Copies management

[dimkouv]

Good afternoon.

I wonder how this component manipulates the various copies of a work. Right after that, I thought myself 'what exactly is a copy'. Well, some libraries have organized their material under the term that the copies of a work go side-by-side. (Note that I say 'copies of a *work*' not of a '*book*'). That said, copies of a work have to be copies of the _same_ spiritual result of one or more writers, BUT they might be released by different editors, different editions (1st, 2nd...), even different languages (translated) or different target groups (e.g. a classic tale of Hans Christian Andersen might be in a big book for elder readers or in a small book with a lot of images for younger readers).

So, does this component make this distinction between different copies of a work? Is there a way to include this functionality in the next version of ABook?

To make it clearer, I would like to be able to handle ramifications of any book. The field of the number of copies could be supported by a command-button that adds a copy of the same book (new row in the same table) and shows the results (the other copies) in a sub-form of rows.

Another idea is to brake the BOOKS table in two halfs. In the main BOOKS table you'll keep all the fields that would be common in any of the works' copies and in the secondary BOOKS you'll move the fields that might differ from a copy to another. So, in this copy when someone adds a book, he would practically create a new row in BOOKS and a new row in the SECONDARY_BOOKS. A new copy of this 'book' (=work) would be only a new row in the SECONDARY_BOOKS.

Think about it! I think it would be very helpful.

[federica]

Hi dimkouv,
I understood, but Abook does't trace the relationship between a book and its next editions. Every isbn is not related to the others books.
This featured isn't in my intentions.