Feature Request: Support for multiple editions

[marcusschiesser]

Books usually have multiple editions.

Wordpress already supports revisions of posts / Pressbooks therefore supports revisions of chapters.

Right now, always the latest revision of a chapter is shown and therefore the latest edition of the book.

The feature request is about to define at any point in time an edition of a book. For this purpose there will be a button: "Create edition" in the book backend. After pushing the button, the admin is asked for a unique name of the edition.

This button internally marks the revision number of each chapter.

If a reader accesses the edition of the book (with a different URL), the chapter in the revision that belongs to the edition is shown.

In the URL the edition-name is used, e.g.

http://{site}/{book-name}/ accesses the latest edition (as it is now)

http://{site}/{book-name}/{edition-name} accesses the edition with the given name

[hughmcguire]

@bdolor is looking at some approaches to this, fyi.

[bdolor]

I'm looking at an approach to editions that is likely to deviate from the role that editions play in traditional print publishing (for textbooks). In that context, I remember feeling there was no choice but to purchase the latest edition from the bookstore instead of getting a previous edition at a reduced cost at the second-hand bookstore. I assumed that updates were made to the content but still questioned the value of a money driven revision process (was anyone really getting their money's worth?). Removing the monetary motivation, it now feels like the only practical reason you would want different versions is from an archiving perspective but I'm not certain. Is the purpose of a new edition to show that information has been updated in a certain way? But then, why? What student would use the ‘old’ version if a new version was available unless they were studying how information has changed, not what the information is. In the context of an open textbook where the profit motive is gone, I'd like to better understand the why, the what and the for whom (faculty/author/publisher, student, researcher). I can guess at what the value of a new edition would be, and for whom, but I don't have a solid use case — does anyone have a solid use case that we can build requirements out from? Here are my guesses:

"I am a student want to access a particular edition of the textbook. I want to read the edition of the text book that the professor assigned (but the latest version is already reflected in the web version). I may also want to retain a particular edition of the textbook (but this is already available with different export formats). Most importantly I need to access/retain a version of the textbook for an indeterminate amount time."

"I am a Publisher/Author/Faculty Member. I need to control the release of editions for particular textbook. Publishing a new edition would be a simple process, similar to exporting files and could be removed or created again, but specific edits to the edition would not be available. Editing would only be available as part of the process for releasing a new edition. As a living text it is important from a change management perspective to see the differences/changes that have been made from one edition to the next."

If I've come close to capturing a realistic use case, then it looks like we're talking about diffs and data sources — As far as the implementation goes (as it's described above), what jumps out for me is data availability...given that users/admins are able to limit the amount of revisions that are retained in a WP DB, how can data availability be guaranteed if there is a very likely risk of a particular revision of a post getting blown away over time with define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 25 );? I wonder if saving the XHTML output of a book somewhere (either as a flat file, or in the DB) would give us a better foundation for diffs and data availability, though divorcing the data source for content presents an interface/theme problem, not to mention what to do with internal links (that would naturally link back to pages from the latest web version of a book).

Looking for more ideas - please post if you have some.

[BillDStrong]

Another use case for you.

Say you are writing a book, and you have reviewers and editors reviewing the book while you are still writing it. They may not get back to you before you have rewritten a part they reviewed. It could be helpful for you to be able to go back to the previous version.

A use case out of East Asia.

Web novels, called Light Novels, are a major industry in East Asia. When these novels are finished, they are often turned into print, but only after a rewriting process. The books are not always the same, and can have a very different feel. If using Pressbooks, they would run into many issues.

1. A reader reading the web version stops reading to let the novel chapters pile up. He comes back after the novel is published in print form, and is now reading essentially a different book.He may want to read the version that was unedited.
2. A translator of light novels may have the same issues. They are translating one version, but the version changes for the print book.
3. Often, these light novels are also used to create Manga and Anime versions, but I don't have enough experience with that to know what workflow improvements would be needed for that. It does suggest a need to add storyboarding and scriptwriting functionality, maybe?

Hope these use cases can be used to narrow down the problem.

[SteelWagstaff]

Related: https://github.com/pressbooks/pressbooks/issues/215

[colomet]

in our installation, we do clone the book with a new name to save the book in an old edition. In that way, we always have the original book with the good urls and we are archiving the old book for historical purposes

I think, a good aproach is to have a clone buttom for revisions, each time we clone the book, a new id is added automatically to the book name. also, isBaseOn will point the original book from the old versions, with that, we can use rel="canonical and to avoid duplications to google.