Can we follow serieses yet?

Is the "follow a series to be notified when a new entry is out" thing not hooked up yet? Or is the button just evading my searching...? :)

Thanks!
john

Nope, cannot be done.

Part of the challenge is that LT does not pre-populate books - a book will be added to the series ONLY after the first member catalogs it and someone realizes it needs to be added to the series. Plus we add various collections and what's not to series so figuring out that this is indeed a new installment and not a compilation of old materials or a translation printed as 2 half volumes or something like that is not trivial.

GR for example works differently - they are a single catalog - you just mark which book from the catalog you have (or add a book in the main catalog), they get their books pre-populated from Amazon and so on. LT is a sum of everyone's libraries - it is not a single catalog but a collection of all catalogs. It is a different approach altogether. And LT's way makes some things harder to do. Such as use the site to monitor series.

I remember the LT team introducing a way to track new and upcoming book releases a while back. That module could help with tracking series additions. But I haven't seen anything for it since.

This is what I'd recalled. Maybe it's what you were also thinking about, unsoluble.

LibraryThing: "Upcoming books?"
https://www.librarything.com/topic/321532

The example link still works.
https://www.librarything.com/labs_upcoming.php

There's a series page that is catching a good amount of new releases.

>4 aspirit: Oh I remember that thread. I was very much against this very concept.

>1 unsoluble: I suppose they could make it so. But it's not going to fill automatically. So what would be the use?

And you'd get a lot of false messages when people add uncombined works into the series.

>4 aspirit: I didn't know about that (experimental) feature, neat.

>6 Nicole_VanK: I mean, it would be helpful if someone who knew about a new book that you didn't know about added it.

>2 AnnieMod: Thanks for the explanation, makes sense. Reason I was asking was I came across it mentioned as an upcoming feature on the blog here: https://blog.librarything.com/2020/06/series-gets-a-revamp/

"Members able to follow a series, and see and receive updates when new books are released in that series."

So I guess it was eventually determined that this wouldn't actually be feasible to implement, which is fair.

Even with false positives and other oddities that might be involved, it would still save a ton of manual work tracking dozens of series in a school-sized collection. I'll keep looking for other approaches :)

>9 unsoluble: Give it some time - it is part of the ongoing efforts of LT and when they are ready, they will announce it officially. See >4 aspirit: for the link to the beginning of it all. The explanation in >2 AnnieMod: is how things work now :)

LT is in the middle of a lot of changes with a very small team of developers. So it is possible that this will end up being implemented - it will just take time.

PS: Meanwhile, I am using https://www.fantasticfiction.com/ - if you register (it is free) you can follow up to 200 authors and you get mails for new books by them added and so on. Not exactly great if your authors have a lot of series you do not follow but works for me. And it has "Next books in the series you're reading" which is helpful as long as you mark the books you had read.