"Synopsis or Blurb" under Book Information

I can't identify if a blurb/synopsis is definitely part of the "book information" that we can enter in our personal libraries here at LibraryThing. Not all books have this. Many of the oldest books on our shelves, classics, and hardbound books do not. However, a good majority of modern books do. It acts as a summary or description of the book added to the back of the dust jacket to draw in readers. So perhaps this is the "summary" in the book information page?

If so, would you please add a title to "summary" that includes "dusk-jacket synopsis"?

The current "summary" has something about leaving it blank so it can be auto generated? I thought at first this was added by LibraryThing from the booksellers automatically but apparently not or its just the title repeated.

In the future I plan to use "summary" to enter these synopsis or blubs, since that is the likeliest place for the them to go. (I wasn't sure about the placement when I first started using the site since it had that auto-generated feature.)

The additional title would definitely bring more clarity.

Thank you.

If the summary is left empty it fills with your title, author and publication date. If you want to use it differently, you can, but this is what it is intended for. Wording that indicates anything else would not be a site improvement.

You can put your own description in member description, but not one from somewhere else. If LT has access to other descriptions you will find them on the description page (from the left hand menu on work pages.

I think there are three different fields confused by the OP. There is the Summary field, which appears in book-level data (individual user catalogs), and auto-populates as described by >2 MarthaJeanne:.

There are two different "Description" fields, and both are work-level (community) data. "Members' description: Book description" is a Common Knowledge field (although displayed in the distinct Members' description module) for original descriptions.

The "Library description" field is populated on each work from the top-ranked description on the corresponding Descriptions page. This description is the one that appears in cover and touchstone mouseovers, as well as the work page.

>2 MarthaJeanne: & 3 Thank you both so much - you have cleared up my confusion about the Summary field and added to my knowledge of the Description fields.

I ask for your patience, however. Is there a way to include the publisher's comments from the back cover of a book? (If I'm understanding correctly, Library Thing would "choose" a member's personal description from the Descriptions page for the "Library Description".) Am I missing something? Are the back cover, publisher's comments considered copyrighted? (What I mean is that it's a "No-No" to use them for a description.) Maybe I missed a rule concerning this?

>4 BooRadleyZellner: When viewing books in your catalogue, I don't think there's a way to see library description (or any summary/synopsis) unless you enter that data into one of the free form fields, such as summary, comments or private comments. In your own fields, you can put whatever you want. Only Common Knowledge field 'Member Description' is restricted to summary in your own words.

Summaries/descriptions that appear on work page as library description are mostly pulled from Bowker, maybe some other sources, but they cannot be edited, only up and down voted or flagged if they are incorrect for the work, contain weird characters and such

>4 BooRadleyZellner:

As far as I know, there is no existing LT field that is dedicated or even well-suited to user input of jacket copy.

The jacket summary would be the "Library Description" which you can not edit.
You can choose if it's correct for the book or just commercial blather, but can't change the wording.

The user description field is not picked for anything. It's just a user entered description. MUST be user written. If it's found to be the jacket copy or other material not written by the user, it gets deleted.

There is no place right now, other than personal comments or the summary field, to put free form data from the book.
And yes, the description on the book jacket or on the back of the book is copyrighted material.