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Hardcover

Book Standards

Last updated on January 7, 2025

Guide

Titles

What title should we use for the book?

We should use the official English title the book was released with whenever possible.

For example, the original title of “War and Peace” is “Война и миръ”. We should use “Война и миръ” as the title of the Russian edition, but “War and Peace” as the title of the book. This could be done from the Edit Book page where we override the edition’s title. Alternatively, we could set the “Default Physical Edition” to the English edition. That would also set the title to the English title.

If books have multiple English titles (ex: “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” vs “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”), we should use the title localized for the USA (Sorcerers stone in this case).

In the future, we want to allow people to set their language and have it automatically use the localized version, but for now we’re aiming to use the US title as the default.

What about franchise books, like “Brotherhood”, which is in the Star Wars universe?

In this case, the official title of the book according to the publisher is “Star Wars: Brotherhood”, and we should use that.

In other cases where there’s a series, we should leave it off unless it is part of the name (ex: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone). When left off (ex: The Fellowship of the Ring), we should make sure to set the featured series to be the primary series we know this title from (“The Lord of the Rings”).

What if the official title also has the series in it?

This will depend on where and how the series is part of the title. If it’s b

How should we handle books with long titles with a “:” in them? Ex: “Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution”

Set the title of this book to whatever the publisher named it. In this case, that would be “Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution”.

On the book page, we’ll break the title up by “:” and wrap it into multiple lines if it has a very long title.

Example of a long title on Hardcover

For books with a very long title, but a smaller, well-known title, we should use the shorter title as the URL slug. This allows the book to live at the URL https://hardcover.app/books/babel while maintaining a longer name. Book slugs can only be edited by the original person who added the book, Adam and Jeff right now.

What about subtitle?

You’ll notice there’s a field for subtitle in the edit book form. We currently do not use this field for anything. We do split the title into title and subtitle when creating books. For example:

  • Full title: “Wallet Activism: How to Use Every Dollar You Spend, Earn, and Save as a Force for Change”.
  • Title: “Wallet Activism: How to Use Every Dollar You Spend, Earn, and Save as a Force for Change”
  • Subtitle: “How to Use Every Dollar You Spend, Earn, and Save as a Force for Change”
  • Slug: “wallet-activism”

Descriptions

Authoratative Source for Book Descriptions / Other Information

In order of preference:

  1. Publisher
  2. Author Official Website
  3. BookBub / WorldCat
  4. Bookstore (Barnes & Noble, Amazon, etc)
  5. Other Book Site (Open Library, Google Books, etc)

Promontional Content / Reviews / Author Bios / Edition Info in Descriptions

Book descriptions should be constrained to a spoiler-free introduction / summary of the book. Additional promotional information should be removed, even if it is present in the description on the authoratative source.

Examples of content to remove: “From the author of xxx bestselling series” “This book is a book -Famous Author” “Reprinted for the first time in genuine leather”

Description Headlines

If available, use a headline from the publisher If the a specific headline is not provided, there are several possible options:

  1. Move the first paragraph of the description if it fits and is appropriate as a standalone
  2. Copy a key sentance or phrase from the description
  3. Leave it blank

Default Editions

Cover Edition

Generally, the cover edition should be the most recently published hardcover edition of the book with a “Good” quality cover available; however, there may be cases such as special or limited printings where another edition may be more appropriate.