"Books you share" preferences

I've added the ability to sort the profile-page "Books you Share" box however you like—by title, by author or by popularity up or down. The default is, for a change, popularity down. I think this brings out the most interesting books you share. (Others may disagree, and we can change the default.)

I also added the ability to control how many books are shown.

To get to it, click the "cog" or "gear" in the upper-right of the "Books you share" box.



The box itself looks like this:

I love the concept, but it doesn't actually work at the moment.

Also, I think you're wrong about popularity down showing the most interesting books. It actually shows the least interesting books. Now I can see at a glance who owns Harry Potter and who owns Twilight. This is about as uninteresting as you can get.

Also, I don't actually care about your wrongness in this case. I can happily change my default and forget about it (well, once it's working). But you might want to consider a more interesting sort order for the sake of others.

The low-high and the high-low seem to be reversed (in low-high the first books that I see are the Harry Potters... they should be at the bottom, right)?

Other from this - I love it.

And you cannot sort by Author - it gets back to the default.

Oh man, I wish I'd seen this discussion when it got started so I could add my own pony request:

I would really, really like it if this could be collections sensitive, so that if I exclude a collection from "use for connections" then those books don't show up in the books you share module. There's a big difference for me between seeing that someone shares books I put in "my library" and even "read but unowned" (since I've got some commitment to those books...) and seeing someone who shares the books I happened to put in one of my wishlist type collections to mark them as possibly of interest.

I like the idea of being able to set the sort order, by the way.
(edited for clarity/grammar)

Right. The low-high and high-low are backwards and setting sort by author reverts to the default. But when it works I'm sure it'll be great!

Okay, sorry. I had to change the numbering system, to avoid the number 0. (Don't ask.) Anyway, it's hosed whatever your setting was. But you can change it now again. So, go ahead and tell me if there are any lingering issues for you.

Tim

This is wonderful, and seems to be working like a charm. I had been wanting it to sort by author, but now I have discovered that I really wanted it to sort by popularity (low-high). Thanks.

but now I have discovered that I really wanted it to sort by popularity (low-high)

Yes, I think that's the best one. I made it the default.

Me too. The low-high popularity option has made me take another look at my similar libraries after a long time.

Yay.

I think the by-author listing doesn't work as well as some of us thought because with the author following the title it makes it hard to quickly skim past the same-named authors. I don't want to seem like I'm never satisfied but I think sorting the list by author would work better if you changed the order to put author first and book title second.

Tim> Very nice. Couple of things, though. Colorific checkmarks, maybe? :D I think that'd help when you're seeing a lot of wishlist/read but unowned stuff.

Second point is possibly unrelated to this but it is in the same place. I'm seeing some books twice. Is that really a good thing? Does it do me any good to know that I have one copy of The Nitrogen Fix and the user I'm looking at has two? (and, actually, it's because they've got a duplicate and not because they set # of copies to 2)

I guess I'd really want it to be "works you share" and not "books you share."

Yeah, I don't want the checkmarks intruding here. Too much visual noise for the payoff.

The two copies thing is hard. It matches to THEIR books, not yours. What if they have editions that are different, and that's interesting to you? I dunno. It's hard.

14> Then I can go into their catalog view to see the full details?

ETA: Too bad about the checkmarks. I've gotten so used to them in places where you do have them that when I do see book names without them I actually get a little confused. Seriously, it's that nice of a feature to me.

Yesss! Nice, nice, nice.

It matches to THEIR books, not yours.

Right on! Please don't change this! If someone is collecting a title in different languages etc., I want to know!

I could add them as a preference, but what would they mean? I think it would be confusing. Would they mean the book was in YOUR wishlist, or theirs—see?

17> Is that question to me re: bookmarks? I think the only sane way for you to do the colored checkmarks is that they always show the status of the book in the collection of the person viewing the page.

Right. But that's not your book. Putting checkmarks by your books I get. Putting them by other's books is weird, and subject to misunderstanding.

Oh, and I just ran across an example of someone I shared 130 books with.

In reality, I shared 50 distinct authors with them. I actually found the author list (once I made it myself copy/pasting from the catalog view and running it through uniq) much more informative because there was less signal to noise ratio. If only I could go from there to say, "Oh, interesting, what books does he actually have by Brian Aldiss."

Of course, it's a bit of a moot point until the data is referenced in a way that doesn't cause thrash when coming up with an author list. But it's something to weigh against your previous comment that it was the general opinion was more on the side of books you share rather than authors. I'm not saying it's one way or the other, but sometimes it's a matter of wanting to see it one way, then the other.

19> When you put a checkmark next to a touchstone in chat, is that my book? If you put a checkmark next to "What members are reading", is that my book? If I click on someones profile page and it says "Books you share", or those my books? If not, how can you say I "share" them with the other user?

