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Confusing UI if you have read multiple versions
J
jaina8851Sep 9, 2021
I don't have many instances of this in my own library, but for books where I (for example) have listened to an audiobook and then read a print version for a re-read, the metadata gets confusing.
Some examples:
- The book shows up twice in my "Read" list. This is a pro and a con; it is nice to see both re-reads in that list, but it is confusing to click in to both and have them be basically separate entities.
- Related to this, it doesn't seem quite right when I click in to one of those copies and have it just say "you read this once in 2021" when in actuality, I read the book itself twice. It makes me do a double take, like, wait a minute, I definitely read it twice, and then I remember that I read it twice in different editions. Again, I can see how some people would want this behavior, but I find it confusing.
- The most difficult thing for me is the way that tags and reviews get associated with only one edition. With the way that I am using tags, I want it to be associated with a book, not with a particular edition of it. My use case is that I'm using a tag called "book club" to maintain a list of books that my book club read. So now, instead of just adding the generic book "Gideon The Ninth" to my book club tag, I have to decide whether I want to tag the audiobook or the print book. Related, it now looks like one version of the book doesn't have a review and one does. Again, I can see why people might want the option to rate the narration differently than a print book, but for all of my purposes, I basically want the review to be for the book, not for a particular edition.
Comments
idea for a more short-term "fix" for this that I think would address some of the issues jaina8851 has raised (all of which I agree with :) ): have the "You have read another edition of this book" text/link show up above editions marked as read. Currently that only shows up on editions not marked as read. I've attached screenshots of 3 different editions, 2 of which I've read, and as you can see only the 3rd one has that helpful text.
This is one of our biggest challenges right now! Allowing people to have a status against different editions vs some of the challenges you've listed above. Thank you for the detailed feedback on your user experience!
There are many features of GR that I never discovered until I started using StoryGraph because that app is so opaque and hard to use and things are so hidden and "editions" is one of them, I never was careful about logging that before mainly because I didn't know you could even switch editions haha. I was just playing around with how I would make this work on there (I do still use both apps 😅 while I work on moving my friends over here!) and I wonder if TSG could do something similar to the way they organize this. I didn't know to start my second re-read on GR as the paperback version (and there doesn't seem to be a way to switch that, which is annoying), so I pretended that I just started the book again, and I like the way that it collects all the reading data into one place and also says I'm on my third re-read, which feels more accurate than saying "I read the audiobook once, and I read the paperback once). I also like that I was looking at the paperback edition, so it specified that my previous reads were the audiobook. I wonder if the "Reading History" / "Journal Entries" page might be able to accommodate something like this so that you could see all the re-reads in one single place.
This doesn't really solve for the usecase of wanting one vs different reviews for the book, because when I tried adding a review for this edition on GR, it straight up doesn't show me my rating / review for the other edition. But I wonder if there is a way to collect those as well... my other concern about rating both versions in TSG is that I feel like it skews my stats. I don't want this book to count as two separate five star ratings in my stats... although I suppose it didn't occur to me until this second to wonder whether re-reads of the same edition get multiply counted in stats haha, but that would surprise me!
Anyway sorry if this is too in-the-weeds for suggestions, I'm super passionate about UX and also really really love TSG and just want to be helpful :) Thank you for taking the time to respond to me!
Not at all! These thoughts are super helpful! Thank you! :-)