Reviews here, reviews elsewhere...

[imabuddha]

(I don't say don't point out errors - but a more fruitful way is just to pass them to the author or publisher).

That's true, but it's also very useful for people who already own the book and thus want to pencil in any corrections. Of course it would be nice if publishers would send errata updates and/or new versions to book buyers but…

I've noticed that even vendors of electronic publications often don't send or make available corrected versions. This is unfortunate IMO.

[mohsart]

If anyone's interested, there is a nice go book review website here:

http://gobooks.nemir.org/browse.html

For me, as a book seller, this is perfect.
Having the publisher's code for the book in the URL makes it possible to link to it "automatically" from each book in my store, same for e.g Slate & Shell's webpage while SL, lifein19x19, and Kiseido are much more difficult to handle.

Now, I said for me as a seller, but I believe that it is also good for the buyers.
When they browse my (or someone else's) shop and want to find out more about a book, it's very nice to have a link to reviews etc as opposed to a link to eg lifein19x19 and a suggestion to search for info there.

/Mats

[judicata]

(I don't say don't point out errors - but a more fruitful way is just to pass them to the author or publisher).

That's true, but it's also very useful for people who already own the book and thus want to pencil in any corrections. Of course it would be nice if publishers would send errata updates and/or new versions to book buyers but…

I've noticed that even vendors of electronic publications often don't send or make available corrected versions. This is unfortunate IMO.

I suspect (but could be wrong) that the errata pages on Sensei's started with the intent that users post errata of go problems, which is useful--when I get a problem book, I scan the errata, so I don't spend 5 minutes on an unsolvable problem.

Regardless, the copy editing serves little purpose other than to obscure actually useful corrections.

[imabuddha]

I suspect (but could be wrong) that the errata pages on Sensei's started with the intent that users post errata of go problems, which is useful--when I get a problem book, I scan the errata, so I don't spend 5 minutes on an unsolvable problem.

Regardless, the copy editing serves little purpose other than to obscure actually useful corrections.

I agree; the focus should be on errors of substance, not on missing punctuation.

[gowan]

I just took a quick look at the go book review forum. There are only nine threads there. John Fairbairn posted a wittily-written review of a Japanese book by Cho Chikun about his territorial style. It made me order the book. However, I don't imagine very many non-Japanese-fluent people would buy the book. The thread for that excellent review devolved into some ranty OT posts.

A question came to me regarding duplication. There have been quite a few posts asking what book should I buy next, and the responses seem like minireviews of books that have been around for a long time. But these same books, which would surely get more than one or two people to answer the poll as having read the book, are not reviewed on the forum. Reviews exist elsewhere, but if you are, say, a 15k player who wants to know what problem book(s) to get (Go Problems for Beginners, right?) where can reviews be found easily? It seems to me that there are a lot of reviews scattered throughout L19 which are hard to find. Maybe they should be collected on the review forum if we are going to be serious about being a source for reviews. And wouldn't it be nice to have a sort of books FAQ pointing people to reviews and recommendations of books for various levels and on various subjects that keep coming up over and over?

[daal]

It seems to me that there are a lot of reviews scattered throughout L19 which are hard to find.

Here is a list of reviews that have appeared on L19: viewtopic.php?p=45918#p45918

[PeterHB]

Sample pages are useful, too. Sensei's Library has occasionally been good in this respect, but in my view SL shoots itself in the foot with its twee, pseudo-objective language and also with its strange obsession (sometimes replicated here) for posting errata pages. I really do fail to understand what goes through the minds of people who post things like "a comma is missing between X and Y on page Z", as if they were the only people ever to be capable of spotting such an error, yet never manage to say anything positive about a book that must have engaged their attention massively for them to spot the hiccups. (I don't say don't point out errors - but a more fruitful way is just to pass them to the author or publisher).

Ho hum. I'm the major guilty party that this discusses.

I tried hard to make the errata pages sub-pages from the main page about the book. I tried to make the errata link from the book page as small as possible. The book I first did this for was 'Making Good Shape', which I think is one of the best Go books in English. My copy was very well worn out before I replaced it with a copy of the 2nd edition, which is still in pretty good condition. To buy a 2nd copy of the same book is a comment on how much I liked the book. And yet your comment "a comma is missing between X and Y on page Z" is not just humour, but a pretty accurate description of some of the typographical errors. Well I have actually communicated with the author on this subject, and unfortunately the 2nd edition was greatly improved, but still had many of the same kind of jarring errors, mainly of the type where black and white are mixed up.

So why bother? Well lets examine the alternative. I could start a long correspondence with each publisher, where I send a list of the things I found and they take the time to send a polite but carefully not too engaging thank-you, with the addition that many have also been been found by themselves after printing, and by other readers kind enough to write in. Then on the next reading I find some more and write another letter to the publisher. At this point they start to wonder if there will ever be a way to phrase a letter to stop this annoying, but well-meaning individual, from bothering them.

