Dimensions, type of paper, price and weigth

DaniOrama
Hello everyone, maybe these fields are included (I cannot find them in my spanish translation) but if they aren't they would be a nice feature, because it helps to relate things and stablish production parameters.
  • bdarcus
    What percentage of potential Zotero users would care about this information? I'd suggest it's something much, much less than 1 percent.
  • DaniOrama
    I think knowing price is really important, not only for students, but everyone who reads technical books (some of them cost hundreds dollars) will consider twice when they have cheaper options. Also weigth is pretty important when you have to pay shipment from USA or ASIA to Europe.

    Libraries (at least in Spain) have really big problems with space, as long as many users if they have paper versions. Many times dimensions are really considered to buy or organize documents.

    Also everyone working or studying publishing must know these things. If they don't they are just taking out maybe the most important things...

    Maybe the type of paper would be a bit too much, but it's very nice to know which surface, grain, width and grammage has the paper of a book, right now there are not so many options, besides experimentation, to learn about them, and having these things could help really. Of course someting like http://www.color.org/Rich-Paper_Parameters.pdf would be too much, but it's easy to understand the importance of paper designing a book.

    Also other fields like cover type, binding, text body font, etc... would be really appreciated.

    I don't know if adding new fields would be really difficult, but trust me that if it's simple it would make some people really happy and will help to the general knowledge of publishing issues and stablishing standards.
  • bdarcus
    I think knowing price is really important, not only for students, but everyone who reads technical books (some of them cost hundreds dollars) will consider twice when they have cheaper options. Also weigth is pretty important when you have to pay shipment from USA or ASIA to Europe.
    This (and your other examples) explain why some users might want to be able to access this information, but it doesn't necessarily follow that Zotero ought to store and display it.

    I mean, if you find your book on some Amazon U.S. or U.K. page and include the record in your Zotero database, there should be a link to that page. It takes essentially one-click to go back to it to see the price, etc.
  • DaniOrama
    It could also be added to Additional, but later when you want to make advanced searches, and for example search books in a range of price it won't be easy.

    Also we're talking about not so many fields, just 4-5 more... there are also other many fields implemented not used by many users. I mean, a bunch of them are not used (10-13 usually) by site translators, but they are listed...

    A good thing could be to show/hide fields, or even options for adding new ones... Anyway, I think it's not so strange to add dimensions, price, weigth to paper books, those are universal parameters, everyone have them... I don't see where is the real problem to add them if it doesn't mean much work? I can see more benefits than problems...

    Of course according to your needs some things are more important than other, but there are so much evidence in the real world about how dimensions, price and weigth influence the reader equally (or sometimes more) than publisher, title and author... Anyway, as it's said, there are so many opinions in the world as colours and tastes...
  • raf
    edited December 6, 2007
    I might be among the 1 percent but at least the physical size of a given work can be of reasonable interest. I'm talking about such measurements as folio, quarto, octavo and duodecimo.

    Perhaps this is interesting for librarians too. It certainly can be of interest to people who work on the impact of a given work on the popular consciousness, lets say in the 17th century. When the first edition of a given work appeared in folio and a second octavo edition comes out, it indicates a much wider circulation of the work. Big books generally were (and still are) more costly.

    Some people (less than 1 percent of the Zotero users?) might find this valuable bibliographical information. But then again, it could be put in "Extra" too.
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