Ebook slugs with long lists of contributors
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Alex Cabal
May 1, 2023, 12:59:09 AM5/1/23
to Standard Ebooks
Someone recently brought up the issue of long filenames on the mailing
list. I think there's a good argument to be made that after a certain
number of contributors, listing them all in the ebook filename/URL slug
becomes unwieldy and annoying.
Maybe if there are more than, say, 3 contributors of a type (translator,
illustrator, etc.) then we can condense the ebook filename/slug to
AUTHOR_TITLE_various-translators_various-illustrators.epub, or something
like that?
Thoughts?
I haven't looked but I think this will only affect a small number of
books, but it would certainly be helpful.
Would anyone be interested in adapting the toolset for a proposal like this?
list. I think there's a good argument to be made that after a certain
number of contributors, listing them all in the ebook filename/URL slug
becomes unwieldy and annoying.
Maybe if there are more than, say, 3 contributors of a type (translator,
illustrator, etc.) then we can condense the ebook filename/slug to
AUTHOR_TITLE_various-translators_various-illustrators.epub, or something
like that?
Thoughts?
I haven't looked but I think this will only affect a small number of
books, but it would certainly be helpful.
Would anyone be interested in adapting the toolset for a proposal like this?
Vince
May 1, 2023, 1:31:28 AM5/1/23
to Standard Ebooks
I think it’s going to be mostly our shorts collections, since those are the ones that often have a bunch of translators. I think Ovid had a lot also, for some reason.
If length is what we’re worried about, I would think length should be what we measure. It would be pretty easy for a long book title and a couple of authors and two translators to be quite a bit longer than a shorter book title with only one author and three or even four translators.
If we just make length the cutoff (100? 150?), if the combination of author/title/translators/illustrators is more than X characters, then we start trimming, starting with the longest of translators or illustrators, and then doing the other one until it’s within the desired limit.
Do we want to say “various…” or do something like Emma had to do (with Ovid?) and put “_et_al” at the end of the however many contributors we keep? That way we would at least have some names still in the filename.
Alex Cabal
Sep 10, 2025, 7:20:35 PM (9 days ago) Sep 10
to standar...@googlegroups.com
Two years later I want to revisit this.
The problem is URL slugs with a large number of contributors make the
URL unwieldy and in some cases can cause file read issues when long
filenames interact with some ereaders.
I propose this solution, which we would apply only to translators for now:
If a book is a collection/omnibus (identified by the presence of the
`se:is-a-collection` element in the metadata) and has more than 1
translator, OR if ANY book has more than 3 translators, combine them
into `various-translators` in the identifier.
This neatly takes care of all of the omnibus cases currently in the
corpus, as well as the long _Metamorphoses_ which is not an omnibus per
se but has a ton of translators.
It will affect 18 books in the corpus.
Does anyone have any thoughts/objections about this approach?
On 5/1/23 12:31 AM, Vince wrote:
> I think it’s going to be mostly our shorts collections, since those are
> the ones that often have a bunch of translators. I think Ovid had a lot
> also, for some reason.
>
> If length is what we’re worried about, I would think length should be
> what we measure. It would be pretty easy for a long book title and a
> couple of authors and two translators to be quite a bit longer than a
> shorter book title with only one author and three or even four translators.
>
> If we just make length the cutoff (100? 150?), if the combination of
> author/title/translators/illustrators is more than X characters, then we
> start trimming, starting with the longest of translators or
> illustrators, and then doing the other one until it’s within the desired
> limit.
>
> Do we want to say “various…” or do something like Emma had to do (with
> Ovid?) and put “_et_al” at the end of the however many contributors we
> keep? That way we would at least have /some/ names still in the filename.
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
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> utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>.
The problem is URL slugs with a large number of contributors make the
URL unwieldy and in some cases can cause file read issues when long
filenames interact with some ereaders.
I propose this solution, which we would apply only to translators for now:
If a book is a collection/omnibus (identified by the presence of the
`se:is-a-collection` element in the metadata) and has more than 1
translator, OR if ANY book has more than 3 translators, combine them
into `various-translators` in the identifier.
This neatly takes care of all of the omnibus cases currently in the
corpus, as well as the long _Metamorphoses_ which is not an omnibus per
se but has a ton of translators.
It will affect 18 books in the corpus.
Does anyone have any thoughts/objections about this approach?
On 5/1/23 12:31 AM, Vince wrote:
> I think it’s going to be mostly our shorts collections, since those are
> the ones that often have a bunch of translators. I think Ovid had a lot
> also, for some reason.
