Where to put a book's own description?

Where to put a manually added book's own description found in bookstore site?

>1 CuriousLearner: There really isn't a place for it, as you have noticed. Just your own descriptions and descriptions fetched automatically. I'd put it in Private comments.

>1 CuriousLearner: I use the comments field for the blurb which still leaves me the private comments for thoughts I want to keep...private. :D

I do the same of >3 Taliesien:, except that I usually don't add private comments (unless for example I am saving the corrections of some typos)

How about putting it in Summary?

>5 CuriousLearner: If you're not concerned with any copyright issues (and I don't think you should be, I'll add, but some people would be which is why I suggested Private comments), that would work, I think. Provided it actually is a summary and not a blurb.

Seconding Private comments.

Haiku summary is for your own summary in haiku format.

There isn't a named place for back-of-book blurbs or commercial descriptions from other sites. Book description is for a summary that you wrote. Some people delete anything that's obviously copied and not the user's own words.

>7 karenb: Summary is not Haiku summary, but a field that, if you don't enter something else, shows Title, author and date from your data.

>8 MarthaJeanne: She meant Haiku summary CK field

>9 SandraArdnas: but 5 was talking about Summary. Using Summary for this is fine as it only affects your own data.

>5 CuriousLearner: I needed my book blurbs to appear in TinyCat and since the Summary field was not available in TinyCat at the time I was setting it up, I used Comments.

Btw, what are the original roles for the Comments and Summary fields?

>12 CuriousLearner: There's some information on the wiki: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/Editing_your_books

I usually let the autogenerated contents in Summary be. But if there is more than one author and/or an editor I add that manually, so the Summary can be used to find authors in an anthology and stuff like that. Once upon a time the Summary field was rather restricted in size, but that's not been an issue for years.

>12 CuriousLearner: I assume summary's main intention is to have one field with all that info as an option for a column in catalogue view, but it's also a free form field, so it can be used for anything you wish just like comments and private comments. E.g. I add content for short story/essay collections since it's searchable

I've always wondered why LibraryThing has never really supported book descriptions / blurbs like every other book cataloguing site does. It's pretty awkward in the main, and I find it makes the recommendation engine well less useful as instead of just clicking on a recommended book to read the blurb, I need to copy and paste the name and past that into a google or goodreads search.

>16 quasar: They do now. New feature, you hover over the book, lightbox appears with description and add button.
UNLESS it's an obscure book or old book that the description isn't available.

If there are descriptions available you can access them from the left hand menu on the main book page.

BTW saying that the other sites do it that way is not really a positive recommendation for people who prefer LT to the other sites.

>16 quasar: It was one of LT biggest flaws for me when I was evaluating whether to use the platform. Still is, and is why LT is basically useless to me for book discovery and it's just a backup to Calibre. The way the site obtains descriptions (official blurbs) is based on legacy publishing and book distribution. I've primarily read KU since it launched in 2014 and those blurbs not being auto imported (because they were exclusive to KU and not in wide sales/library distribution channels) was a real PITA and why I had to use TinyCat as a workaround by manually copying the blurb into the comments field and displaying that in TC for other group members for browsing purposes.

how to vex a vampire is neither obscure (almost 4k ratings on Amazon, 6k+ on GR) nor old and yet LT will never show an author/publisher description unless a user goes against the guidelines and copies the blurb into a member description or a different format (print/audio) eventually makes it into the library distribution channels and is picked up by Bowker.

The fact the I could add a book from Amazon and get the cover, title, pub info (publisher, date, page count) & ASIN auto populated but not the blurb/description seemed completely illogical. So yeah, I feel your pain. "Awkward" is a much nicer way to describe the massive inconvenience than I and others have. ;-)

>18 MarthaJeanne: "BTW saying that the other sites do it that way is not really a positive recommendation for people who prefer LT to the other sites."

LOL, pretty sure it was meant as a criticism of LT, and a very valid one at that.

>19 Taliesien: Actually, LT used to have all those descriptions from Amazon and such. If you look, there's still 2 categories of descriptions in CK. Only when descriptions were reworked to allow up and down voting did the other one start appearing empty. Can't say I miss it, those were practically always loaded with useless crap and it often wasn't until the second paragraph that summary itself started. Not that these don't appear among current ones, but we can actually influence the default one that appears on pop up to something useful, unlike on Goodreads, where your only way of seeing another description is bumbling around among various editions to find a decent one.

>19 Taliesien: Yeah. I mostly found it weird that if you select Amazon to import data from it would import everything except the publisher description most of the time.

And yeah, me reading alot of KU book and using LT to catalogue audiobooks makes that less likely to get imported. Add to that I do have to manually create records every so often and I certainly can't fill in a description box for manually created entries.

Of course GR has its own things that drive me insane, like how poorly I find alot of the book data and having to jump through hoops to become a 'librarian' just to add additional versions of a work or to fix the data (such as simple things like adding a book to a series that no-one could be bothered to add). Plus how you can't really add books that aren't sold on amazon/audible.