E is not é on ABE
Archive: Online bookselling
I'd swear that once upon a time ABE considered e and é the same letters.
Recently in pricing a bunch of French language books I discovered each has recovered its own identity. So you have to do two separate searches to find the best or cheapest copy.
The change was possibly necessitated by ABE creating international sites and trying to make the search results more relevant for, say, French speaking book buyers.
I'm not competent to say if this is a good thing. A 'power search' switch to flatten the accents would be a handy feature.
2 · Posted by: Richard on August 29, 2005 06:29 PM
I may start entering names with the proper accents and an 'Americanized' spelling in parentheses.
Last week I thought I had the only copy online until I did a second search with the accent in place.
3 · Posted by: Anirvan on September 1, 2005 07:49 PM
I just checked — Abebooks' accent-handling seems to be working fine now. I tried searching for both “el nino de la bola” and “el niño de la bola”; both returned identical results, including titles cataloged as either “El niño de la bola” or “El nino de la bola.”
4 · Posted by: Richard on September 4, 2005 08:54 PM
I went back and tried the book that promted the entry and sure enough now both copies show up regardless of how you enter the name.
I'd actually seen signs of this earlier in the week while I was cataloging lots of French titles.
Maybe they were playing under the hood a bit. Rarely it seems a good sign since many perfectly functional sites seems to suffer when changes are made to - ? - justify someone's salary?
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My thanks,
Richard
1 · Posted by: Anirvan on August 28, 2005 01:07 PM
No, it's not a good thing. Given that many searchers and booksellers don't know how to éñtër characters not found in the English language, it's good practice to allow “e” and “é” to substitute for each other. If booksellers did consistently correct data entry, you could even have “e” substitute for an “é” in searches, but without the reverse, figuring that nobody would type an “é” without meaning it.