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Thanks for the site, it is a very interesting concept!

By the way, I considered sending this to you via email, but decided against it to allow others to (a) see what I already reported, and (b) comment and improve on my ideas if they like. I folded my thoughts away so it doesn’t take up so much visual space, though…
(If you would prefer me to send you an email instead, please tell me and I’ll comply)

Some Natively issues regarding editions

I’m pretty sure you’ll see :rofl:


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The cover images of vol. 1-3 are from a different edition than the cover image of vol. 4. See the green border around the image? This indicates the full-furigana edition. Here are the non-furigana images for vol. 1-4:

If it’s an edition with more vs. less furigana, that would immediately feed back into the perceived difficulty for me, though. (By the way, Kiki has the same issue, there are two editions with different furigana amounts.)

Also, once people start venturing into older books, you might have books with old vs. new kanji/kana/grammar as well which all of a sudden could make all the difference between “nice read” and “unintelligible” :flushed:

Also please note that the 鹿の王 as well as the 獣の奏者 series actually consist of five books (the fifth one of each does not have the number 5, though…). Oh and I think (but not sure really) that the full-furigana children’s edition of 獣の奏者 even split each book into two… :sweat_smile:


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For Fruits Basket, it seems you are listing the Collector’s Edition (judging by the covers). That one groups two volumes of the original edition into one which made selecting them a bit confusing for me… My suggestion would be to at least indicate “Collector’s Edition” in the title so that it becomes clear to the users which edition is being listed.


No issue, just a remark: “The Perfect Insider” is the first in a series of 10 novels.

Some thoughts around displaying series

I really like to look at the search page and to skim all the books, and it’s very nice that directly below each book I can immediately see whether I already added it to my list - if it’s a standalone book, that is… For book series, I have no visual feedback whatsoever. I cannot even see how many books you currently have in a given series. Plus, checking a series means opening a new page. This makes dealing with series a bit cumbersome for me. Therefore I have a couple of ideas:

  • display below the book series how many books are in it
  • indicate below the book series how many of these books are in which category of mine
  • make the books in the series more easily viewable, without opening a new page. I really like the way bookwalker displays series in their “what you did not yet buy from each series” list. Initially, each series is displayed as just one entry, pretty much like learnnatively does it (plus it indicates the number of entries):

    If I click on the arrows icon in the bottom right corner, I get all the members of the series in that same page:

    If that list is too long to fit in one row, I can scroll left and right. This way, it always covers just one row. (If I expand another series, this one gets closed first.)
    This way, I can operate on all the entries of that series on the same page, without the need of opening a new page and clicking around etc.

Speaking of which, I encountered a bit of a display bug: I marked a book as “finished”, then switched to looking at a series, and when I returned, that book was visually unmarked again. When I reloaded the page, the book was marked as “finished” again. So the backend had received the information initially, just the frontend had forgotten about it in the meantime…

Some ideas for the book page

On each book’s page, you list each grading which is very interesting! But it takes up a lot of space:

  • It is unnecessary to list the name of the book in each row. It would be fine to have “User graded as more difficult than Other Book” just in one row.
  • I would find it much more informative if the gradings were sorted by the book being compared to, so that I can see whether many others agree or disagree with my grading (so I can maybe think about my own judgment once more).
  • If the gradings are sorted by the book being compared to, it would be sufficient to have just three entries (easier, same, harder) per “other book”, with a list (foldable) of users who gave that grading. (Think of having hundreds of gradings at some point…). You could also maybe indicate the percentages of the votes (“33% of graders think that this is harder than Other Book”).
  • If we only have three entries, it would be helpful to sort by “percentage of votes”, so that e.g. the easiest other book that was compared comes first, and the hardest other one that was compared comes last. Again, this would help me compare my own ranking (that I have in my head) to the list.

I hope I didn’t scare you too much with this long list of ideas and suggestions :sweat_smile: Please keep up the good work!

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Wow! Not scared, that’s amazing feedback and very thoughtful! Do you work in tech perhaps :joy:. I’ll follow your lead with folding thoughts, good idea

With regards to the editions & weird splits / older versions / cover photos

Yeah, it’s unfortunate and it’s an absolute headache even the massive booksellers struggle with. Ultimately, I think i’ll need to allow users to be able to add an edition and hope crowdsourcing will be able to mitigate some of the issues.

