Description of your request or bug report:
- Community editable
- Pull Japanese descriptions from Amazon (?)
Trello link:
I donāt know if someone mentioned this previously but as an example of this, koohi.cafe (another site with a database of Japanese books), you can click on any of the titles to see the Amazon description right there on the site. So, maybe itās not a legal issue? 
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The āamazonā description is the one provided by the publisher (as far as I know). If you go to other websites (like BookWalker), youāll see the exact same thing. I donāt see why it would be an issue?
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Yes, I told the same to Brandon, it shouldnāt be a legal issue, copyright wise, because thatās the description provided by the publisher for the store fronts, and most of the time is effectively whatās on the back cover of the book.
Now, on the other hand you have to take in mind Amazonās terms of service, and what it might say about scrapping content. As Natively has the income right now almost 100% coming from Amazon, you want to make sure you are not in violation of anything there, and thatās probably where the ālegalā issues are at.
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Ah, thatās good. I brought it up because I know there was some sort of discussion of the legality of it in the previous thread. I donāt know where exactly koohi scrapes the descriptions from but they do use Amazon affiliate links as well.
That aside, I think it this feature (along with genre tags) would be an essential to anyone who intends to use the site as a discovery tool since having to do external research can be tiresome. Especially when most books are unreviewed at this time.
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The fact that other sites do it, doesnāt really mean that itās allowed.
If I were in the position of implementing, Iād double check the ToS. Thereās a fine line in there. Since Natively links also to other marketplaces other than Amazon, scrapping content from Amazon and then being able to go somewhere else to buy, might be a gray area or a red line.
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I recall Brandon not wanting to do this because Natively is mostly in English (basically everything except the book titles) and he didnāt want to have the descriptions only in Japanese. I have no idea if his view on that has changed since we discussed it.
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Aaah, right, I remember that discussion.
That being said
- Textbooks/graded readers would most likely have a description in English, due to their target audience.
- Books at a high level (say 35+) are probably fine with Japanese descriptions, considering whoās reading them.
The problem is for everything in between, I guess.
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Right, if there are long descriptions in Japanese, I think the site becomes much more Japaneseā¦ which Iām somewhat wary of. I also donāt particularly want to encourage book reviews in Japanese either.
Reasons for not loving book reviews in Japanese
Theyāre more likely to be less in-depth and less readable by learners. Iām all for people practicing Japanese of course, but hopefully not at the cost of other userās experience - much prefer āJapanese Onlyā forum threads for practice, rather than reviews.
In general, I think the website functionality should be fully focused towards easy-use by learners. Immersion is of course very valuable, but I think it should be an opt-in choice. If you want a fully immersive website, you should go to bookmeter 
All that being said, I think iām ok with Japanese descriptions, but Iāve been holding off until we can also add community editable English descriptions. I would prefer Japanese descriptions to be toggled closed by default.
I know browse & discovery is not ideal right nowā¦ but browse and discovery is only one portion of the website. Lots to do!
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I agree that too much Japanese might scare new learners off. I also prefer English reviews to Japanese ones, especially if theyāre coming from non-natives.
However Iād rather prefer an official summary from the publisher/back of the book than a community created English version.
Thereās also been some comments floating around in the Product Discussion thread about maybe using DeepL / machine translation to get an English version (which might be very hit or miss, considering how vague book descriptions tend to be sometimes), maybe with the possibility to switch back to the Japanese original?
Not sure if this is even worth considering, I just wanted to make sure the idea doesnāt get lost
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I guess it would be hard to automate, but for books that got translated to English, it could be possible to pull the English description instead. That doesnāt really scale, but itās an option.
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I do think it is allowed to copy the book summaries/descriptions from Amazon.jp 
They basically are using the same summary/description which is provided by the publisher. I checked all the three books Iām reading right now (to be fair, two are from the same publisher) and the description on Amazon is the same as on Kadokawa and Kodansha. The same goes for Aoitori (checked one book), but Aoitori is part of Kodansha, so yeah.
Someone maybe could mail the publishers and ask if itās fine to use the summary/description they provided. Iād do it, but my Japanese is way to bad for this. But in all honesty, I think itās fine. On the other hand, I can understand that you donāt want to run into legal issues here.
Edit: But if @Brandon does not want to copy/paste the Japanese summaries to Natively that is fine too. I mean, the link to Amazon is already provided, so everyone is just a click a way from the the summary anyways. I think thatās convenient enough.
That said, I think the Japanese summary is fine for Natively. If someone wants it to be translated, they just can copy it and put it into deepL (for example).
Review wise, I also prefer English reviews to Japanese ones.
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I am currently working on this ticket and will be released soon.
The approach:
- Any logged in user will be allowed to edit a book āblurbā
- Blurbs have 3 pieces of information: language, summary, source
- Summary and source field are just text fields, will support markdown
- Full history logs will be kept and viewable to all users (similar to discourse).
- By default, we will show the English blurb. However, you will be able to toggle/open other language blurbs if available
- I will try to backfill the current descriptions as Japanese blurbs, but after V1 release
- May implement flagging for abuse mechanism, but after V1 release
Why the sudden priority?
- Iāve been trying to improve browse and discovery and the lack of book descriptions is probably the largest issue right now.
Let me know your thoughts on all of that!
(PS: regarding legality of using amazon descriptions, amazon explicitly gives you license to use the textual descriptions for their products, so all good)
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If there is no English blurb (which I imagine will be the case for most booksā¦?) will it default to showing the one that is available or will it stay hidden unless you toggle?
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Whatās the guard against vandalism etc in this instance? Just the history logs and being tied to user accounts?
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This is something Iām not yet sure of. Iām going to be reworking the book page to move the āWhere To Findā & book information (pg #, isbnā¦etc) to the left hand side bar, bringing reviews up to the top.
My inclination would be to not surface Japanese so that itād emphasize the English reviews.
Another place this tradeoff comes into play is a new hover over widget for books on Desktop. I think iād prefer to surface an english review to Japanese description.
But yeah, something to play around with.
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For now yeah. We can implement qualifications later if itās an issue.
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I wonder if doing this would make discoverability of the target language summaries harder? Iām not sure how tricky it would be to code something like ādefault to TL summary if no English available, but show a highlighted blurb asking for an English summaryā?
Iām also a bit leery of user generated summaries (from someone who hasnāt read the book) and would probably preference ones direct from the publisher anyways.
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Iām sure though there are many books without an official English summary, correct?
I guess there are a few types thatād occur:
- Official Summary (from publisher)
- Official Summary (translated - auto)
- Official Summary (translated - user)
- User Summary
We could ask for what type it is, but the source field should somewhat indicate that.
I agree thatās ideal and I will be storing if a summary is autogenerated. But I do think english summaries are pretty critical. Perhaps I could put a setting for users who find they donāt like the community edited ones, but I think we see how it goes first.
Happy to hear how other sites do it as well.
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The vast majority Iād assume, yep.
This and your above bullet points confuse me a bit. Are you saying that all books would get an English summary and theyād be machine translations if not user onesā¦? Or that this flow is in reference to when someone wants to add a summary?
Or maybe I didnāt explain what I was asking well enough
Imagine I land on a page of a book with no English summary. I would like to default to seeing the publisher summary in that case, and maybe a blurb asking for an English summary since I know thatās the overall site preference. I donāt think itād be intuitive to have a blank space and need to find a toggle to switch that space to be the publisher summary. Does that make sense?
Iād just ignore them 
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