Something very similar to this has been attempted before, with rather dismal results. Hardly anyone seemed interested in writing a little synopsis (or "blurb") On a few records in the online catalog, you will see a link labled "Reviews" which contain these. Many of them are actually only brief excerpts from the text in question. Andrew On Wed, 10 Nov 2004, Tony Baechler wrote:
I have a possible suggestion for solving part of this. Put something in the newsletter asking people who read PG etexts to write summaries of them and categorize them. Somehow create a form which only allows books to be reviewed or summarized, maybe like a wiki but more confined. Someone would still manually approve the summary ("good" isn't helpful) and add it to the catalog. That would at least give the end user some idea of what a book is about first. Just for clarity, I would suggest that this summary, synopsis, categorization etc. would show up on the etext/1234 page and be added to the rdf feed but not appear in GUTINDEX.ALL.