Entering_data_for_a_book - freebase-schema/freebase GitHub Wiki

When adding information about a book, you have a few options. You can enter the basic data for the abstract idea of the book (e.g., author, date, genre), or you can enter data about a specific edition of a book. You can also enter information about a book’s contents, translations, etc.

Briefly, a Book is anything that has been published in book form. The Book type should represent the most abstract notion of the book, rather than any specific publication of it. This provides for a single node that can be referred to when discussing or linking to a book (e.g., lists of favorite books or awards or lists of an author's works generally refer to instances of the Book type, rather than to specific publications that book. The Book type can be applied to writings that have never appeared in a traditional bound form, such as those released only in audio or electronic formats, as well as ancient formats like papyrus. The Book type can also be applied to instances of other, related, types, such as Short Story, Play, Poem, and Dissertation, providing that they have been published as stand-alone books. This prevents duplication. For example, Hamlet is primarily a play, but has been published numerous times in stand-alone book editions. If the Play and Book instances (and therefore the authorship of each) were entered separately, Shakespeare would have two entries for "Hamlet" in his bibliography, which would be wrong. Another way of thinking about it is that the Book type simply represents something that holds a text and has properties that only represent publication data; other types (most especially Written Work are used to store data about the text or other contents of the work.

Periodical issues, while similar, should not be typed as Books. (There is a gray area, where certain periodicals release issues in a book-like way, even to the point of having ISBNs. A case could be made for typing these as both Book and Magazine issue.

Much of the information about a book, such as author, copyright date, and language, will be entered in properties on the type Written work. See Entering Data for All Written Works for more information. The Book type contains additional information about the book that will be true of all versions of the book. Information about specific editions such as publisher and ISBN should be entered in the Book Edition type (see below).

• The convention is to use the full name of the book (including subtitle) as the name of the topic; if the book is commonly known by a shorter name however, the full name can be put in the Also known as field instead. If the book has been published under multiple names, try to use the most commonly-known one; if you’re not sure, pick one, and put the others in the Also known as field.

• Genre describes the class of literature the book belongs to, rather than its subject matter.

• Characters should only be used for works of fiction.

• Interior Illustrations by: on books in which the illustrations will be the same in all editions, enter the illustrator(s) here. Children’s picture books are a good example of this sort of book. Illustrators for books in which the illustrations may differ between editions should be entered in the Book Edition type (see below).

### Book Editions (More Advanced)

A Book Edition represents a specific publication of a book. Print, audio, and electronic versions of books can all be represented as book editions. Note that we are not, for the most part, interested in tracking separate printings of an edition, except in rare cases where there has been significant change between printings (such as a new cover or additional contents).

• The title of an edition can be entered several ways. The simplest is simply to give it the title that appears on that edition, which will be the same as the book in the majority of cases. In many cases, however, books have undergone title changes, and this is useful information to know. You can also include descriptive information if you think it’s merited (such as "revised edition", “limited edition”, “critical edition”, etc.). Additional clarifying information can be added to the topic’s Description; this text will appear in the flyout for autocompletion, making it easier to tell the difference between many similarly-named editions.

• Edition of: this property connects to the topic for the book that this is an edtion of.

• Contributing authors: enter the names of people who have contributed content to the book, but who are not credited as one of the primary authors or editors. This is especially useful if you know that someone contributed something to a book, but don’t know the title. This is a partial duplication of the Contents property on the Published Work type (see Entering the Contents of a Book or Periodical for more information about contents).

• Editor of this edition: if the editor would be listed as the editor for all editions (e.g. the editor of an anthology or collection), they should be entered instead on the written work type. If the editor is only an editor of one or a few editions (such as a critical or annotated edition), the editor should be entered on this property of the book edition type.

• Publisher: enter the publisher from the title page, if listed.

• Binding/Format: this will be something like “Hardcover”, “Paperback”, “Trade paperback”, etc. for print books; “Cassette”, “CD”, etc. for audiobooks; and file formats for ebooks.

• Place of Publication: use the first city printed on the title page, if more than one are given.

• ISBN: enter the ISBNs here as either an ISBN-10 or ISBN-13.

• LCC: this stands for “Library of Congress Classification”, and is the call number of the book in libraries that use this system.

• OCLC number: this is a unique identifier used by many library systems around the world

• LCCN: this stands for “Library of Congress Control Number”, and is a unique identifier for books published in the United States.

• Cover price: the price listed on the cover or inside flap of the book.

• Number of Pages: there are two values for this property, “front matter” which should be a Roman numeral for works in which the front matter is numbered differently than the body of the book, and “numbered pages”, which should be the last numbered page in the book.

• Some books (such as omnibuses and some Bibles) have multiple page ranges; to accommodate this, the “numbered pages” property is not unique. Enter the highest page number in each range.

• Reader (audio book): if this edition is an audio book, enter the name of the person or people who read the book.

• Cover artist: the name of the person or company that created the cover art for this edition. Note that Freebase will automatically apply the Person type to any topic you enter in this property; if you enter a company, please then edit the company’s topic and remove the type Person.

• Interior illustrations by: the name or names of all people who created interior illustrations for this edition. Note that for books like children’s picture books and graphic novels, the interior illustrator will be the same for all editions. Rather than input that data here, it should go in the corresponding property on the Book type.

• Credited as: enter the names of the author or authors as they appear in this edition. This property is how we distinguish the bibliographically-correct information from the author’s canonical name in Freebase. E.g., the author Mark Twain has had books published under that pseudonym as well as many variations on his real name: Samuel Clemens, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Samuel L. Clemens, etc. All these editions should be linked to the same author topic (currently titled Mark Twain), but it can also be valuable to know how a given edition was attributed.

The simplest way to enter a book edition that is a translation is to enter it as an edition of the Book. In this case, you should title the edition with the book’s name in the new language (or as close as you can make it with your keyboard, since Freebase doesn’t currently handle some non-Latin alphabets well). Note that you cannot enter the translator or the language of the translation. If you want to enter this data, see Entering a Translated Work of Literature.

If you would like to add the contents of a book, see Entering the Contents of a Book or Periodical. Note, however, that this is currently a somewhat complex operation. See also Entering Special Kinds of Books for information about entering omnibuses and other unusual types of books.

To enter data for excerpts and serial installments of a book, see Entering Serialized and Excerpted Works of Literature.