All good - not really any way you could’ve known! 
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I signed up to check the site out as well.
Submitted a request for a new manga series. I don’t know how you want to add it since it has two different editions (25 and 17 volumes). I wrote the details in the request form.
Edit: and a few other manga series as well.
Yeah, would be really great to be able to specify when I actually read a specific book.
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These kind of initiatives are excellent. But I do wish one could search/find audiobooks in such a database.
お疲れ様でした
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Awesome! Welcome aboard! Thanks for sending in all those book requests, filling out the catalogue really helps a lot!
Ugh. Yes i’ve encountered this in a few other places (ヨコハマ買い出し紀行, ARIA… a few others) and I don’t really have a good solution for it… it’s just unfortunate. I’ll probably take whatever the newer edition is and make a note to estimate your volumes. Good news is that for almost all series, we treat the difficulty as only one number rather than difficulty levels for each volume. So the weird editions don’t impact that at least!
Coming very soon! Should be there by this weekend.
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Perhaps they deserve to be added as separate book series but share the difficulty ranking in the backend?
The star rating could be different btw, since it’s manga and different editions may have differences in image quality, colored pages etc.
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Certainly on the horizon! I’d love to add them and thanks for pointing out you want them, helps me gauge what to do. I started with books as language learners usually start with books, but next up will be anime, tv shows and movies. Audiobooks & podcasts are definitely in the plan too, but trying to do the most popular things first! I’ve had a lot of requests for anime for instance.
And each item type has it’s own little particularities. Like how correlated is the audiobook difficulty to the written book difficulty? Should they be the same? Should we only be comparing audiobooks with other audiobooks & podcasts? Are there different voice actors for audiobooks that make an impact? Should I simply add an audiobook option on everything right now and if you marked finished not allow you to difficulty grade?
It’s all very doable, just need to be thoughtful about it and try not to move too fast.
All that’s a long way of saying, yes it’s coming! Just will be a little while in the current roadmap (which is liable to change too…).
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That’s a very good thought and probably the right solution! It’s not totally trivial though as the notion of ‘series’ is integrated into a lot of things, so I’d have to wade through each item and potentially change. It’s not a huge issue now, but as we continue to add books, it will continue to get larger and I’ll probably need to fix.
That’s a good callout that I hadn’t thought of. Will certainly keep in mind!
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I think I’m missing a link to browse all items. The Browse page splits items by level (and defaults to the easiest one).
I think it’d be great to have a link this page somewhere on browse:
Or perhaps have Browse be a dropdown? If you click on brows you get the current screen. But items on a dropdown could be the book types (Novel, Manga, Graded Reader etc).
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It actually is there! But that’s good feedback as it’s not super prominent. It’s the ‘search page’ mentioned at the top of the browse page:
Additionally, on each swimlane of content, there’s a link to see all that type of content on the search page:
Frankly though, I’m not thrilled at how the browse page / search page split turned out. The browse page I have is a pretty common type of page (that’s the main way you browse on GoodReads for instance), but people really seem to like browsing the Natively search page more it seems.
That’s to say, I appreciate that feedback and I agree I probably should make that ‘search page’ link more prominent!
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I couldn’t find it because I didn’t realise it was a “search” page. To me it’s more of a “browse” page, while the current Browse page is something like “explore”/“suggestions”.
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That’s good to know!
Cool cool! Well, I want to do something similar with podcasts and have even bought the domain name poddokyasto.com - maybe we could cooperate so I can take some burden off you? My email is fatihkilic@hotmail.nl
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Wow! Love it. I’ll be honest, I’m quite busy these days so not sure how interested I am in a full joint venture… really want to work on what I currently have right now. But shoot me an email and we can talk - brandon at learnnatively dot com.
Alright, so made a few updates to the ‘my resources’ / personal library pages. They should be much faster and handle series quite well - although when you get a moment @NicoleIsEnough, I’d love your thoughts on the series handling! It does add a bit heft to the UI naturally, but I think it works well. Do note I haven’t touched the search page series handling yet… may not for a little while.
If anyone else has feedback too, please let me know! Otherwise, i’m onto editing start dates & end dates for you all
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Thanks for adding the books!
I was going through the new ones and when trying to rate them I couldn’t figure out where to click 
I found the 3rd place but since it was faint grey it took me some time to find it. And I don’t understand why there are two other places with stars?
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No problem, thanks for contributing!
Oh no, you found another place I spent a long time worrying about
So those other two places are for aggregate star ratings on the book, not your own personal star rating. All aggregate stars are shown in that teal color, all personal stars are shown in yellow. For instance, looking at 黒 1 for me:
and on a book with aggregate ratings and no personal ratings, I think it’s relatively intuitive, but I’d love to hear other thoughts too:
You hit my nightmare scenario though, which hopefully isn’t too common:
- It was your first time reviewing something from the book page
- There were no aggregate ratings yet, making it confusing
I’m not entirely sure what to do that’s better. GoodReads does something similar (except they use a reddish color rather than teal for aggregate ratings):
Really appreciate all this feedback on the interface - it’s invaluable. A lot of users don’t take the time to send it in!
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But still why do you have a star meter under alternative titles and under reviews? They are identical, no?
And as for your rating input, maybe it’d make sense to place it next to the aggregate ratings? Something like:
Book rating ●●●●○ | your rating ○○○○○
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This is amazing! Thank you so much for this! I can tell you put a lot of hard work into creating this site. Wow. Very helpful! Reading Crystal Hunters now.
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They are identical yes, but I think you do want it in both places as those aggregate star ratings are pretty crucial information. If I took it out of the header, I think users would be disappointed because it’s almost universal to showcase an aggregate review count underneath the title these days for just about any product. I also can’t really remove it from the reviews section, as in many cases the header aggregate reviews wouldn’t be visible (too many where to find / written description).
So that kinda forces me into the situation I have with both places showcasing aggregate reviews, which is pretty standard (Amazon does this, Goodreads… I think most places).
Now where to put the widget for your rating is a good question and I’ll think on your proposal, it is intuitive. I do like keeping all the ‘user actions’ on a book in one place. On mobile, perhaps it’s a bit more intuitive for you as everything is stacked.
There’s also the issue of showcasing how many reviews, which I currently do to the right of the aggregate stars, so I would have to rearrange that too if I were to take your proposal.
Like I said though, your particular case was worse than usual, but this is all really good feedback and I noted it down as an issue. I could do some other simple things, like adding ‘rate book’ above the stars similar to goodreads to emphasize that this is where you put your rating. I’ll continue to monitor too and see if more people hit your issue as well.
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Woohoo! That’s amazing to hear and it’s what makes working on the site so easy!