Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-24894325-20151119211902/@comment-24894325-20151229111407

Now I'm really mad at myself. Because I've noticed that The Diary of River Song doesn't have a dab term and correctly reconstructed the reason: it is not a story. But I somehow failed to apply it to this discussion.

I like the idea of dropping dab terms for collections whenever possible. The rationale for always having dab terms for stories was that they often need disambiguation in non-obvious ways. But most collection titles disambiguate themselves, so to say. If it has "and other stories" or "Volume 01" or "Series 03" or "Box Set" at the end of the official BF release name, there is no chance of confusing them with anything. Someone suggested to rename Extinction (audio anthology) into Extinction, so this should not be done IMHO. Because, as you can see, Extinction does require disambiguation already, but Extinction never will. In short, collection names are much less likely to be literal and, hence, ambiguous than story names. For instance, from the table above I think only the following already released titles may require a dab term: And out of these, I'm sure many actually do not require any dab term. And, for those that actually require a dab term, we may avoid "splitting hair" by simply using (range). This also avoids the issue of searching for the use of (anthology) or (box set) in the release materials.
 * 1) Dark Eyes
 * 2) The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield
 * 3) The Triumph of Sutekh
 * 4) Epoch
 * 5) Road Trip
 * 6) Legion
 * 7) New Frontiers
 * 8) Missing Persons
 * 9) Circular Time
 * 10) 100
 * 11) Forty-Five
 * 12) The Company of Friends

I'll address other points separately, but let me answer one question. The Companion Chronicles: The Specials is actually a collection of three stories previously available as free downloads for DWM and main range(?) subscribers. This is also my example of a 4-tier structure, because it is a release within a range that contains three parts, of which the first consists of 12 stories.