Publish date should be standard information available on every layer of the UI where the book title is shown. Otherwise this is excellent and very much appreciated.
This is a not-uncommon request. The problem is that the publication date for many older books is unclear or unknown. Was Romeo and Juliet published in 1597? It certainly appeared in print, but that edition was so riddled with errors that scholars think it was pirated. Was it published in 1599? A better edition certainly appeared in print then, but that edition too was incomplete and filled with errors. Then was it published in 1609?...
This is a common theme for a surprising number of books, even going in to the modern era. For that reason we're only concerned with the publication date of our own editions. Interested readers can come to conclusions about the original publication date of particular books using their own research.
I agree with OP and think it may be better to show a publication year on every title. (Of course, the site is open source so I could experiment with this myself).
I'd push back on your example and say it doesn't matter if you say 1597, 1599, or 1609—any of those provides quite a lot of information to the reader and vastly more information that not providing any date at all. I find it a bit hard to scan because some of the books seem to be from the Roman era, others 1800's, and having an approximate publication year would be very helpful.
But again, I could be wrong, just suspect OP is right and putting years frequently would be a decent improvement.
Agreed, also with OP. I'm not sure why Alex didn't mention that the original publication date (or date range) is a standard item in the `content.opf` file that is part of every ebook.
This data is important to me, too, when choosing ebook—e.g., reading Dickens or some other prolific author in order of publication. The edge case for non-inclusion is a bit of an outlier–itself readily solved by using range, as noted (and producers already can do a fair bit of research when producing an SE volume!). (Conversely, the date of publication of the SE edition is of no interest to me at all...)
For personal interest, I maintain a "cumulative index" of the SE corpus which includes the original publication date, scraped from the `content.opf` file. Anyone interested is welcome to have a look: https://www.sudalyph.org/seci/
