Product Updates & Casual Natively Discussion

@brandon So scratch that, I’m now getting “time read” (watched) kind of activity just from marking a show completed (from watching) on the season page. It’s only one activity this time, but it’s still confusing and misleading. I most certainly did not watch 13 episodes all today, but since I don’t track episodes as I’m going (just like I don’t track pages in a book as I’m going) I get weird activity. Is this a bug? I feel it should only show episode/time information if I explicitly mark episodes watched, not from the auto-episode watched stuff that happens when you complete a show. Am I wrong?

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I don’t know if that’s the intended behavior of the code, but I agree that’s what it should be :slight_smile:

I do think though that if you use the ‘update progress’ dialogue, I’ll probably generate that activity, but for every other update (‘basic info’, simple toggle), I agree I should just say ‘finished’.

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That makes sense! Do you want a formal write up for this one?

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That’d be lovely, thanks :slight_smile:

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Done!

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I must say, I’m a bit surprised this ticket only has 3 votes :sweat_smile:

I was planning to do this as a quick win and to help outreach with Korean. I already had to build out the infrastructure for checking if a site had a book or not for Korean, so would be easy.

Would it not impact how you use Natively much?

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I think most people probably buy from just one or two book providers. In my case, I only buy ebooks from Amazon, which is obviously already linked to. And I buy physical books from CD Japan, but I tend to still keep my wish list on Amazon anyway. So it wouldn’t impact how I personally use Natively. But if it’s easy maybe it’s still worth it?

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I just gave it a 4th :slight_smile:

I’ve never come across it before. Maybe similar for others.

Relatedly, it would be convenient to auto-populate Audible links. Not sure if it strictly fits with the original request, but it seems close with

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Right, that would be in the mix too :slight_smile:

Unfortunately I don’t think that the more popular audiobook.jp has public facing pages I can see, so they probably aren’t an option.

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No? I came across a book that was not available on the ebook platform I use (booklive) only once, and that was before using Natively, so I never even thought about it.

Edit: I can’t read
Ah, that’s too bad. That is something I would care about.

Edit: Well, at least you can use the search link. I don’t know if they have a limit on requests per second?

E.g. https://www.audible.co.jp/search?keywords=コップクラフト
and then parse the page?

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that’s audible, not audiobook.jp? Audible I already have access to via the amazon api.

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Oops, I can’t read. Somehow my brain went for audible.
So if you implement the functionality, I will be able to search for stuff that are on audible?

Edit: audiobook.jp has a search too, though.
https://audiobook.jp/search?q=パノラマ島奇譚

It seems to return stuff even when not related, though :confused:

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Yep! I actually pull the audible link from the amazon product page (ex: コップクラフト).

However, it looks like we only have 1060 books with audible in our database right now… with 521 being unique series. So not that many. I think audiobook.jp has a ton more. Still, easy to add as it’s already in our db! :slight_smile:

Edit: Wait, i did not find that audiobook.jp search page, whoa. That may be doable then!

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Sadly I think Audible’s library is larger, although a great deal is region locked

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That’s the links from the Natively book page to the Amazon/whatever book page, right? I buy physical books, so I end up keeping a wishlist of books separately and then buying them from Amazon/cdjapan/Kinokuniya in bulk. I guess in theory if I kept my wishlist on Natively it might be convenient, but at the moment it’s too common that Natively doesn’t have the book listed for me to want to do that.

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Yes, I found that last night. I put in an “add volumes” request for the missing book (which is on Amazon, just not in the series data there).

I wonder what the right thing to do is if Amazon’s series data has a gap in the numbering like it does here…

I think that only triggers an automatic check of the list, so I don’t think it would work here :thinking:

I don’t know if there’s a way to fix the amazon list, but otherwise, to fix it on the natively side, just use the feedback button on the series page (just below the add volumes one)

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The ‘add volumes’ form has a free-text Notes box, so if it’s purely automatic and nobody reads the Notes field that would be rather misleading UI…

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We do read them, don’t worry. There’s a part time contractor, Tarek, who looks through all the requests and does our mostly automated process of uploading. By year’s end I hope to have this ironed out so it’s completely automated :slight_smile:

Yeah, this comment along with the others make sense. Natively isn’t really a great book discovery platform yet for people with a lot of books and aren’t hamstrung by text difficulty. Maybe someday we’ll get there… but it will be challenging as our user base will always be a bit smaller and our database most likely will be too.

Right now the discovery is really only good who’s primary issue is with text difficulty and aren’t reading a ton of books yet. At least, I think that’s the case.

We could become a good discovery platform for big readers too, but we’ll have to leverage our potential future advantages:

  • book source agnostic
  • better tagging
  • better potential recommender algorithm / recommendation interface

It’s possible as a lot of these giants are pretty antiquated, but we’ll see!

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It would be useful for when the time comes to drop Amazon.

As long as I can keep buying without extreme workarounds and I can load the books on my read application of choice, I’ll probably keep with AmazonJP. But there might be a time where it comes useful as I have to browse somewhere else.

I think really having tags well in place before diving into discovery will help a lot.

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