Product Updates & Casual Natively Discussion

Pretty sure there’s browser extensions/add-ons that do that too, fwiw

but at least natively doesn’t have to deal with multiple editions in multiple languages with multiple ways of writing the author. :face_holding_back_tears:

1 Like

Oh my :joy:. Strange, i’d think they would deduplicate based on ISBN. Unless you’re saying they bunch translated editions together into one… which is just not right.

Yes, editions will unfortunately be a mess as @Naphthalene says because the reality is that they are mess. JoJo’s editions for example, still haunts my dreams. Two parallel digital editions, different number of volumes, amazon errors all over the place…

My guiding light for this is probably a similar UI to StoryGraph (see the editions link under the title)… with the addition of allowing ‘alternate series’ to be surfaced too, when the volumes don’t map perfectly.

Still a mess, but what are you going to do :sweat_smile:. We’ll chat more when we get to it.

6 Likes

all languages, all versions (paperback, hardcover, kindle, audiobook, …) get listed in 1 entry. Problem is, that
a.) the author name is often spelled inconsistently putting some editions under author Random Name Author and others under R.N. Author and yet others under Random N. Author :upside_down_face: (don’t get me started on author names that use other scripts and have to be transliterated)
b.) sometimes editions don’t match completely (added/missing/different content) or a comic adaptation gets thrown in with the novel.
Sorting all that out is unbelievably tedious.
Just as an example: A book I am currently reading has over 100 editions. Agatha Christie books (and over older popular title) easily get 1000+ editions for every single work. :face_holding_back_tears: Almost everytime I mark a Japanese title on GR I have to fix the entry in some way. :melting_face:

If you are curious, this is what the librarian view looks like - and that’s a fairly easy one. I have had authors where every second or so entry had a librarian note, why you should not combine something or other. :rofl:

Authors get a “romaji” profile and a “original language” profile and librarians have to manually add the missing version of the name to books when needed, or they don’t show up when searching for the author. Romaji name comes first, original language name second. Natively has a better search functionality. :partying_face:

5 Likes

Oof yeah. That does look like a mess. Unfortunately, my impression is that GoodReads doesn’t get a lot of active development these days and is mostly just trying to manage to run with their antiquated hardware. Our search isn’t even that good yet, but search utilities have just really improved in the last decade :joy:

At some point we’ll also probably need to recruit a group of volunteer librarians … at that point I may send you a few messages on how that’s structured @Biblio, for inspiration :slight_smile:

6 Likes

I’m curious; I see the natively appended part of the URL when I click on a Natively link to Amazon:


But when I switch versions of the same book (phsyical → digital, for instance) that tag disappears:

Would Natively still get a piece of this Kindle sale?

6 Likes

My understanding is that I get a portion of all sales within a 24hr period. And when I do go on my account, I do see random purchases attributed to me (like headphones, random house goods… etc). However, I think they factor in what the initial landing page was and only do related items to that.

Regardless, you don’t need to worry about switching tabs, that’s ok. We’d get that kindle sale :slight_smile:

6 Likes

Why doesn’t my tracking ID appear in your URL after a visitor clicks through to Amazon from my Web site?

We understand your concern, but rest assured that it is not necessary for your unique ID to appear in order for us to track sales made after the initial clickthrough. The individual shopping session will be tagged in a way that allows us to track the items purchased and credit you with the appropriate commission.

As far as I know they count everything (except gift cards), but the commission % varies wildly per category. and it works for everything that was added to the cart during a 24hr period. Then the checkout can be made whenever as long as it’s not removed/expired cart.

Also a factor to take in mind with promotions is:

Free Book Promotions

You will not be eligible to receive any Standard Commission Income or Special Commission Income for any month if we determine that your Site is primarily promoting free Kindle eBooks and during that month (i) 20,000 or more free Kindle eBooks are ordered and downloaded during Sessions attributed to your Special Links, and (ii) at least 80% of all Kindle eBooks ordered and downloaded during Sessions attributed to your Special Links are free Kindle eBooks.

So if you ever want to do promotions in the main page or newsletter you might want to balance things and not just send an email/promo with only free books.

6 Likes

@brandon

There are duplicate links in some entries. Maybe some script needs to catch these and is not working? Also since there are potential more than once, maybe the database needs to be checked for more entries.

Basically the same URL with and without www.
Might also be happening with non-amazon links.

image

image
image

The entry in question:

2 Likes

Ah, thank you for all the info! I’m glad to hear I’ve hopefully been able to credit a few books to Natively.

4 Likes

if anyone orders stuff for their company on amazon, sneak in a little natively tag :smirk:

5 Likes

Is it the same for Google Play (or any other website)? I’ve been using the Natively links to buy on GP, but only Amazon is mentioned in the disclaimer at the bottom of the page. :thinking:

On a related note, any plans to auto-add links for Amazon’s sites in different countries (Amazon UK, Amazon Canada, etc)?

3 Likes

Google play unfortunately not. They used to have one, but now their affiliate program is only for authors, ugh.

Yeah, I think that’s right, I should probably do a few more amazons. Unfortunately you have to sign up with each one independently, heh.

7 Likes

“Sort by difficulty level” on my books doesn’t seem to be entirely in ascending order:

マリア様がみてる 1 here is L27 but mixed in with a bunch of L30s. (This may be because I just graded it so its grading changed not long before this – does the grade used in sorting lag behind the grade displayed?) Also I expected the L30?? to sort together rather than scattered through the L30s.

Is there a way to say “show only my books between levels X and Y”? The filter dialog on the “my books” search doesn’t have all the options the main search does, and the main search lets you exclude books that are in your personal library, but there’s no option to exclude books that aren’t in your library. (Use case: somebody asked for recommendations at about a certain level so I wanted to see what I’d read that matched that.)

5 Likes

Same as the normal search. There’s no GUI option, but you can just manually add it to the address
e.g.:
min=24&max=35

(just make the settings you want on the main search and copy paste them)

7 Likes

So I think this was a temporary issue because you had just graded them. It looks fixed now? Could make that work better.

Yeah, I should add the difficulty level filter to the user libraries too. Tbh, I think with the sort by difficulty & collapse series functionality, most people don’t really need it as there aren’t that many items to look at.

However, when it comes to linking, I agree it’d be nice. I’ll try to add it soon as I’ll be playing around in that area of the site soon for book providers… but a formal product request is always good :slight_smile:

Uh, that doesn’t seem to work for me? Does that work for you? We’re talking about user libraries here :joy:

7 Likes

I thought it did, but that’s just because the things on the first page were (by chance) in that range :sweat_smile:

6 Likes

Yeah, this type of issue seems to happen a lot. Do you have some aggressive caching for this?

2 Likes

Propagating difficulty rating across to other books in a series also seems to lag – last night the other MariMite books showed and sorted as L30?? but this morning they’ve updated to match the one graded book in the series at L27.

5 Likes

Yeah all this is done hourly. So, I calculate new grades from new ratings and then I update series ratings to match.

You usually don’t notice the latter effect except in the case of temporary grading. For temporary grading I immediately update the rating in order to get new comparisons… the temporary grading system is its own little algorithm that will keep asking for grades until the level settles.

I think the reason i normally update ratings only hourly is to give you a chance to edit your gradings. While you can edit your gradings after we ‘process’ them, it’s a little bit unfortunate on our end.

Not sure if that original concern is really that valid though :man_shrugging:

4 Likes