

You don't need to fully understand series to have fun with your series statistics, but if you want to know more, check out the Series wiki page or two groups that love to talk about Common Knowledge series: In All Seriesness and Common Knowledge, WikiThing, and HelpThing.

[edit] Features

The Series in your library page is fairly simple. The series are listed alphabetically, and you have two options to view them.

• Your books will display only the books you own.
• All books will display the books you own (with green check marks) as well as books in the series you don't yet own (no check marks.)

You can click on any book title to go to it's corresponding work page, and you can click on any series name to link to a page with more information about the series, such as a series description, related tags, awards, characters, and places.

[edit] Notes and Frequently-Asked-Questions

[edit] It says I don't own (book name), but I do! Why?

There are several reasons your book might not show up in a series listing:

• Someone might not have yet entered series information for that book on the work page (Common Knowledge). Most popular series have been entered, but by no means all.
• Your copy of the book might not have been properly combined with other copies of the same work.
• You might have the book as "part" of a combined whole. LibraryThing members try to include omnibus editions containing more than one book in Common Knowledge, but even when they enter these, the system can't yet recognize the overlap. For instance, if you have a box set with the first three books in the Dark Tower series, the omnibus edition will show a green checkmark, but the system can't tell that you own books 1-3, so those books aren't separately checked.