This is awesome, one question

[PoisonedV]

I found this through some viral marketing type stuff, I guess. I love this idea, and have been waiting around and even considered making something myself. I also love that there is an abundance of scifi books. (not surprising, am I right?  ) I just have one question, how will you do short story compilations?

[Stephen Rollins]

I just have one question, how will you do short story compilations?

What do you mean by that?  Maybe everyone else understands... but I don't. XD

The only thing I can really think of that would be a problem with short stories is... well, they're short.  The x axis on the graphs wouldn't have enough detail to show a very well-done graph.  There's a ton less information to be gleaned from a graph that only judges 5 different parts of a book rather than 50 or 100+.

[Mandi Taylor]

Compilations as in collections of short stories.  One book may have stories from ten different authors, so it would have a wide range of writing styles.

[Stephen Rollins]

Huh.  Dunno why I didn't see that...  Must've been late when I posted.

Or early.  8-ish in the morning, it would seem.

[Therin]

Aaron hasn't said a whole lot about short stories.  But there was one post a while back that perhaps hinted it wasn't really what they were dealing with right now - a bridge for crossing later on.

http://beta.booklamp.org/forum/index.php/topic,48.msg374.html#msg374

[Genevieve Bruneau]

Short story anthologies usually revolve around a theme, and the variety of authors also makes it more likely that someone will enjoy most of the stories if they like the theme.

It would be quite difficult to grade anthologies like the other books in the database, so they would probably need a different set of criteria altogether, like number of authors, average lengths of the stories, etc.  I imagine the development team will deal with the problem when it gets there.

[Daniel Bowen]

Genevieve,

Recognizing and classifying thematic elements is one of the avenues that we are pursuing.  Though, short stories can be quite a bit different from books in general.  Your thoughts are on the right track, though.

Thanks for the interest!

Keep in touch,
Dan