>
> If length is what we’re worried about, I would think length should be
> what we measure. It would be pretty easy for a long book title and a
> couple of authors and two translators to be quite a bit longer than a
> shorter book title with only one author and three or even four translators.
>
> If we just make length the cutoff (100? 150?), if the combination of
> author/title/translators/illustrators is more than X characters, then we
> start trimming, starting with the longest of translators or
> illustrators, and then doing the other one until it’s within the desired
> limit.
>
> Do we want to say “various…” or do something like Emma had to do (with
> Ovid?) and put “_et_al” at the end of the however many contributors we
>> <mailto:al...@standardebooks.org>> wrote:
>>
>> Someone recently brought up the issue of long filenames on the mailing
>> list. I think there's a good argument to be made that after a certain
>> number of contributors, listing them all in the ebook filename/URL
>> slug becomes unwieldy and annoying.
>>
>> Maybe if there are more than, say, 3 contributors of a type
>> (translator, illustrator, etc.) then we can condense the ebook
>> filename/slug to AUTHOR_TITLE_various-translators_various-
>> illustrators.epub, or something like that?
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>> I haven't looked but I think this will only affect a small number of
>> books, but it would certainly be helpful.
>>
>> Would anyone be interested in adapting the toolset for a proposal like
>> this?
>
> --
>>
>> Someone recently brought up the issue of long filenames on the mailing
>> list. I think there's a good argument to be made that after a certain
>> number of contributors, listing them all in the ebook filename/URL
>> slug becomes unwieldy and annoying.
>>
>> Maybe if there are more than, say, 3 contributors of a type
>> (translator, illustrator, etc.) then we can condense the ebook
>> filename/slug to AUTHOR_TITLE_various-translators_various-
>> illustrators.epub, or something like that?
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>> I haven't looked but I think this will only affect a small number of
>> books, but it would certainly be helpful.
>>
>> Would anyone be interested in adapting the toolset for a proposal like
>> this?
>
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Vince
Sep 10, 2025, 7:25:52 PM (9 days ago) Sep 10
to Standard Ebooks
Why different criteria? Why not just “more than three” across the board?
Alex Cabal
Sep 10, 2025, 7:32:30 PM (9 days ago) Sep 10
to standar...@googlegroups.com
Because omnibuses with more than 1 translator are always SE
compilations, which I don't think should highlight one or two names and
then lump the rest under "various"; and as work enters PD there's a good
chance that more translators will be added, which will change the slug
in any case.
For non-omnibuses, more than 3 seemed like a good number. In this case
they are always people names (not something like "The Russian Review")
and 3 feels like a reasonable number of names to try to comprehend in a
run. The only books this affects are _Siddhartha_ which I suspect was
translated for PG as a school project, and _Metamorphosis_.
compilations, which I don't think should highlight one or two names and
then lump the rest under "various"; and as work enters PD there's a good
chance that more translators will be added, which will change the slug
in any case.
For non-omnibuses, more than 3 seemed like a good number. In this case
they are always people names (not something like "The Russian Review")
and 3 feels like a reasonable number of names to try to comprehend in a
run. The only books this affects are _Siddhartha_ which I suspect was
translated for PG as a school project, and _Metamorphosis_.
Robin Whittleton
Sep 11, 2025, 12:47:38 AM (9 days ago) Sep 11
to standar...@googlegroups.com
Sounds reasonable.
-Robin
> On 11 Sep 2025, at 01:20, Alex Cabal <al...@standardebooks.org> wrote:
>
> Two years later I want to revisit this.
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-Robin
> On 11 Sep 2025, at 01:20, Alex Cabal <al...@standardebooks.org> wrote:
>
> Two years later I want to revisit this.
> To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/standardebooks/48589974-9ea9-4398-a74c-f782da2a955d%40standardebooks.org.
Asher Smith
Sep 11, 2025, 10:06:52 AM (8 days ago) Sep 11
to Standard Ebooks
No opinion on the actual decision here, but just noting that as the Apple Books identifier is (due to some niche reasons) based on the first 34 characters of the github slug, any changes to the way that's formed will mean that I'll need to do some cleanup and would appreciate a list of which volumes are affected if/when a change is made.
Alex Cabal
Sep 11, 2025, 2:12:53 PM (8 days ago) Sep 11
to standar...@googlegroups.com
Ebook slugs can change from time to time for various reasons. We should
bake this possibility into the Apple Books system instead of doing
one-offs each time. Is that possible?