ETA: Other places you've already made it "weird": In "Top wishlisted books," books have checkmarks. So if I own a book it shows a green checkmark. Yet I haven't wishlisted this book, so what's it doing putting a green checkmark next to a list of books that are wishlisted? If I click on a Series, it shows checkmarks. I'm not looking at my books, but rather the information for all the books, with checkmarks showing the status in my collections. Otherwise, if I was looking at just my books, the ones I don't have shouldn't be showing up.

> When you put a checkmark next to a touchstone in chat, is that my book?

Yes. We use your title for it, not the title entered by the user.

> What members are reading

No, but it's the work, not some particular members book.

> Books you share

They are the other user's title.

I just think that, when the context is explicitly listing the books of another user, the implication of the checkmarks is ambiguous. I'm not even sure what the answer should be. Since I—apparently alone—have no trouble remembering the real ontological status of my books most of the time when I have them in my catalog at all, maybe I want to know what they're doing with them instead.

22> Oh no, not the ontological status thing again! :D Didn't we beat you down on that one? Just because you have a photographic memory of your entire library (and all the books you've ever read that aren't in your library, unless you want to wipe out Read but Unowned collections) doesn't mean we do. I thought that was pretty well demonstrated by the angry mob on the checkmarks thread.

This is all my opinion here, but I'm going to express it pretty strongly. I just think your best approach to the checkmarks is consistency:
Q: "What do they stand for?"
A: "The status of a book in your collections."

That, to me, is the power of those checkmarks. At a glance, I can tell if I own or have read some book someone is talking about in talk, or that gets recommended to me on the work recommendations page. I'd like to see this across the site, really. I'd be fine if it was opt-in, but I'd like every single book title to have a checkmark by it showing me the status in my collection. Everywhere.

ontological status

Oh yes, I believe I was pretty vocal (er, perhaps belligerent) on that point the last time.

I'm afraid that we like our new (checkmark) pony so much that we can't possibly see how we every managed to function without it - it's really that fabulous.

I really like the ability to sort low/high for popularity - and I never would have even thought of it!

Did we lose the little link for "show in library" though? (I'm not crying - just adds one more step - enter the person's library and click on the "you share" link there - where, of course, we also want to see the checks in our checkmark colors rather than all in green - but with all these great new features my head is spinning and I haven't yet processed that last batch - like the kid who has opened way more-than-enough presents at Christmas.)

show in library

Sorry, no. It's back. It was turned off when you didn't have more than the "hide" number.

Checkmarks

I resist the intrusion of UI elements into running text. We're readers. And we can follow links. To have little graphics next to every book is to make us all into symbol parsers.

More importantly, we're not going to start putting checkmarks next to things that aren't in our libraries. Shared books are an edge case, but I think they would be misunderstood.

Incidentally, checkmarks DON'T mean the status in your collection. They mean the status in the appropriate user context. For example, I can see what series PortiaLong has here:

http://www.librarything.com/profile/PortiaLong/stats/series

The checkmarks indicate what books she has, and where she has them, not which I have. I have virtually none of these books, so that would be boring, and it wouldn't actually tell me what the page purports to tell—how her books are in series.

The Show in Library is there for me.

I don't think the check marks belong in this list, but if it were there it would be more meaningful to me to know what category that user had them in - I'm there to find out about that user. I'd be confused to see checkmarks with my info here.

Thank you for saying it.

I'm extremely grateful I can now sort by author name again, when I use this function. I missed it when it went a few years ago. Thanks

OH!

>25 timspalding:

re: checkmarks - doh! - since mine shows for me in the example my experience was different than yours! - I have never looked at that page for anyone BUT me so I saw what I always see (until I play around a little). -- I definitely see your point! When I am looking at MY subpage I expect to see MY checks but if I am looking at your subpage then I would see no (or rare) checks so it makes sense to see yours (or none - I'll have to think about this - what if the person shared more works than you and I? - what if I was looking at bluetyson's library or AsYouKnow_Bob's? - which checkmarks would make more sense?....I will ponder...).

Thank you for widening my perspective.

PS. Thanks for putting the "Show in Library" back - I actually use that quite a bit (in my estimation...do you have a way of seeing how often I actually use that feature?)

PPS. I have virtually none of these books - so that means...?! (I actually typed up a sarcastic "anti-my-stuff" post but I realized that the "intarweb" still lacks a sarcasm font - *stupid intarweb* - and you are actually one of my top 10 favorite "intarweb" people of all time so, without a sarcasm font, it seemed a little harsh...

(I'm glad that you have to deal with all of these pesky LTers and not me - because I would be considerably less ... er, kind,...)

