When adding information about a book, you have a few options. You can enter the basic data for the abstract idea of the book (e.g., author, date, genre), or you can enter data about a specific edition of a book. You can also enter information about a book’s contents, translations, etc.

Adding a Book (Basic):

Much of the information about a book, such as author, copyright date, and language, will be entered in properties on the type Written work. See Entering Data for All Written Works for more information. The Book type contains additional information about the book that will be true of all versions of the book. This also allows any articles or discussion about the book itself to be on one central place, rather than spread across several editions. Information about specific editions such as publisher and ISBN should be entered in the Book edition type (see below). 

• The convention is to use the full name of the book (including subtitle) as the name of the topic; if the book is commonly known by a shorter name however, the full name can be put in the Also known as field instead. If the book has been published under multiple names, try to use the most commonly-known one; if you’re not sure, pick one, and put the others in the Also known as field.
• Genre describes the class of literature the book belongs to, rather than its subject matter.
• Characters should only be used for works of fiction.
• Part of series: if the book is part of a series of books, enter it here. Do not use this property for series of book editions (such as the Library of America or Oxford Illustrated Dickens).
• Interior Illustrations by: on books in which the illustrations will be the same in all editions, enter the illustrator(s) here. Children’s picture books are a good example of this sort of book. Illustrators for books in which the illustrations may differ between editions should be entered in the Book edition type (see below).

Book Editions (More Advanced)

A Book edition represents a specific publication of a book. Print, audio, and electronic versions of books can all be represented as book editions. Note that we are not, for the most part, interested in tracking separate printings of an edition, except in rare cases where there has been significant change between printings (such as a new cover or additional contents).

• The title of an edition can be entered several ways. The simplest is simply to give it the title that appears on that edition, which will be the same as the book in the majority of cases. In many cases, however, books have undergone title changes, and this is useful information to know. You can also include descriptive information if you think it’s merited (such as "revised edition", “limited edition”, “critical edition”, etc.). Bear in mind that the publisher, date of publication, ISBN, and binding all display as disambiguators, and do not need to be included in the title field. Additional clarifying information can be added to the topic’s Description; this text will appear in the flyout for autocompletion, making it easier to tell the difference between many similarly-named editions.
• Edition of: this property connects to the topic for the book that this is an edtion of.
• Author/editor: is the person or people who wrote or compiled the book. Enter all people listed as authors, but do not enter the names of people who merely contributed contents to the book (such as a poet who wrote a poem included in an anthology). Note that the name of the topic for the author might be different than the way the author is listed on the book; this is because topics can only have one name in Freebase, and authors may be known by many different names. See credited as (below) for instructions on how to credit the exact name of the author as published.
  • Note that the Book type also includes properties for authors and editors (technically on the type Written work); these properties are essentially duplications of each other. They are necessary because not all book editions in Freebase might be reconciled to an abstract Book topic, and not all Book topics will have editions associated with them. This duplication allows people to input whatever type of data they have.
  • Note also that the author of a book is not always a person; sometimes the author is listed as a company or other organization. If this is the case, just enter the name of the organization in the author field.
    • Freebase will automatically co-type all authors with the type Person, so if you have entered a company as the author, please fix this by clicking the name of the company, then removing the type Person from the list of types near the top of the page.
• Contributing authors: enter the names of people who have contributed content to the book, but who are not credited as one of the primary authors or editors. This is especially useful if you know that someone contributed something to a book, but don’t know the title. This is a partial duplication of the Contents property (on the Published work type): see Entering Contents of a Book or Periodical for more information about contents.
• Publisher: enter the publisher from the title page, if listed.
• Binding/Format: this will be something like “Hardcover”, “Paperback”, “Trade paperback”, etc. for print books; “Cassette”, “CD”, etc. for audiobooks; and file formats for ebooks.
• Place of Publication: use the first city printed on the title page, if more than one are given.
• ISBN: enter the ISBN, ISBN-13, and SBN numbers here, without hyphens or spaces.
• LCC: this stands for “Library of Congress Classification”, and is the call number of the book in libraries that use this system.
• OCLC number: this is a unique identifier used by many library systems around the world
• LCCN: this stands for “Library of Congress Control Number”, and is a unique identifier for books published in the United States.
• Cover price: the price listed on the cover or inside flap of the book.
• Number of Pages: there are two values for this property, “front matter” which should be a Roman numeral for works in which the front matter is numbered differently than the body of the book, and “numbered pages”, which should be the last numbered page in the book.
  • Some books (such as omnibuses and some Bibles) have multiple page ranges; to accommodate this, the “numbered pages” property is not unique. Enter the highest page number in each range.
• Reader (audio book): if this edition is an audio book, enter the name of the person or people who read the book.
• Cover artist: the name of the person or company that created the cover art for this edition. Note that Freebase will automatically apply the Person type to any topic you enter in this property; if you enter a company, please then edit the company’s topic and remove the type Person.
• Interior illustrations by: the name or names of all people who created interior illustrations for this edition. Note that for books like children’s picture books and graphic novels, the interior illustrator will be the same for all editions. Rather than input that data here, it should go in the corresponding property on the Bbook type.
• Credited as: enter the names of the author or authors as they appear in this edition. This property is how we distinguish the bibliographically-correct information from the author’s canonical name in Freebase. E.g., the author Mark Twain has had books published under that pseudonym as well as many variations on his real name: Samuel Clemens, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Samuel L. Clemens, etc. All these editions should be linked to the same author topic (currently titled Mark Twain), but it can also be valuable to know how a given edition was attributed.

Translations

The simplest way to enter a book edition that is a translation is to enter it as an edition of the work. In this case, you should title the edition with the book’s name in the new language (or as close as you can make it with your keyboard, since Freebase doesn’t currently handle some non-Latin alphabets well). Note that you cannot enter the translator or the language of the translation. If you want to enter this data, see “Entering a Translated Work of Literature”.

Contents

If you would like to add the contents of a book, see Entering Contents of a Book or Periodical. Note, however, that this is currently a somewhat complex operation. See also Entering Special Kinds of Books for information about entering omnibuses and other unusual types of books.

Excerpts and Serial Installments of a Book

To enter data for excerpts and serial installments of a book, see Entering Serialized and Excerpted Works of Literature.