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i've listed this article for peer review because it hasn't gotten much attention for such an important topic, and it has major gaps in areas like the state of contemporary book publishing. i've tried to organize it in a better way, but it's still pretty sparsely sourced.
Thanks, LarstonMarston (talk) 01:02, 3 February 2024 (UTC)
- So I made some changes on some of the lower sections. I recommend wherever possible, moving complex content into subpages, and using the excerpts template to bring over well cited leads or sections from those articles. The volume of scholarship on the history of the book is enormous, containing it all in one article seems kindof folly (and not useful for readers).
- As for the content itself, here is my initial thoughts:
- So some things that I am noticing, the article spends far too much time on the history of the book. From a modern reader perspective, the long and complex kinds of history involved in publishing book-like things should be summarized in this article, and handled better in a location where different academic perspectives can be taken and better comparison can happen between different lineages (i.e. West vs China vs Middle East vs Meso America).
- the book publishing information (including formats), should be more concise, readable and a constructive narrative that helps someone understand the process and how modern technologies have made publishing different. Right now, it travels all over the place, and gives far too much detail for something that could be handled much better in subpages.
- Far more time should be spent on the economics of the book publishing industry and social issues related to "books" -- books are economic and social objects, not simply material items that only need to be understood as material items. These sections need to highlight different trends and concepts related to economic and social relationship to the physical object (for example, different places to sell books (independent book stores, vs chains like Barnes and Nobles and Waterstone, vs self publishing and sales) and how different publishing industries exist for different topics (i.e. academic vs fiction vs romanc), languages and geographies (for example, in Spanish speaking LATAM, there are publishing centers different from the English speaking North for instance).
- Additionally, the content section doesn't deal with some of the major issues that make published books distinctive as we have come to recognize the different ways they can be used (such as children's books, access to technical knowledge through books (i.e. textbooks and cookbooks) books for the blind or otherwise disabled (i.e. brail printing), translation and a number of other issues.
- Sadads (talk) 19:10, 4 February 2024 (UTC)
- all great recommendations, thank you! LarstonMarston (talk) 19:51, 4 February 2024 (UTC)
- Adding to some of what Sadads is saying, for a broad topic like this one it can be helpful to think about the scope of this article and how to balance subtopics within that scope. You can do that by looking at external references on the topic - what do they cover and to what level of depth - but also existing subarticles in the category, navbox, etc. There is a lot of literature out there that could be cited, so ultimately it's going to be more challenging to limit the article than it is to expand it. Nikkimaria (talk) 02:32, 5 February 2024 (UTC)
- I shifted a lot of content around to make the order and subsections make sense and added some excerpts. Many of the excerpts aren't perfect, and a good update to the page means rewriting some of the leads for the other articles. Sadads (talk) 15:03, 5 February 2024 (UTC)
- Adding to some of what Sadads is saying, for a broad topic like this one it can be helpful to think about the scope of this article and how to balance subtopics within that scope. You can do that by looking at external references on the topic - what do they cover and to what level of depth - but also existing subarticles in the category, navbox, etc. There is a lot of literature out there that could be cited, so ultimately it's going to be more challenging to limit the article than it is to expand it. Nikkimaria (talk) 02:32, 5 February 2024 (UTC)