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276K Points
Restoring the "literature" section for title pages
For some years IMDb had a Literature section for title pages. This was intended to include information about such items as:
- books that films were based on
- novelizations of films
- books about the making of a particular film
- printed reviews that were not available online and could not be linked in the "External Reviews" section
and other print sources that might be relevant to a film or TV program.
You can see an example of what a Literature page once looked like at http://web.archive.org/web/20160629142954/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061418/literature.
However, in 2017, the Literature section was eliminated, in part because it was receiving little usage. (See https://community-imdb.sprinklr.com/conversations/data-issues-policy-discussions/title-literature-pages/5f4a79d48815453dba8c7ccf.) The staff raised the possibility that it might be brought back in the future, though.
I would appreciate it if the staff would consider bringing the Literature section back to IMDb. According to https://www.imdb.com/pressroom/stats/, there are 152,163 titles as of June 2021 which had literature associated with them (if I'm reading the statistics page correctly), although that literature is no longer accessible to users.
If the staff does decide to bring the Literature section back, I would appreciate it if they got input from contributors here as to what the scope of the section should be, that is, what kinds of works should and should not be included, and what information should be required about each item. As I commented last year:
I suspect that we would want to distinguish between a novel that a film is based on and a novelization based on a film and list them in separate categories. (Even a film based on a novel can have a novelization -- which happened with the 1994 version of Little Women.) There are also books about the art of a film, children's storybooks based on films, and books about the making of films -- not necessarily favorable to the filmmakers (consider the books about The Bonfire of the Vanities or Heaven's Gate). And that's just for films -- there are lots of books about TV series, too. In fact, two different publishers have book series about "Popular Culture and Philosophy" or "Philosophy and Pop Culture", and both include dozens of TV-series themed books.
There may be kinds of books that IMDb might not want to cover -- like coloring books and activity books (see these examples for Frozen II). Or maybe you would want to include them -- I don't know. And you probably don't need full publication information for film sources which are public domain books from the 19th century, for example, and even less for much older source works like the Bible or ancient Greek plays. But these are all issues that can be worked out if we discuss them.
Please up-vote this idea if you agree with bringing the Literature section back.
leonard_david
Employee
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6 Messages
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240 Points
7 years ago
One of those changes is the deprecation of the Literature title sub-pages. The pages today are a mix of media related to the title,including: books on which the title was based; academic articles about the title; and even some written interviews related to the title. The Literature title sub-pages have generally received very little customer usage.
While we understand that some of you may be disappointed with this decision, it’s worth noting that your contributed data will not be lost. Taking down the Literature title sub-pages will enable us to build a more compelling experience in the future.
Some areas that we’re exploring are: possibly introducing a more obvious tie between a title and a book,and potentially enabling you to vote on how closely the title aligns to the book. When we move forward with any new Literature functionality, we’ll leverage your contributed data.
Thank you.
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mark_hyde_3ezvergl9xsls
4 Messages
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164 Points
6 years ago
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gromit82
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7.4K Messages
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276K Points
1 year ago
I think this thread deserves a bump. I admit that the Literature section as it once was could have used some improvements, but I think it would be a good idea for IMDb to revisit how to bring it back with better categories and policies.
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