>12 jjwilson61: "I think the by-author listing doesn't work as well as some of us thought because with the author following the title it makes it hard to quickly skim past the same-named authors. I don't want to seem like I'm never satisfied but I think sorting the list by author would work better if you changed the order to put author first and book title second.

I agree.
With all the other sorting orders the name of the book is the relevant item to come first -- however, with author-sorting the author's name is the relevant point...
How hard would it be to make the author's name come first in the author-sorting? If it's a terrible amount of work, it's not worth the trouble, but if it's an easy coding task, would you Tim consider this...?

Oh, forgot to say: thanks a lot for this feature, I really like it!!

Great, I like it. (An aside: if I've selected that my wishlist collection not be included in 'connections', how come books I have in it show up as 'Books You Share'?)

Thank-you, Tim.

For me, this is even better than collections.

It's superb, fantastic, brilliant and a whole lot of other superlatives.

Not interested in checkmarks (for all the reasons given above). Ordering by reverse popularity is not something I'd have thought of, and is now my default.

The only thing that's missing (apart from listing author names rather than books, but I see your reasoning on that, until proper author support comes along) is sorting by rating. I suppose there would be a bunch of titles without ratings which might make the display problematic, but it would still be really interesting.

My kind of feature. Yet another thank you.

v

I love this. I would never have thought of ordering books by popularity low-high, but having played with the feature I definitely think this is the right default.

#22 Tim, you are Not Alone. I remember the ontological status of my books. In fact, this is how I remember what the colour of the check-marks signifies: 'it's blue on book X therefore blue must mean Read but Unowned'. I would never remember what the blue check-mark meant otherwise.

I am, however, thoroughly confused by trying to remember whether the check-marks signify which collection I have a book in or which collection someone else has a book in. I may have to stick a post-it to the side of my monitor to remind me. Their books => their collection makes most sense. I think. (I also think I need more coffee.)

25> Interesting example, Tim. When I opened it up, that's exactly what I thought it was showing me - the status of the books in my library. If you had not explained it, I would have probably filed it as a bug.

But to me, this is far more of an edge case than the "Books you share" list. Doubly so since the text on the screen is "Series in your library" and "Your books." There's already a lot of places you could remove ambiguity on that screen.

But I can definitely see where you would want to avoid checkmarks if at all possible, since in your approach they are confusing.

I resist the intrusion of UI elements into running text. We're readers. And we can follow links. To have little graphics next to every book is to make us all into symbol parsers.

Please, Tim. We are symbol parsers. That's what text is.

Anyhow, I'm doing to drop it for now and hope it will bubble eventually. Considering how much you were against the idea of checkmarks (and before that, collections) in the first place, I'm hoping there's a special feature of them that somehow works its way into your brain and subverts your gut instinct. Here's hoping. :)

Thank you! And I too would never have thought of popularity, but oh that is fun!

Love it.

Yup, after all my requests for author sorting I've decided that popularity low-high is best after all.

I don't want to see the checkmarks here. But I would be in favour of having two completely separate lists, one for books they have from your wishlist and one for books they have from all your other collections.

Ooh, I'm going to have fun with this feature!

A few thoughts - I really like the default being low-high popularity.

Also, while I can see some folks' point about not wanting to see books that are in a wishlist or other collection we've taken out of connections, I think overall I'd rather keep it as is, including all books. We can see our top 50 most similar libraries without the books anyways by looking at the stats page. I made two collections - "School Books" and "Graphic Novels" - not count towards connections, basically because I didn't think a list of 50 libraries that also had several volumes of Fruits Basket really matched up with my overall interests. Yet looking at a member's profile and seeing books I want to read or a collection I've taken out of connections still tells me something interesting about what they like to read in comparison to my own taste.

ETA: Oh, but I do like Zoe's idea of separating the two lists, as long as we include both. :-)

Yet looking at a member's profile and seeing books I want to read or a collection I've taken out of connections still tells me something interesting about what they like to read in comparison to my own taste.

I think that the 'desirability' of separation or not of wishlist books from this kind of thing has to rest, not with the visitor to the library, but with the owner of the library. There are many reasons for 'wishlist' books not to even say anything vaguely interesting about what people like to read depending on why or how someone uses a wishlist collection. I add books that I possibly have no interest in reading at all but that I need to remember because, maybe someone has asked me something about it or told me about it, all shmooshed up with things that I want. Looking at my wishlist wouldn't necessarily inform you of what I like to read at all (although because on things like RSS feeds, wishlist books are treated no differently from other additions, I'm more careful than I want to be about what I add - I like to tweet my additions but that stops me adding books that I want to note because they're possibly abhorrent or awful but there's something about them I need to check - won't add them until there's a way of distinguishing them from 'real' wish-to-own books). So I guess the point is that the collection's mine and I should be able to choose fully whether that is used in connections, and I'm sorry but connections to me also means 'Books you share'. Isn't that like the BIGGEST connection of all? If you've got a choice to exempt from 'Connections', it should include that. It doesn't really matter whether people want to browse my wishlist, it's whether I want it classed as a part of my library.

