Handle longer free samples

Natively Product Requests
1

Description of your request or bug report:

This request is based on the discussion here. It came from the fact that the free sample https://learnnatively.com/book/c660b049b9/ was added as first volume to the series it belong to, while other sample books are not added:

For instance, when I added 王子様に溺愛されて困ってます ~転生ヒロイン、乙女ゲーム奮闘記~ | L30, you didn’t pick up the longer free sample.

The discrepancy is based on Amazon’s own inconsistency, but it seems like it could be easily detected: those books will always have a word in the title like 無料読本 or 試読版. I guess there aren’t that many possibilities. Plus: they are always kindle only, while the rest would usually have a printed version, and they are much shorter.

In terms of handling on Natively, I can see two options:

  • short term: store as standalone book. The reason to make it standalone is that the difficulty can vary wildly between the sample and the full book (that’s the case for my example above, as I have read both and the crazy vocabulary comes in after the cut). Optionally, those books could be put in a category of their own (“samplers” or something similar) since, for light novels at least, they often merge a sample of the novel and a sample of the manga adaptation.
  • long term: Add extra links between the book being sampled and the sampler, such as an extra entry on the info page of each linking to each other. There could be an option for the community to add those links (so that they don’t have to be automatically generated)

Trello link: (leave in blank)

2

For the particular sampler you note, is that fully contained in the first main book? Is it separate?

If it’s fully contained in the first book, I think we should remove the separate entry and simply list the main book with a link to the free sampler, noting that it’s only partial portion of the novel.

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3

That’s my guess, but you should check with @eefara who read the book (if I remember correctly).

I like that approach, but that contradicts your previous position:

So maybe do the link short term, and still have a separate entry (or tab or something) in the long term todo pile?

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4

I think I wasn’t clearly thinking what a sampler was… which is simply a slightly longer free sample of the first book. I was bucketing in with side stories / supplemental content, but this isn’t really supplemental content, just a free sample.

People can just record as having read a certain amount of pages of a book and then marked stopped… which I think is a more accurate portrayal here as they didn’t read the full book.

So I think I was wrong, let’s remove the standalone :stuck_out_tongue:

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5

Would you be ok closing this request then, if going forward we don’t have a standalone just a link on the main book?

Or do you think there’s still a good argument for special handling?

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6

I’m not sure. The other one I listed is different (as it merges both the novel and the manga). It’s also a combined length of above 100 pages, so I could see people waiting to keep track of such book.

At the same time, I’m not one of those people. So, sure, close the thread. Someone who actually cares can make another one :stuck_out_tongue:

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7

Got it. Well, I’ve messaged @eefara to see what they think. Pending their response, I’ll close.

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8

Wouldn’t then make more sense to put the progress on both the manga and novel they correspond to?

As if you want to continue, you might want to pick the actual book, and continue from where you left it off from the sampler.

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9

Sure, that makes sense.

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10

@brandon should we close this one as there’s not been any udpates or further comments?

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11

@Megumin yeah we can close - I’ve combined the free sampler into the main novel per @eefara’s approval :slight_smile:

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