So now lets think of what is particularly special about a wiki. Anyone can edit it. So anyone who wishes to can co-operate, and anyone who is not interested can just ignore it. So I thought it was quite suitable for listing errata, because I wouldn't have to do all the work. I would just add what I found, other people could add stuff they found and nobody repeats effort. The publisher just ignores it until he is thinking of doing a re-print and has a quick look then. I guess it takes less than a day for the publisher to incorporate the changes he wishes to, and just ignore the ones he disagrees with.

I included the small stuff as well as the large stuff because of a couple of problems:
1. Where is the border between large & small?
2. I would see a mistake and think 'Didn't I see this before?'.
If a publisher is re-printing, it is as easy to fix the small stuff as to fix the large stuff, all at the same time. Well as long as someone has pointed it out, because if it was so obvious, the publisher would never have allowed the mistake to appear in the first place.

I am not a strong writer or a strong player, so I find writing reviews hard, even though I also think I should try harder. You are right that there should be more reviews on SL.

So, I meant well, I tried to do it in a way that didn't dominate the book page, but it looks like I caused offence anyway. Sorry.

[kirkmc]

From my point of view, having written and published a dozen books, as well as a number of ebooks, I think you need to understand the publishing process. There are some mistakes which are very serious - in a go book, that'd be a diagram - that merit changing. Making this kind of change can cost money, depending on how the book is printed. (If it's offset, and the publisher has kept the plates for a reprint, it means redoing a plate; not a huge expense, but not just a couple of bucks.) If it's just changing a typo or a comma, it's less likely that a small publisher will go to the trouble.

On the other hand, in my experience, publishers are always interested in any reports of typos. (Some authors are less so, because it's a headache for them to then go through the process of getting the corrections to the publisher; again, the size of the publisher makes a big difference.)

But no matter what, the law of conservation of typographical errors applies: for every typo you correct in a new edition, one or more new typos appear. No book is perfect; I've never had a book where I haven't spotted a typo on the first page I've opened at random; not that there are typos on every page, but you just open to those pages, for some reason. The gods of typography want it that way.

Again, if it's not diagrams, or essential explanations (alive vs. dead; sente vs. gote), send the info to the publisher, but don't count on it being corrected in books by small presses.

[tapir]

I think, like Kirk, that L19 is currently the best place for reviews and SL should be avoided for the reasons above, though with some reform SL could be a more logical place.

You made yourself pretty clear on that earlier, I well remember you explicitly stated you don't want to be quoted on SL anymore. Fair enough. Addressing SL as a single entity to be reformed or reform itself, however, shows a profound misunderstanding of what a wiki is meant to be, but alas, you do not want it to be a wiki anymore (only signed contributions, no discussion...)

This politicking between platforms (did mentioning rgg merit such ridicule) is particularly strange in case of book reviews that are in no way limited to a single platform and in a thread asking for cross-posting of own reviews.

[John Fairbairn]

But no matter what, the law of conservation of typographical errors applies: for every typo you correct in a new edition, one or more new typos appear. No book is perfect; I've never had a book where I haven't spotted a typo on the first page I've opened at random; not that there are typos on every page, but you just open to those pages, for some reason. The gods of typography want it that way.

This is the experience not just of book authors but also journalists, and may even be proof of aliens among us

When I had my first book published by Oxford University Press, I was wined and dined several times in the process (the world was a more civilised place then), and one story I heard more than once was about some anniversary (the 400th?) of the OUP. For this occasion the top brass decided they would reprint their first (?) book in a traditional manner but with the special provision that they would make absolutely sure that it had no typographical mistakes. It was checked umpteen times and finally someone decreed it was safe to go off to the press. But in the process, when the frame containing the colophon was handled, a letter at the end of the date fell off. As this was a Roman numeral, no-one noticed even when a trial impression of the form was made.

The book duly appeared in large numbers, and of course the error was then spotted instantly. Chagrin all round.

The moral of this story is that this one tiny and unimportant error is all that seems to be remembered now about that book. Few people know or care what the book was or who the author was or what the anniversary was, but many people know about the embarrassment.

This is part of the problem with focusing on small errors in go books. If your cardigan has a small hole in it, you inevitably poke your finger in it, make the hole bigger, and eventually make the cardigan unusable. You forget that the purpose of the cardigan was not to be a plaything but was to keep you warm, and it was probably doing a pretty serviceable job of that until you subverted the process with your fidgety digit.

[kirkmc]

I think, like Kirk, that L19 is currently the best place for reviews and SL should be avoided for the reasons above, though with some reform SL could be a more logical place.

You made yourself pretty clear on that earlier, I well remember you explicitly stated you don't want to be quoted on SL anymore. Fair enough. Addressing SL as a single entity to be reformed or reform itself, however, shows a profound misunderstanding of what a wiki is meant to be, but alas, you do not want it to be a wiki anymore (only signed contributions, no discussion...)

