Product Updates & Casual Natively Discussion

Brief announcement: These two requests have been implemented.

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Private notes can be edited in the ‘additional options’ book edit popup… accessible from your library or the book pages:

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Some of the book pages aren’t loading for me now. The header and footer appear, but no contents.

A few book pages do load. The ones which load seem to all be items which are in my library. If something has a volume 2 and I haven’t read it, it’s not showing up.

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Oh no! Yeah this is a bad bug… everything not in your library breaks on the book page. yikes.

Pushing out a fix now!

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Ok, all fixed now :slight_smile:

Apologies on that!

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Thanks for the great work! Love that, I already know what I’m going to use it for.

Also, please include that on the CSV dump when implemented.

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FYI - I will be taking a vacation for the next week. Will still be poking around, but you may see slightly slower response from me. Especially when visiting the nephews… they’re a handful :slight_smile:

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I wonder why the top part on my iPhone doesn’t correctly switch to black; it works correctly on the WK forums. Is it related to the logo not being transparent and the header is somehow sampled from there? It’s really only a nuisance when browsing in bed at night :sweat_smile:

It shows black to me?

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Alright now that I forced both to dark it works. Weird😅

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I don’t think we have an offtopic thread anywhere but I wanted to share the ridiculousness that is my company’s IT security. I can waste time on Reddit, discord, Facebook, twitter, etc as much as I like, but oh no, beware of employees who are trying to learn :rofl::rofl::rofl:
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Hey all, so I’d like to talk a little bit about book covers on Natively, especially really crusty book covers. A lot of the books I’ve submitted/would like to submit have absolutely awful photos on Amazon as their “cover photo” (generally due to the books being older ones), and I hate for that to be the first thing a prospective fan sees when they click on a series. (Two examples: one, two)

There are also cases where a book has an Amazon page, but no cover or Kindle version to take from, and it kind of dissuades me from submitting it, even though I’d like to. (Example)

What could be some reasonable options for getting higher-quality book covers for these titles on the site @brandon?

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I’m totally with you @eefara, I’d love better covers!

Ultimately, I’m not sure how much I can do right now beyond handling one off feedback requests … thank you for all your requests btw will get to them today :slight_smile:. Once we have more community editing tools (eventually I plan to allow community-driven content tagging, book summaries, etc) I imagine we could allow editing the cover images too.

Beyond that though, Amazon is without a doubt the best source for images that I’ve found. If you have any other places with better images, do let me know!

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Thanks! And I’m sorry for the flood of feedback notes. :sweat_smile: Hopefully some of the burden can be lifted from you in the future.

I will definitely keep my eyes open for good alternate sources.

I just sent you some random website in feedback but looking into it, both the manga I sent in a better cover for (ウテナ) and @eefara 's previously linked 氷の魔物の物語 have better covers on Bookwalker (1, 2)

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So I will mention here that that particular series (+ others from the same author) have very nice ebook covers that are slightly different than the paperback releases. I think @brandon mentioned hesitating in the past about adding ebook-specific covers; might be best to have your opinion here in the comments for reference, though?

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I’m going to mention here, since it’s off topic for the original thread.

The free sample ended up as “volume 1” of the series, with “volume 2” being the full version. That seems pretty confusing :sweat_smile:

Maybe longer free samples should be handled separately? Back when I only read one for a different book, I just marked my status as “stopped” but I guess it might not be satisfying for some. Maybe it should be a specific entry on the book page?

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How about if you detect is an image with artifacts/very bad compression/low resolution/placeholder, give a button that says “Suggest new cover” where you can upload a better one?

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Throw it in the queue :joy:

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It’d be nice, but honestly it’s hard :sweat_smile:. I agree it might irk people if they can’t complete a series without reading the sampler… but obviously some people want to track if they read a sampler. TBH there’s a whole host of supplemental content that makes it into series as separate items (side stories, art books, samplers, short story side story collections…). Eventually we may attempt to demarcate and handle all these things, but will probably just roll with treating everything as a book for the time being :confused:

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