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bake this possibility into the Apple Books system instead of doing
one-offs each time. Is that possible?
> standardebooks/2D61C3E4-5F9E-436A-
> A40D-48BB8D7359C8%40letterboxes.org <http://40letterboxes.org>
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> msgid/> standardebooks/2D61C3E4-5F9E-436A-
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> >
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Asher Smith
Sep 11, 2025, 2:29:05 PM (8 days ago) Sep 11
to Standard Ebooks
I don't think I realised that at the time that I set the system up. Apple Books needs each book to have a unique Vendor ID, which they say should be "A permanent, unique identifier for a product" and which has to be a maximum of 100 characters. At the time I set it up, I wasn't sure if it needed to be unique across the entire Apple Books corpus or just our catalogue, so I set it as "StandardEbooks_" followed by the first 80 alphanumeric characters from the slug, which I extracted from the github URL. In hindsight, I think it doesn't need to be unique to the entire corpus, so I should have set it to be the first 100 characters of the author and title and excluded any translators entirely, but Apple doesn't have the sort of open philosophy of documentation that you might want and I didn't find anybody else trying to create their upload files for ebooks by command line, so I was more or less reverse engineering it from what I could find.
It's totally possible to swap the system used there for some other one, but that would involve taking all our books currently listed on Apple Books off the store and replacing them with new ones. This is possible: I had to do it for the first hundred or two books I uploaded because I discovered an error. However, I don't know that I'd recommend it because I don't know what it would do to the Apple recommendation engine and it might cause gaps in catalogue availability.
Alex Cabal
Sep 11, 2025, 2:32:33 PM (8 days ago) Sep 11
to standar...@googlegroups.com
If the slug changes, can we just permanently pull the old version from
Apple and upload the new version instead?
On 9/11/25 1:29 PM, Asher Smith wrote:
> I don't think I realised that at the time that I set the system up.
> Apple Books needs each book to have a unique Vendor ID, which they say
> should be "A permanent, unique identifier for a product" <https://
> support.apple.com/en-ie/guide/transporter-app/apdaa364dd13/mac> and
> > groups.google.com/d/ <http://groups.google.com/d/> <https://
> > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ <https://groups.google.com/d/
> msgid/> <https://groups.google.com/d/ <https://groups.google.com/d/>
> > standardebooks/48589974-9ea9-4398-a74c-
> > f782da2a955d%40standardebooks.org <http://40standardebooks.org>
> <https://groups.google.com/d/ <https://groups.google.com/d/>
> > msgid/standardebooks/48589974-9ea9-4398-a74c-
> > f782da2a955d%40standardebooks.org <http://40standardebooks.org>>.
> > standardebooks/3f170272-59bd-4f2d-
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Apple and upload the new version instead?
On 9/11/25 1:29 PM, Asher Smith wrote:
> I don't think I realised that at the time that I set the system up.
> Apple Books needs each book to have a unique Vendor ID, which they say
> support.apple.com/en-ie/guide/transporter-app/apdaa364dd13/mac> and
> groups.google.com/d/ <https://groups.google.com/d/>> msgid/
> > standardebooks/2D61C3E4-5F9E-436A-
> > A40D-48BB8D7359C8%40letterboxes.org <http://40letterboxes.org>
> <http://40letterboxes.org <http://40letterboxes.org>>
> > standardebooks/2D61C3E4-5F9E-436A-
> > A40D-48BB8D7359C8%40letterboxes.org <http://40letterboxes.org>
> > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ <https://groups.google.com/d/
> msgid/> <https://groups.google.com/d/ <https://groups.google.com/d/>
> > msgid/> standardebooks/2D61C3E4-5F9E-436A-
> > A40D-48BB8D7359C8%40letterboxes.org <http://40letterboxes.org>
> <http://40letterboxes.org <http://40letterboxes.org>>?
> > A40D-48BB8D7359C8%40letterboxes.org <http://40letterboxes.org>
> > utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>.
> > >
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Asher Smith
Sep 11, 2025, 2:35:43 PM (8 days ago) Sep 11
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Yes, trivially. That’s what I’d propose doing if you make the various translators change. It’s just a case of making sure that we catch it and don’t have two versions up, and I can run an analysis to see if there are any places where that’s the case. To be clear, the thing I don’t know that I’d recommend is pulling and reuploading the entire catalogue all at once.
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