Re: [Meta] Wait, you sort your books how???

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.