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"Not a book" status
Shipped
May 6, 2022
There are some types of reading material logged on StoryGraph that aren't traditional books (e.g. fanfiction, literary journals, etc.).
These types of formats need to be handled differently to a regular book in the product but we still want to give our users the ability to track them if they'd like to.
We are working on a set of features that'll better reflect the nature of these types of reading material in the app!
Comments
For items marked as "Not A Book" in StoryGraph:
It would be really helpful if anything tagged as "Not A Book" wasn't counted in the number of books read each month
radella_hardwick Hello! The reason we had to introduce the "Not A Book" label is because users were adding lots of fanfiction so that they could track it as part of their goals, but it caused issues for other StoryGraph users and the fanfiction authors. On the flipside, sometimes people read a certain type of book that is very much a book but they don't want it tracked as part of their reading goals. Typical categories I see are Children's Books (say they're reading books to their kids), or Manga or Graphic Novels, etc. To that end, there's a separate feature on the roadmap to allow a user to say "don't count this book as part of my reading goal": https://roadmap.thestorygraph.com/requests-ideas/posts/filter-books-that-count-towards-reading-goals.
Nadia I'd missed that feature! Will need to go implement it to weed out radio dramatisations 😊
radella_hardwick Oh, it's not live yet!! Just saying that that's the one you'd want! :-D
We have a radio programme in Italy where books are read as audiobooks, but split into episodes that are then made available as podcasts: https://www.raiplaysound.it/programmi/adaltavoce .
I'm listening to Raymond Carver's short stories and I would like to add them to TSG. Can they be considered as an audiobook or should I mark them as "not a book"?
mikebond I think those would be audio NABs!
Nadia thank you for your response. What exactly would make them NABs? Being split into episodes, being broadcast on the radio, lacking an ISBN...? Would books read and shared on free sites like LibriVox also be NABs?
mikebond You can use your discretion and if the team or librarians have a different view of a status we will change it. With the case you mentioned, it sounded far enough away from traditional book publishing, but if the very same content is available in book form, especially if those records exist on TSG, then you could argue the radio show is just another edition of it!
Nadia ok, thank you! I haven't found any tables of contents for the collections of Carver's short stories. I suppose they picked some from different collections, so this may be a NAB. However, when they read a novel, it's from a published edition, so that would be closer to an audiobook edition.
Would this include short stories that are either released on their own or as part of magazines? I'm thinking of the Hugo nominated short stories and novelettes that I currently have no way to track.
devrose You're welcome to create whatever book records you'd like and attach the "Not a book" tag. You can also search beforehand to see what else others have already added just in case! :-D
OMG! I listen to serialized fiction via podcasts (like Orphan Black: The Next Chapter and If I Go Missing, The Witches Did It) and this new feature might work for tracking them!
👀 I've been waiting so excitedly for this feature, since my book reading has taken an absolute nose-dive since Our Flag Means Death aired and I've been reading fanfiction instead 🙈 How do I use the new features to log "not books"?
When you create a book, there's now a "Not A Book" checkbox at the bottom that you can check! :-)
Where would I go to create a book? I'm struggling to find that feature.
When you search for a book, there's a button up top that says "Import book". On that page there's a link to the manual book form.
For items marked as "Not A Book" in StoryGraph: