Finding ways to bring new users, I see 
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One potential ask I’d have for this is some way to import your collection. I’ve got all my currently-tracked English books in Goodreads, and it would be a massive pain to import them all by hand, set read dates, star reviews, etc. x.x
No Mandarin? 
(You have to draw the line somewhere, I know.)
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Mandarin would come after Web Novels / Web Comics as, from what I understand, it’s much more of a struggle getting books. I’d also have to custom handle the book import process.
Granted, I could potentially open a language without books… we will see. But no, not immediate priority 
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No worries! It’s always fun to see your plans, so I’m looking forward to everything on your roadmap regardless!
That would be an interesting way to test the blank book request for sure. No pre-populated books, just stuff you add yourself. Reminds me of a video game tracking site that I like using specifically for that reason; it’s got a lot of downsides, though: users being careless about what info they add (inaccurate/wrong, mostly), users being put off from the thought they have to add their collection of 82397438 Steam games by hand, etc.
Dunno how much any of that would be a concern for a community like this; I will say it is very convenient to just be able to search from a database and add that way, haha.
I was thinking about this the other day: if Natively continues on an upward trend like it has been doing, one day it could become the gold standard for retrieving book data for books of different languages. Like, say Natively ends up having to put in a lot of elbow grease to populate a large database of books written in, say, Nepali; there’s no other site that has much of a collection, and if Natively had a public API that allowed book data to be retrieved, you could very well end up seeing Natively be the guy that everyone copies when they need info for their own databases.
When Natively eventually withers and dies (not anytime soon, of course, but all websites eventually fade away), maybe it’ll be the bedrock that the next great book-tracking site for language learners will sit on…
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Oh, so I was not going to allow users to manually upload books. Just block out books entirely, which would be very sad. That said, I probably would just spend the time to get douban working if I were to launch mandarin.
And yeah, I’m a big believer in not doing manual uploading of books. One of the prime reasons other people have failed at trying to do something like Natively is that they require users to manually input their thousands of books 
Eventually yes, manual uploaded books will be needed for edge cases, but those really should be approved individually by admins which is a pain.
Also why would you require video game manually to be inputted when IGDB is a thing. At least let that cover a good portion of your video games 
Haha perhaps. Although I’d have to think there’ll always be larger native databases out there. Maybe, one day 
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Ah, I see; that is quite sad. 
OT
A very good question! My best guess would be that the site in question existed before IGDB, but I don’t know any dates/am too lazy to look them up to see if that’s a reasonable guess or not.
(The site is going through a 2.0 update; iirc they are adding a searchable db with that.)
I figure it’d be a case of two options:
- You use the larger database but have to put in way more work to get it work nicely with your own setup
- You use the slightly smaller database that contains the information you’re actually interested in and is formatted for use by a site similar to what you’re already trying to set up.
I know which site I would use.
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I’m curious if down the line there would be other languages offered for site navigation? I can see this being popular once English is added. I also have a sense of deja vu - have I asked this before? 
I think also if a list of items needing translated were to be shared, some people would be happy to crowd source translations. Would probably want another user to sign off on the translations as a proofread/sanity check, but it’d be better than machine translation.
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It was asked by someone else, yes 
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Just got reminded of a shower thought I had the other day.
Is there any value of using other languages’ gradings of an item to help estimate the translation of that item? I could see this being more of a thing when more European languages (and especially English) get online because I think there’s way more translation of media, for example, but in all honesty I’d probably trust “this is a level X in language Y, so it might be a good choice for you” over “well manga tend to be this level”.
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I’m not sure how equivalent this will be for something like say, Japanese to Spanish. Furigana, kanji coverage, the amount of localization the translation has would all impact difficulty a lot I imagine. Maybe for ungraded items having it as a guide, but I dunno if I’d want impacting other users ratings (who actually are learners that read the book in that language) if that makes sense? But European language to European language I’d see less of an issue
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Yeah I’d envision using this for ungraded items, not to mix in with anything currently graded. I already plan to plunder the German and Spanish media libraries (and probably, to some extent, Japanese as well) once I start looking for early wins with French content. With some obvious cultural differences here and there, everyday vocabulary is going to be everyday vocabulary, and I’d imagine content in one language is going to be at most +/- 3 levels in another language. With how all over the place gradings of things that I was recommended to be an easy watch or read before I found Natively are, I think hearing that a work is pretty easy for X level in another language (I think every language learner has been recommended to read The Little Prince) might be a good enough reason to give it a try.
