Make authors searchable in series, make search easier

LBonne24

Currently I cannot search a series by the author name, nor does clicking the author section on the book page lead to all of their works. A few months ago, this would occasionally work. But now neither works. So you have to spell the entire series out, or have the right keyword to bring up the series. Sometimes you’ll type the ‘wrong’ part of the title and the book won’t even come up, even though it’s in the title.

It should be easier to go through the various titles. Currently a new series has come out and the author is ‘Yuu Tanaka’ ,this name seemed familiar and I wanted to see if I had liked their previous work before looking further into this new one. But I can’t search and find out. Sometimes you can’t even find out that there’s both manga and light novel versions of the same story because there’s no link, and you can’t check via author.

Please update this.

GeorgeMTO

@LBonne24 if you couldn't figure out the other series, Yuu Tanaka writes Late-Start Tamer which is translated here on J-Novel Club, but their more well known work is probably Reincarnated as a Sword (which also shares an illustrator with their new work here of Accursed Chef)

Aruseus493

I can get behind this. It has always been annoying how bad the tags and searches work.

Geezer Weasalopes

A core problem is that by contract they end up using different spellings for the same author's name; Japanese Publisher A requires one romanization, Japanese Publisher B a different one. And maybe Japanese Publisher C chimes in with a third.
Sometimes just flipping name order (the author of D-Genesis has this with the LN and manga!), other times different romanization schemes (I'm aware of at least three? for Japanese to English?)
So depending upon the portion of the name entered you might or might not pull up all the relevant entries for a given individual.

Leave it searchable and have folks not realize there's a problem with the results or realize there's a problem and complain. Either is unsatisfactory.
Or just have it non-searchable until they overhaul their database such that they can somehow link the variant spellings together. Which is kinda a low priority given what all they seem to have on their plates these days. And a non-trivial bit of coding in some ways, based upon my experience within the library community.

...if everyone is going to be unhappy, at least have them be unhappy for the same reason?
Semi-serious about that.

This is very much something JNC is aware of, and would like to come up with a solution for.

MrMonday

@Geezer-Weasalopes said in Make authors searchable in series, make search easier:

And a non-trivial bit of coding in some ways, based upon my experience within the library community. [...]
This is very much something JNC is aware of, and would like to come up with a solution for

From a data schema standpoint, though, this doesn't actually seem like it should be a complicated problem, though? You can solve this by turning the various required romanisations into aliases of a single underlying "author" entry. You could even normalise that as separate tables if you're a stickler for that sort of thing. Then you just associate all of an author's "aliases" (read: alternate known romanisations) with every one of their works in the DB, even if you only show a single one as the "preferred" romanisation for a given entry, with the entry itself tracking the "associated alias".

This genuinely does seem pretty trivial from a technical standpoint to me. The hard part, of course, is the actual data collection -- you'd need to actually map out which names are referring to different people and which are the same people with different romanisations. Even that doesn't seem like it should be too hard, though, since JNC should have the underlying kanji for the names, which should be the same for all entries that have the same underlying person (I hope), so it'd just be elbow grease.

That said, CS folks are a lot like physicists, in that we tend to underestimate the complexity of problems outside our experience space, so I'm definitely open to hearing more about the difficulties you mention experiencing in the past.

Which is kinda a low priority given what all they seem to have on their plates these days

I can definitely see this not being a high priority. It's pretty terrible from a UX standpoint, though.