Re^2: The view from Barnes & Noble

IMHO, the only reliable way to organise books on shelves is to sort by ISBN.

Similarly, the only way to sort music is firstly by the first note played, and secondly by the quantity of drugs the composer was on at the time.

Update:

On reflection, I this comment was sub-consciously influenced by Borge's Animals. I think we could all benefit from a brief contemplation of this classification paradigm.

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Comment on Re^2: The view from Barnes & Noble

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Re^3: The view from Barnes & Noble by DrHyde (Prior) on Oct 10, 2008 at 10:43 UTC
The only reliable way to organise books on shelves is to not organise them at all. If you sort by ISBN, then you're stuffed if you need to insert in the middle as you have to shuffle everything along, perhaps onto other shelves, which in turn means you have to move stuff on those shelves, and so on. The best way to organise books on shelves is to just put them wherever there's space, and use a searchable database to keep track of what's where. Anyway, sorting by ISBN is approximately the same as sorting by publisher. Which is what Foyles in London used to do. People hated it, and they only stayed in business because there were no other large bookshops nearby. Now that several others have opened, Foyles have adopted a much more sensible sorting algorithm - they mostly sort by subject, author and title. Although they do still have a seperate section for O'Reilly books.	[reply]

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Re^3: The view from Barnes & Noble
by DrHyde (Prior) on Oct 10, 2008 at 10:43 UTC

The only reliable way to organise books on shelves is to not organise them at all. If you sort by ISBN, then you're stuffed if you need to insert in the middle as you have to shuffle everything along, perhaps onto other shelves, which in turn means you have to move stuff on those shelves, and so on. The best way to organise books on shelves is to just put them wherever there's space, and use a searchable database to keep track of what's where.

Anyway, sorting by ISBN is approximately the same as sorting by publisher. Which is what Foyles in London used to do. People hated it, and they only stayed in business because there were no other large bookshops nearby. Now that several others have opened, Foyles have adopted a much more sensible sorting algorithm - they mostly sort by subject, author and title. Although they do still have a seperate section for O'Reilly books.

[reply]