explicitly support serials publications like magazines and journals

[hughrun]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Currently Bookwyrm is dedicated to "books". There is allowance for multiple formats including digital and audio texts, and for serialised stories (e.g. multi-volume novels).

There is a fairly fuzzy line between "books" and "serials" (magazines, journals, serialised comic books, serial zines etc). In some cases it is clear conceptually (nobody calls TeaTime magazine a "book") but in others it is a little greyer, (e.g. the difference between a "book" of collected essays, and a volume of Emergence Magazine).

It would be nice if Bookwyrmers had the option to add serials as well as "books" to collections. Currently this is possible, but because Bookwyrm assumes everything is a book, some metadata doesn't make much sense and serials have to be shoe-horned in to a not-exactly-right metadata set.

Describe the solution you'd like

Some minor additions to the fields for books, or alternatively hoisting common fields into a meta class and then creating a separate serial class, would enable the creation of true serial records with relevant metadata. Unlike libraries we don't need to worry about "frequency" or whether we have a complete run, we can just treat it the same as a series of books. Additional things that would however be helpful and make things easier are:

• ISSN field
• series (i.e. as a Model like Author, so we can have landing page for all volumes in the series). Logically this should be connected to an ISSN but not all serials will have an ISSN for a range of reasons
• implementing #1120 to enable an issue to be added with, for example, just an Editor listed (or alternatively to list all editors, authors and so on)

Describe alternatives you've considered Maybe Bookwyrm wants to draw a firm line and be only for "books"? The risk of scope-creep is real, so maybe we shouldn't widen it (although libraries worldwide all have mature systems for including serial publications in addition to monographs).

Additional context

This is related to the discussions in #1368 (because the workflow for adding publications could be clearer if we hide inputs irrelevant to a given format) and #1120 (because serials often have many authors, and non-author creators like editors and illustrators are often given more prominence.

A minimal implementation would simply add an issn field to Book (non-exclusive, unlike ISBN), but it would be good to address the features from the above Issues while we're at it, since that would make the workflows more intuitive.

[mouse-reeve]

I do worry about scope-creep (especially for multimedia outside of print, like movies or music), but I think supporting publications is a pretty natural extension, especially since, as you point out, there is a real spectrum of format within written media. I've had FatCat in mind as a possible data source as well.