Audiobooks Are Now Eligible - Ideas for How to List Them

Audiobooks are now eligible for inclusion on IMDb, and @Ozzy suggested I create an Idea post with suggestions for how they should be listed in the future. Right now, they are listed as Videos, which is less than ideal, but no doubt intended to be temporary. I hope other contributors will reply with their own ideas. Here are mine: - Create a new title type: Audiobook. - Make it a series type, with each chapter treated like an episode of a TV series. - Allow any credits that are heard on the audiobook or listed on the physical packaging. - Make sure the reader is listed as an actor with the (voice) attribute. - Take special care that regular books without audio productions are excluded. - Take special care that each edition of an audiobook is given its own page. - Take even more care with popular books out of copyright. There may be 100 audiobooks of "The Hound of the Baskervilles," and we would not want to see 100 different readers listed on the same page. Each audiobook production must have its own page. - Encourage contributors to list the media the audiobook appears on whenever possible. There are albums, tapes, CDs, digital and who knows what else. Many audiobooks, of course, will have been available in more than one medium. - Find a way to automatically upload the information from Audible onto this site, leaving the main job of contributors to add chapter-specific information, plot synopses (which can be exhaustive and include spoilers) and keywords. Audible (as far as I know) does not tell users whether or not a book has also been listed in media other than digital, and so that would be another area where contributors can help. Any other ideas?

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jay_spirit

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11 months ago

By the way, we currently have two different keywords for "audiobook." https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?keywords=audio-book&explore=keywords https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?keywords=audiobook&explore=keywords They need to be merged. And if there is not already a warning to contributors that the keyword cannot be used for non-audiobooks, there should be. I'm not sure what keyword we should have for movies with audiobooks in them. Listening-to-an-audiobook? There may be an audiobook in the movie that no character ever listens to. Audiobook-in-plot? Audiobook-as-subject?

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Ozzy

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25.7K Points

11 months ago

Hi

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jay_spirit

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@Ozzy How did I not know this? Wow!

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11 months ago

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ACT_1

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11 months ago

@jay_spirit 😀 How many people out there are going to look for Audiobooks on the Internet Movie Database ?? IMDb Statistics As of Sep 2024 https://www.imdb.com/pressroom/stats/ Title Types Add "audiobooks" ?? Amazon.com : audiobooks over 100,000 results for "audiobooks" - - - More chat... https://community-imdb.sprinklr.com/topics/data-issues-policy-discussions/5f4951c662e5fc53cfeb9557?q=Audiobook - - - 34,150,000 Titles https://www.imdb.com/title/tt34150000/ 190,500,000 Users registered https://www.imdb.com/user/ur190500000/ .

(edited)

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ACT_1

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@jay_spirit 😀 This may get deleted or marked as Private?? Audiobooks.com .

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11 months ago

A

alendar

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152 Points

11 months ago

Thanks for doing this @jay_spirit . This is good stuff. Not all audiobooks are series, though. That might add to confusion. That point about "(voice)" attribute is good. On the audiobook series that triggered me, the actors were not listed as voice, and made me really think this was a TV series. My suggestion would be to reduce this set to specific ideas. Mostly, I would like to see a title format that mapped to a title type. The only way to set the title type is through the title string format. "Title" (year) (Audiobook) => Audiobook "Title" (year) (Audiobook Series) => Audiobook seriesThe rest could filter down as a result of this. For example, Blocking addition of non-voice attributed cast. Forcing the keyword audio-book presence.Possibly most important would be the updating of the documentation to be consistent and clear across the primary help sites. Currently no examples of audiobook titles exist in the 3 help pages I've looked at. Primarily, when submitting title format/type corrections, there is no example given there, and the help text does not say "Some of the formats available are", but rather "The formats are." But any classification of audio only media as video is just blech.

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jay_spirit

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@alendar Thanks for the reply! My idea was to treat each audiobook as a series and each chapter as an episode. This is the idea I am most tentative about, but I thought I'd throw it out there to see how people reacted. My reasoning is that IMDb could get a lot of good granular information about a book if each chapter could be treated as an episode with its own plot description. This would be especially useful for audiobooks from The Great Courses, where each chapter is the equivalent of a half-hour class. I've already been submitting their video courses as TV series because each "chapter" is nearly discrete. Example: How to Write Best-Selling Fiction. I would oppose treating each audiobook as an episode of a series, though. For instance, each audio production of a James Bond book should be a standalone title, not an episode of a series called "James Bond." Making series out of these books would be chaos, especially when individual titles often have more than one audio production. I can imagine someone trying to turn the hundreds of audiobooks made from the out-of-copyright Sherlock Holmes stories into a single series called "Sherlock Holmes," and that would be awful.

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11 months ago

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jay_spirit

Audiobooks Are Now Eligible - Ideas for How to List Them

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