Dedicated series description field

[sicahjes]

What's Your Idea?

Instead of drawing the description for series from the first book of the series, it would be great if there could be a dedicated series description field.

My thought is that this would only be visible on the series page, not on each individual book page.

Why Would This Be Helpful?

• This allows admin to provide a description of the series more generally, rather than duplicating the synopsis/blurb from the first book in the series.
• Series specific information that should be reviewed before reading the series can be communicated here (reading order for related series, novella reading order recommendations where there is more than one option etc.).
• Sometimes, the 'first' book in a series is book 0 or 0.5, which is often less helpful than the book 1 description

Want to Help Out?

I'm happy to help test and give feedback

Before Submitting

• I've searched existing issues and confirmed this feature hasn't been requested yet

[obviouslyallie]

This one seems interesting but I'm unsure what metadata source keeps series information like that to be pulled from? Editing them all manually would be...painful for most users.

[raafayawan]

I've filled it for 10,000 series as notes for my Calibre collection and it's even more painful not to be able to see it properly 😭 I really want this feature.

This one seems interesting but I'm unsure what metadata source keeps series information like that to be pulled from? Editing them all manually would be...painful for most users.

[zachyale]

FWIW, Goodreads has series descriptions (https://www.goodreads.com/series/45175-harry-potter). Functionally, it seems feasible to fetch this info from different existing metadata sources.

However, due to how series data is currently stored in the DB (as a set of columns on the book_metadata model, this could get really messy over time, since then you begin to ask questions like "if I have multiple books in the same series, and they have different series descriptions, which one do I use?", "how much redundant space am I wasting by storing this column multiple times?", etc.

My suggestions would be that if we want to take on work such as this and multi-series support, we could await further feedback on improvements to series, and then start a series improvement epic, that aims to refactor series to behave more like authors in relation to a book (stored as a mapping, i.e., book_metadata_series_mapping). Once that migration has occurred, it would be significantly easier to add functionality for both multi series support and series descriptions.

[sicahjes]

This one seems interesting but I'm unsure what metadata source keeps series information like that to be pulled from? Editing them all manually would be...painful for most users.

My suggestions would be that if we want to take on work such as this and multi-series support, we could await further feedback on improvements to series, and then start a series improvement epic, that aims to refactor series to behave more like authors in relation to a book (stored as a mapping, i.e., book_metadata_series_mapping). Once that migration has occurred, it would be significantly easier to add functionality for both multi series support and series descriptions.

Would a hidden column and fallback method for the series description be feasible?

• There could be a hidden SeriesDescription column in the book_metadata.
• On the Series page, the SeriesDescription is displayed, with an option to edit from this page (only).
  • If edited: the input sets the SeriesDescription for all books that share the same SeriesName.
  • If not edited: SeriesDescription is null and maps to the first book description.

This would maintain the current logic whilst also allowing users to update this field if they wish. Limiting SeriesDescription visibility and edits to the Series page:

• Ensures SeriesDescription is null by default, so does not force any changes for current users.
• Ensures the SeriesDescription value is constant for all books in the same series, avoiding conflicts.

FWIW, Goodreads has series descriptions (https://www.goodreads.com/series/45175-harry-potter). Functionally, it seems feasible to fetch this info from different existing metadata sources.

I can see how fetching series descriptions could be quite useful, but I honestly didn't have that in mind when I suggested the feature. I figured this would be manual. Integrating metadata fetch could be an improvement considered down the road, but in the meantime the ability to override the series description/synopsis would be fabulous.