With regards to the editions & difficulty

I definitely see where you’re coming from, but I’m worried as it introduces a lot of complexity and I’m not sure if it’s worth it. Each edition i introduce would split the amount of grades I have per book. And it also brings up other questions… should i treat ebooks separately? I’m not experienced with all the ebook readers, but do only some of them have built in vocab? Should those be treated separately??

It’s such a potentially tricky problem that I’m thinking I leave it to the ‘noise’ accounted for in the Elo model and leave it to users to let other users know about old editions / weird edition issues. I will certainly see though if some users dramatically underrate certain books with furigana editions compared to others… so I think it will be diagnosable if it is indeed a massive issue.

I also think (although I’m only at the beginning of my reading), that furigana would only change the book maybe, at most, 3-4 levels? I hope haha.

Regardless, you have pointed out my biggest fear! Editions for books are something i’m watching and thinking about. Your feedback is really helpful and i’m all ears to talk more about it.

Some thoughts around displaying series

I love everything you laid out and totally agree. That’s actually much better than what i was envisioning with a hover over, as your solution is more mobile compatible.

Some ideas for the book page

I really like all those ideas. And they’re super easy to implement. I also liked @Myria idea of prioritizing book comparisons with books already in your library.

No issue, just a remark: “The Perfect Insider” is the first in a series of 10 novels.

Got will fix.

Really appreciate that pointed feedback with recommendations!

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:eyes: Good job Mr. Detective :wink:

In case you’re looking for a React+Redux consultant at some point :sunglasses:

More editions talk

I’m struggling each time I need to find the correct book on Bookwalker :sweat_smile:

I think that might be the case at least for those editions that significantly alter the contents (e.g. 1 combined volume vs. 2 individual ones).

You’re probably right that having more or less furigana might not be worth the hassle of managing separate editions for the purposes of Natively.

One thing, though, might be the book covers. I often use them to make sure I picked the correct book, and if you have only one cover for several editions that might be confusing for some users? I don’t think this is a pressing issue, but if you have some ideas for somehow grouping/displaying several covers for one book, while keeping and not cluttering the current beautiful layout… :sweat_smile:

In my experience, ebooks usually have the same contents as the matching physical books, so I don’t think they need separate treatment.

More displaying series talk

Wow, thank you! :blush: I also briefly thought about hovers but it’s more hassle to operate even on desktop in my opinion. Glad you like the suggestion!

Oh, and I forgot to mention one thing: I think it would also be nice to use this widget on the user’s “My ressources” list so that the volumes of a series are grouped together and only unfolded on demand. This makes for a much cleaner list, especially for users who read lots of series.

Thank you for following up to quickly! Looking forward to using the new features :wink:

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Looks very useful! Love the elo system. I’m a bit hesitant to sign up, however, since I can’t find a privacy policy anywhere :thinking:.

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Thank you for that push! I had been dragging my feet on legal, but a link to the privacy policy is now on the footer: https://learnnatively.com/privacy-policy/

I think I also still need to add the cookie popup warning and a more general legal page - will do shortly.

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Yep, GDPR is a must.

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The green border edition thing does more than that, since in some cases it also simplify the words being used (and remove some of the violence since it’s a children edition; they removed a whole chapter in キノの旅 1 :rofl: )

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they removed a whole chapter in キノの旅 1 :rofl:

You’re joking lol. I mean, it wouldn’t be the end of the world if I had to separate out the tsubasabunko books explicitly if they do seem to be an issue. Usually it’s pretty small changes, right? But I think in general, it would be a nightmare to try to handle furigana difficulty for many different types of editions. :sweat_smile:

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One thing, though, might be the book covers.

I agree - I was thinking i would allow adding editions of a book with a corresponding images (crowdsourced). If there were multiple editions with different covers, I could have a small indicator hovering in the image corner which allows you to cycle them. But, like you said, not super high priority now… hopefully the name and information is enough for selection :sweat_smile:

“My ressources” list so that the volumes of a series are grouped together

This is actually a bit more difficult, as I allow you to sort by ‘date added’ and ‘review’ along with other things… which i would have to wrap up to the series level. I could do that, but it also might cause some issues in certain cases. I’ll have to think on it… I agree it’s not ideal currently!

