Comment by joemi

A simple search for books is an interesting problem because some it makes sense to find based on title alone, while it doesn't make sense for other books.

Take To Kill A Mockingbird as an example... No matter what (English) edition of the book you read, you're likely reading the exact same content, even the exact same words, as any other English edition. There might be a different preface near the front or different blurbs on the back cover or a different number of words per page, but the actual story is word-for-word the same. A simple title lookup makes sense here in most cases.

Compare that to something like The Iliad, where the English versions are all translations and can vary greatly from translator to translator. While all telling ultimately the same story, a bad translation doesn't begin to compare to an elegantly beautiful translation, so you almost certainly don't want to treat all editions of The Iliad the same.

Translations aren't the only times that you wouldn't want to treat all editions of a title the same. Some books have undergone abridgments, revisions, or corrections, so the content won't be word-for-word the same between editions, but might or might not be close enough that it's worth considering them the same. Some books have heavily annotated editions, so while not changing the underlying content that all the editions are based on, the reading experience is quite different.

I could go on with differences, but I hope it's clear that there _are_ differences between books and movies when it comes to variations/releases. For books, I think the lookup issue is closer to how it is for board games. Board games, like books, have many editions and translations and often get updated/revised between editions. Sometimes the updates change the gameplay significantly, and other times they don't. Boardgamegeek.com is one of the best (if not _the_ best) catalogs of board games that there is, and it has regular discussions/arguments about whether a new edition of a game is different enough that it deserves its own page or if it should just be relegated to be an easy-to-ignore note in the Versions section of the previous version's page. I think a letterboxd-like lookup for books would have similar regularly-occurring debates, and, like with board games, ultimately have to be fairly hand-curated.