Talk:2791: Bookshelf Sorting

Oh wow, literally 14 captchas to save my edit? Sorry if someone else was working on it too, apparently someone added transcript while I was doing captchas, and when it finally went through it might have overwritten something. 141.101.98.97 22:05, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

I fixed a lot of the typos, but should we use color or colour? Trogdor147 (talk) 22:11, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

Because Randall is 'Merkin, full Webster-inspired leftpondian spelling tends to be the norm. (Including people editing correct-for-the-author Discussion contributions... which they really shouldn't!) But I'm happy to see "colour", "centre", "aluminium", etc for as long as nobody has yet decided to normalise(/normalize) everything. ;) 172.69.79.184 23:06, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

Have no idea what the previous means but Randall is American so this page uses American English spelling. So color, center and aluminum etc (and Normalize) --Kynde (talk) 06:03, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

I just said what you said, but additionally putting in my oar in about non-standard (to me!) English spelling occasionally forced on us by them damnyankees. :P 172.70.85.34 09:29, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

Does the mirroring of the order of the covers mean that there is a secondary sort order? The longest book is first. 172.70.91.65 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Good eye that the small books are nested inside the large. Should go in the explanation imo. 172.70.131.91 00:47, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

It looks like all of the front covers are at the left and the back covers are sorted by the number of pages in the book.172.71.222.139

It looks like each group of pages is sorted randomly. Note that each book has a unique height. You can see the height distributions change as books end at their back covers and are no longer included in clumps. The books seem short? A careful eye may be able to identify the location of every page. 172.69.59.154 01:53, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

To me it looks like the longest books are really really long and that it doesn't match the size of the front. --Kynde (talk) 06:03, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

The last "pages and rear cover" is obviously the real thickness of the end bit of the last book (where it is the only representative). The penultimate pages section is therefore 2x the thickness of the pages from either book which has such pages (give or take paper-quality/weight), and so on until the first paper-bundle is eleven times the thickness of the books that all have pages one-to-whatever.

Which means it should be 'easy' (...FCVO) to reconstruct the uncollated and re-bound individual book widths from pixel measurements alone (and use the visibly cyclic nature of the initial 11-collated page 1s, 2s, etc to estimate the 'page density' to even get a good approximation of page-counts). But I must admit that there seems a lot more paper there than eleven books would normally have. Unless peculiarly short-and-fat.

In fact, I'm glancing at a bookshelf unit opposite where I'm sitting. It looks narrower than the drawing (just measured: 750mm, or 2'5½" internal to its sides; I reckon the comic bookshelf is the traditional 3ft/yard length, though obviously less the end bits where unobtrusive bookends could be for an 'open' version like that) and yet it has thirty books crammed in on one of its levels, and some of those being 'mighty tomes' (830 pages, 469, 454, 944, 778... just by 'last numbered'). Thinnest book in the sequence is 122 pages. The whole lot is a mixture of hardbacks, paperbacks and those intermediate 'card-bound' types that I forget the name of. If they were all hardback, I'd have to lose at least one (maybe two) of the thinner ones, but can't account for anything above a dozen of the difference, that way. Similar for the other levels of shelving, and I've got more (and thicker, at first glance) books on other shelves in this room and elsewhere.

So artistic licence, probably, but I get the impression that the mix of relative proportions are probably taken from RL, just exagerated for drawability.

And an unbound book, leaf torn assunder from fellow-folio leaf, probably gains a bit of 'air gap', now that it has no spine to help 'bookend the book', the standing-power of singular hardback covers alone can't be that stable to resist all that paper wanting to domino-lean outwards, like a reasonably long book or two can to retain thinner works within the central part of the shelving. It looks like an engineering problem, in miniature, working with tolerances and margins (NPI!) to not have everything decide to schluff sideways; and possible off the shelf entirely! 172.70.85.34 09:29, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

Did you skillfully defuse my nerd snipe regarding mapping the page locations? 172.70.131.91 00:47, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

Why not sort by ISO 2108? -- Hamslabs (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

By ISBN? You mean order by the publishers' registration date? Lol. No, that's useless unless you're trying to make a point about publishing industry consolidation, which you could more effectively do by sorting on parent company identity. (But making that point would be a pretty good idea.[1]) 172.71.154.47 06:29, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

There are so many drawbacks from destroying books to sort the pages and zero advantages (except to horrify book people with the destruction of books), so all the crap about the good and bad is not relevant! I will delete it. --Kynde (talk) 06:06, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

Go for it, landed gentry! 172.71.155.22 06:09, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

I agree that adding supposed "advantages" to the sorting method is probably superfluous, but I instinctively added a summary of the disadvantages, since that is what we usually do on ExplainXKCD. It can often be illuminating to actually break down the reasons why something is bad - even if it seems obvious, I often discover nuances that I'd never even considered this way. Hawthorn (talk) 13:03, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

The content of the shelf happens when somebody digitizes a personal library by cutting the bindings off books and feeding large clumps of their pages through a document scanner. You’ve already digitized them, so the loose pages are a novelty rather than the primary source for the content. 172.70.131.91 00:44, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

... books? 162.158.90.135 06:51, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

There's a compromise between sorting by colour and sorting by topic. --172.68.146.11 14:14, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

Are there any famous books where the first line is "Aaaaaaahhhh", thereby making it first in Randall's bookshelf? 172.70.175.226 18:15, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

I don't know. But I haven't written any part of Earthly Powers. "Sorry, but we can't advertise your book."--172.71.114.11 21:30, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

I would think the obvious way to sort books would be alphabetically by most important word. For genre fiction, that would be the 40000th word, since that is the one that makes it eligible for a Nebula Award for Best Novel.172.69.247.45 05:13, 21 June 2023 (UTC)