And yeah, Japanese is always going to be its own weird thing with furigana (although I feel like I already break the gradings since I read most of my manga OCRed with Mokuro and books as epubs in an app that has fast lookups so content without furigana is a lot easier than for a user that sticks to physical media).
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I don’t think that should affect the grading (provisional or otherwise), but I could see the appeal for an easy mechanism to “view book/grading in other language(s)”. Otoh I’m not sure there’s even a mechanism to link those though, since the books will have totally different ISBNs, and there’s probly no reliable way to auto-associate them
(PS I don’t think what you described breaks the gradings - especially since many others also read with a similar setup… The site already balances to prevent any one user from having too much influence anyway)
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I’d also be happy with this.
Probably also fair…
I wonder if it would be worthwhile to have a way to have admin-approved linkings…
Just wanted to update you all on my current plans:
Road Map:
Lists (new addition)Community Editable Book Synopsis ( Jan/Feb)Lists (Jan)Hover over widget for items showcasing descriptions while browsing. (Feb)Add Native Language setting (Early Feb ?)- Add Video Games & Visual Novel (In Progress - Sometime in March)
- Web Novel / Web Comic (In Progress - Sometime in March)
- improved Book & Series pages (March ?) (includes lists feature and publisher date)
- Crosslinking between different media forms of the same title/property (Late March / April)
- Book Club Support (April ?)
- Book Edition Handling (May?)
- Rereads / Rewatch (May?)
- Recommendations & Premium(May?)
- Notifications System (??)
Discussion:
I’ve already started in on webnovels & videogames and i’ve already got the upload process working pretty well! I’ve decided to do them at the same time for two reasons:
- It forces me to standardize my approach to different items - Books, Movies, TV shows… etc. While it is already standardized to a degree, doing these two at once really forces me to standardize it even more. It also forces me to make various UIs scalable (Activity filters, Stats, Gradings Admin… etc).
- I couldn’t decide which one was more important .
Number 1 will force me to return to the book & series pages, which is why that feature was bumped up. I also think adding these content types will make the crosslinking feature even more important, which is why that feature is on deck.
Another thing I’d like to note - Adding English & French is on hold for the time being. We’ll see if we get some breathing room, but I’ve found that adding languages isn’t really a zero-cost for me. It is low cost, so I don’t expect them linger too long, but perhaps until after these features go out.
Lastly, for webnovels & webtoons, I will be starting with Naver only (Korean). Webnovels have a lot of potential sources which will be easy to add, but I want to get Naver working first. Webnovels & Webtoons are especially important for Korean. I also think figuring out how to deal with Aozora crosslisted as book & webnovel is it’s own can of worms.
All in all, I’m super excited about the next month! Webnovels & videogames will certainly have a longtail of feature improvements after their initial launch, but it will really round out our offering. Webnovels & webtoons in particular will offer a lot of cheap options for people to explore
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Why would stuff on Aozora be considered a webnovel?
And just to double-check, video games and webnovels will be language agnostic, right? (Once more than Never is recognized, of course.) Will I be able to add the same video game for multiple languages?
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So, you’re right, I’m mostly thinking syosetu. However, I do think there’s a nuance which we will need to contend for when it comes to web-based books. For Natively, are webnovels more about how they’re published? Or how they’re consumed?
Right now, i’m imagining progress-marking in webnovels will be done via chapters, not pages. If someone is reading a long book on aozora, that may be nice too.
Idk, we’ll have to think about it aat some point, as i’m sure it will come up.
Video games by default handles all languages because IGDB does. Webnovels will purely be source dependent, but yes, I expect to expand to syosetu relatively quickly after launch.
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But, in that case, the book will have been published before. It’s the same as reading the ebook version.
That’s not the case for webnovels. Even if they eventually get published, there will be enough difference between the two versions that you can’t really tell.
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I would say published; just like @Naphthalene said, if we consider it by how it’s consumed, any book I read through the Kindle app on my PC is now a webnovel, which doesn’t fit the spirit of the definition.
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Yep, fully agree with you two.
AFAIR @brandon was worried about not being able to determine the number of pages read when reading a webnovel, but in all honesty this is the case for any digital media, be it bookwalker or kindle or anything else, and we all have to cope with this in one way or another. 
For me “webnovel” implies it’s published on the web and not through a book publishing company, while Aozora ist just one of many distributors of (already published) books. Most of the Aozora books are available through other channels as well (e.g. Bookwalker and afaik also Kindle distribute many of them for free).
On top of that, ironically, all Aozora books have been published before the web even existed 
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