Modernize Book type?
I find Zotero's "Book" type outdated. Currently DOI has to put to "extra" and there isn't any provisions for multiple ISBNs: a single book can have up to three ISBNs, one for the hard cover, one for the soft cover, and the other for the eBook version.
I think DOI should be a proper field and multiple ISBNs should be allowed.
Does this make sense? If so, where should I submit this feature request?
Also, what should we do with the chapters of eBooks? An eBook often has separate PDFs and separate DOIs for individual chapters. I suppose we need a systematic method to record this information and store downloaded PDF files within the entry of the eBook, or otherwise to create a hierarchy of entries. Currently it's easy to create one Zotero entry for a chapter but it's tedious to create all the entries for all chapters and it's not obvious how you can combine them under a single book entry.
I think DOI should be a proper field and multiple ISBNs should be allowed.
Does this make sense? If so, where should I submit this feature request?
Also, what should we do with the chapters of eBooks? An eBook often has separate PDFs and separate DOIs for individual chapters. I suppose we need a systematic method to record this information and store downloaded PDF files within the entry of the eBook, or otherwise to create a hierarchy of entries. Currently it's easy to create one Zotero entry for a chapter but it's tedious to create all the entries for all chapters and it's not obvious how you can combine them under a single book entry.
tl;dr: When the different types will be updated to include a "DOI" field, this information will be directly picked up from the "Extra" field.
Regarding the multiple DOI, I didn't see so much discussion about this.
I agree that automatically creating and linking both the book reference and the relevant chapter(s) would be nice.
In the previous answer, I guess "multiple DOI" was supposed to be "multiple ISBN"?
I know that, as I implied in my initial posting. What I've been wondering for a long time is: Why are people here so reluctant to update the types and fields?
Arguably, DOI in `extra` is a kluge (workaround), not a proper "solution".
Digitization only accelerates.
Is there a forum to propose and discuss changes to the types and fields?
Thanks. This comment of yours prompted me to re-examine the process. Then, I've now found a method to import the individual chapters all at once into Zotero. The Zotero webbrowser plugin offers such an option, although I don't know this interface applies to all eBooks.
> multiple ISBNs
I imported the eBook again into Zotero and found that the single ISBN field accommodates multiple ISBNs (I don't know how. Perhaps just separate them by a newline character?), but the information of which ISBN corresponds to eBook is lost. Also, only two of the three ISBNs have been imported. I don't know why.
Is it standard with Zotero that multiple "values" are contained in a single field?
For example, for a multiple-author publication, you create multiple author fields. In contrast, a single ISBN field can apparently contain multiple ISBNs. Is this how things should work?
For the ISBN -- having separately entered ISBNs is just not much of a priority in terms of data structure (there are few use cases) and the data model is only as complex as it needs to be.