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I’m absolutely not.

本編の変更としては、新短編「偉人の国」を第四話として入れる代わりに電撃文庫版での第四話「コロシアム」は取り除かれている。

So a new story was put in place of the fourth chapter (odds are that it’s because it was too violent). Looking at reviews, some people complained that the original chapter 4 introduced one of the recurring characters, making the rest of the series a bit weird. Some people also wondered about future violent story arcs. I haven’t checked, but those might have been replaced as well. If you are a completionist and want to read everything, you need to buy both editions.

If you separate the editions (i.e. treat them as separate items), having separate difficulties should not be a problem. Selecting the edition could be an option on the book page, you could also have a user option to show the normal or kid edition in search results.

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This was really surprising at the time too. Until then, book clubs with both a standard and tsubasa bunko version had no differences besides the furigana, so it was very very unexpected.


Also, just a tip for the forums. You’ve been quoting people by copying the text and putting it in a blockquote using >. But when you highlight the text, a “Quote” button appears (see image below). If you use this instead, the quote will actually be directly linked to the post you’re quoting, making it easier for people to follow the conversation. (See how the quote I made from your post looks and works for comparison.)

image

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Ok that’s what I was hoping :slight_smile:. If that’s the case, then I’ll probably leave it as is and analyze the issue later. For those exceptional cases, I could always just make two books with some warnings in the description and call it a day.

And thanks for that tip… i’m still relatively new to participating in these forums :grin:

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Lovely resource. I will make a point of checking it out regularly.

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Oh, do you want to hear another funny joke? (probably not, but here goes anyway :sweat_smile: )

There are two editions for ヨコハマ買い出し紀行. The first edition is in 14 volumes, the second one in 10, slightly thicker volumes. You list 14 books, the cover of the first 10 being from the second edition, and the last 4 from the first edition.
I feel like people finishing the series through the second edition would get really confused (“wait, there are more books? The story is not over?”)

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… you mean like I was? Absolute madness :joy: :sob:

Thanks for the heads up. Honestly would’ve never caught that

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I see… Well, borrowing inspiration from Bookwalker again :sunglasses:, they (a) let you choose whether to display individual books or group the series (in which case individual books are sometimes displayed as a “series of 1” and sometimes displayed as individual books, which I find a bit strange tbh, but if you like uniformity and if there is a big difference in displaying the two, you can always treat each book as a “series of 1”), and (b) bump the series with every new purchase (i.e. they pick the date of the newest purchase and order the whole series by that). So far, that ordering method has not shown any issues for me.

Bookwalker screenshot

Here you see three individual books in a row, the topmost one is a series of 1 which is not unfolded, the middle is a series of 1 which is unfolded, and the bottom one is an individual book which is not in a series. :woman_shrugging:

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Never solve what you can “borrow” :slight_smile:

Thanks for laying that out, super helpful! I’ll try to get that done sooner rather than later. People are starting to have quite large libraries now :man_dancing:

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@sweetbeems Thanks for adding all my book requests :slightly_smiling_face:

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Thanks for adding my requests as well :grin:
I have added a few more (working up from my oldest read books).
Is there a limit to how many requests we can make at the same time? Including manga, I have read about 500 items (although it will be way less requests than that considering a lot of them are series and I already have 150+ items on Natively), so I assume just putting in everything at once would be a bit too much (for me as well…)

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No problem! Please anything you want to add, don’t hesitate… especially things you really like or think other people would be interested in!

First off, that’s a lot of books! :exploding_head: No limit, only as many as you care to add! If you want to add them all, i’d absolutely love that. I will say though it may break the general difficulty grader, I haven’t stress tested it with that many books :sweat_smile:. If that does happen though, it’s not a big issue, you just need to let me know and I’ll fix it.

Really, the more relevant books on platform, the more people can use it for general discovery, so it’s super helpful. And up until this point, Natively’s been less attractive to a bit more advanced users, just because the books aren’t there.

So yes! I’d love it!

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