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From: Ahasuerus <ahasuerus@email.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Re: [Meta] Wait, you sort your books how???
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2024 18:15:37 -0400
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On 7/16/2024 9:19 AM, BillGill wrote:
> On 7/15/2024 12:25 PM, Ahasuerus wrote:
>> On 7/15/2024 9:48 AM, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:
>>> In article <v738di$n4rq$1@dont-email.me>,
>>> Tony Nance  <tnusenet17@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> More signs of madness in this crazy world:
>>>>
>>>> I just ran across the results of a poll that asked 29,000 Americans
>>>> about their book-owning habits, and friends, I am shocked — shocked! —
>>>> to report that there are people who have absolutely no organizational
>>>> system whatsoever. Worse — worse, I tell you — there are some who sort
>>>> their books by color. Color!
>>>>
>>>> Here’s a link to the main source (published in October):
>>>> https://today.yougov.com/society/articles/47712-how-many-books-americans-own-and-how-they-organize-them
>>>
>>> I could read the link, I suppose, but I wonder how many people actually
>>> have a sufficient number of books such that they need to be organized.
>>
>> As a general observation, the viability of various organizational 
>> systems depends on the number of books to be organized. What works 
>> reasonably well for a few hundred books -- e.g. sorting by the 
>> author's last name -- may be problematic for a collection with a few 
>> thousand books and completely unworkable for a collection that 
>> contains tens of thousands of books.
> Have you checked your local library lately?  They do have
> thousands of books.  They use a system that separates the
> books by class, first fiction and non-fiction.  Then
> they separate the non-fiction according to the Dewey Decimal
> Code.  The Fiction is separated into a number of sub
> classifications, such as General Fiction, Mysteries,
> Science Fiction, and of course Children's.  Then within
> those categories they are sorted by the author's last
> name.

[snip]

It's a viable system for certain types of use cases. Unfortunately, any 
system that sorts books "by the author's last name" comes with inherent 
limitations. Suppose you have N bookcases dedicated to authors whose 
last name starts with an "H". Everything is fine as long as your library 
is static or close to it. Then you discover that you absolutely love D. 
K. Holmberg (https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?200173) and/or Nathan 
Hystad (https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?249647) -- to pick two 
random prolific authors -- and suddenly you have a problem.