http://tagshadow.com/forum/tags/pern a quantitative visual SFF book recommendation ... thingy en-US Sat, 19 May 2012 12:35:59 +0000 http://bbpress.org/?v=1.0.2 q http://tagshadow.com/forum/search.php http://tagshadow.com/forum/topic/classification-and-spoilers#post-15 Sat, 17 Oct 2009 20:15:35 +0000 MentatJack 15@http://tagshadow.com/forum/ <p>Talking with a friend just now, a particularly good example of this came up: Endings. Some people prefer books with happy endings and others prefer depressing endings. Sometimes knowing, even in such broad strokes, how a story ends might feel like a spoiler, but often it's just another useful way to categorize a book. </p> http://tagshadow.com/forum/topic/classification-and-spoilers#post-14 Fri, 09 Oct 2009 08:42:11 +0000 MentatJack 14@http://tagshadow.com/forum/ <p>Spoilers have always annoyed me. Both when reading and when writing reviews of books, the line between knowing what a book is about and knowing enough to not even need to read the book can be rather thin. This happens quite a bit when you tag things. The main categorization of a book is usually safe. Tagging <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/076534825X?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=tagshadow-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=076534825X">Spin</a> by Robert Charles Wilson science fiction is in no way a spoiler, but tagging it <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_uplift">uplift</a> probably is. It's a perfect tag, but that aspect of the story appears rather late in the timeline and might thus be considered a spoiler.</p> <p>I can think of other books where tagging them science fiction instead of fantasy could be considered spoilers. The original <a href="http://tagshadow.com/amazon/pca.php?tagId=4326">Pern</a> trilogy comes to mind. There are plenty of examples where the question of science vs magic or alien vs religion is the central mystery.</p> <p>It strikes me that one benefit of the TagShadow method of recommendation (browsing through clusters of similar books) to an extent protects the reader from the potential spoilers contained in a tag cloud about the book. </p>