I edit a number of articles on Wikipedia, and, while you or someone else has claimed that Wikipedia is not a "real" wiki, I find that the segregation of content and discussion makes a lot of sense. At a minimum, perhaps SL should have two types of pages: those that are articles, which are more like Wikipedia, and those that are free-for-alls, which is the way it is now.

Looking at Sensei's recently for something, I noted, in the few articles I looked at, an alarming number of statements that were either wrong or out of date. The risk of the SL approach is that everything accretes into a big lump and no one weeds out the stuff that is wrong or out of date. And the comments are linear, so they aren't organized in any appreciable manner, so you have to read a lot of dross to get through many of the pages.

[kirkmc]

The moral of this story is that this one tiny and unimportant error is all that seems to be remembered now about that book. Few people know or care what the book was or who the author was or what the anniversary was, but many people know about the embarrassment.

Indeed, it's because they tried so hard to overcome the gods of typography, and flew too close to the sun.

One friend who is a novelist hates when readers send him e-mails with corrections of typos. However, in his last novel, I read it in galleys, and found an error - not typographical, but factual, regarding the possibility that a certain group played a concert at a certain venue in a given year. I pointed it out, and he agreed that it should be corrected, but was especially impressed that an "anorak" copy editor had also spotted the same mistake. Given that the copy editor was in the UK, and the group was an American group who was never very well known in the UK, and the concert in question was in the 1970s, it was indeed impressive that a copy editor who didn't know the group went to the trouble to fact-check that item.

[HermanHiddema]

I think, like Kirk, that L19 is currently the best place for reviews and SL should be avoided for the reasons above, though with some reform SL could be a more logical place.

You made yourself pretty clear on that earlier, I well remember you explicitly stated you don't want to be quoted on SL anymore. Fair enough. Addressing SL as a single entity to be reformed or reform itself, however, shows a profound misunderstanding of what a wiki is meant to be, but alas, you do not want it to be a wiki anymore (only signed contributions, no discussion...)

I edit a number of articles on Wikipedia, and, while you or someone else has claimed that Wikipedia is not a "real" wiki, I find that the segregation of content and discussion makes a lot of sense. At a minimum, perhaps SL should have two types of pages: those that are articles, which are more like Wikipedia, and those that are free-for-alls, which is the way it is now.

Sensei's Library does try to separate content and discussion, that's what the "Discuss page" link at the top of every page is for. Additionally, there are many pages that have a /Discussion subpage, which is in the wiki style (often preferable when discussing diagrams).

There are two main reasons that many pages still have a lot of discussion in them. The first reason is lack of manpower. Inexperienced users ask questions in the middle of pages, and it is a lot of work to move those questions, including any relevant context and diagrams, to discussion pages. The second reason is that, unlike wikipedia, there often is no "definitive answer". No scholarly journals to quote. In many cases, having named contributions allows the reader to click on the name of the author and decide for themselves how much credibility they want to assign to various opinions. In some cases, this depends on the playing strength of the author, in others it depends on other expertise (for example, see Choshi)

Looking at Sensei's recently for something, I noted, in the few articles I looked at, an alarming number of statements that were either wrong or out of date. The risk of the SL approach is that everything accretes into a big lump and no one weeds out the stuff that is wrong or out of date. And the comments are linear, so they aren't organized in any appreciable manner, so you have to read a lot of dross to get through many of the pages.

If you see statements that are wrong or out of date, please edit! Even just slightly editing pages puts them on the RecentChanges list, and often attracts attention of other editors. I've seen it happen alot of time that a single edit suddenly results in a flood of edits by others and a much improved page.

[RobertJasiek]

SL would benefit if it had fixed articles as another type of pages. This would prevent expert contribution from being "improved" to become destroyed, weak contents. Of course, articles should still have discussion subpages so that the author can be motivated to correct and should have a page name that does not lock the topic for the public. E.g., PageName/UserName. Quite like PageName/Discussion.

[HermanHiddema]

SL would benefit if it had fixed articles as another type of pages. This would prevent expert contribution from being "improved" to become destroyed, weak contents. Of course, articles should still have discussion subpages so that the author can be motivated to correct and should have a page name that does not lock the topic for the public. E.g., PageName/UserName. Quite like PageName/Discussion.

This would totally destroy the wiki model, and is impossible to manage. You have to manage who are experts, in what field they are experts, and decide which pages can be edited by which experts. And what if the experts do not agree? Bureaucratic nightmare.

If you want static pages, make them sub-pages of your homepage. Those are generally considered off limits to editing by others (other than for questions or comments not altering the main text, which you are free to remove). That way you also automatically provide context on who the author is.

Do you have any examples of expert contribution being destroyed, BTW?