It's true that how one uses collections will impact, and I'll admit I use "wishlist" a bit differently from most, not for books I want to read or remember but book that I want to own. Generally (though not always), they're books I've already read. So yes, that definitely makes a difference for me.

But don't those "keep out of connections" only work one way anyways? I could be wrong, but I thought that those books - say, "Graphic Novels and Manga" - being separate just meant that people with those books wouldn't show up on my list of top 50 libraries. But if someone had a large number of them and included them in connections, I would still (potentially) show up in their top 50 libraries because I've read a large number of them.

But don't those "keep out of connections" only work one way anyways?

Interesting question. That's not how I interpreted it, but you might be right.

Woohoo!

Interesting question. That's not how I interpreted it, but you might be right.

Not how I interpreted it either. I just figured it did what it said on the tin - that keeping something out of connections, kept it completely out of connections site-wide. In which case, that's ambiguous terminology.

I also especially like that it also tells you both how many books AND how many works you share. Nice.

Nice, I hadn't noticed that.

Klarusu, why not create a custom collection for books you need to look into and save the wi8shlist for a true wishlist?

And I still like my idea of checkmarks against your books at the front and checkmarks for the other member's books at the rear of each entry. But I'm sure Tim will think that is too much clutter.

Klarusu, why not create a custom collection for books you need to look into and save the wi8shlist for a true wishlist?

But books I want to look into, random books that have crossed my path ... they are a true wishlist. That doesn't mean that kind of ephemera are things that I want as part of 'Connections' and if exempting them from connections doesn't actually do that then I want checkmarks against the 'Books you share' but exempting from connections should really do just that so these shouldn't appear in that box. Things that are 'Recently Added' and I want to notify people of are things that are recently added to my library. Custom collections are part of my library and the wishlist collection is the only collection that I use to catalogue anything that hasn't passed through my hands at one stage or another and is not part of my library nor is it recently added to my library. But that's a different argument and I'm derailing the thread.

Point that's on topic - if exempting from 'Connections' doesn't remove a wishlist books from books you share, there needs to be another way so either checkmarks or a separate box for wishlist (but if you can do the separate box, you should be able to do the exemption too).

I suggested a separate box rather than complete elimination of the wishlist books because some people do want to see them.

wow. This is completely awesome. I just clicked on all my top shared libraries (who sort themselves pretty neatly into "read obscure Nancy Kress", "read obscure Joel Rosenberg", "other people who catalog movies" ) and then all my interesting libraries.. seeing the rarest matches is completely fascinating.

(Hello all you James White fans! )

51 - That's also why I suggested "use for connections" should apply here too - so there's an option. If people want to see their wishlist books when they see books they share with others, they can leave "use for connections" checked for that collection. I don't see why this couldn't work in two directions either: If person A looks at person B's profile but A doesn't want to see her own wishlist books in the "books you share" mix, unchecking "use for connections" could exclude them; if B has a wishlist and doesn't want A (or anyone else) to see those books in books you share when A (or anyone else) looks at B's profile, not using for connections could apply there.

To me, it seems like a pretty logical extension of the existing "use for connections" option. I don't know: Maybe there would be cases where someone would want to exclude books from calculating similar libraries yet still see them in "books you share" or vice versa, but it seems like it's more likely the two would be coincident to me.

Waves back at ansate. (James White at 2 and 3.)

Hello all you James White fans!
'Hello' back atcha ansate!

Very cool. Still trying to wrap my mind around setting my preferences on another person's page.

Are any of these neat things you have done going to show up on the Connections page ? Maybe they do, but it defaults to all events for all people, and it takes so long to load I give up and leave.

43 and 45 - I'm not really certain about that, and I'm basing it primarily on my own observations with one library so it could be a fluke...

53 - I think it depends on what books you're excluding, particularly how unusual they are. I read a lot of graphic novels and manga in the past two years, and because they're not extremely popular on LT I found that my "top 50 similar libraries" all had about twenty volumes of a series or two, but not much else in common. I made a separate collection that's not calculated in connections so that my "similar libraries" reflects my reading more broadly, beyond these more obscure works. But I still like the overlap of "books I share" for them, and wouldn't want to lose it completely.

I like Zoe's suggestion of a separate list of books in the "wishlist" category.

for sorting order options, how about "Random"?

58: Random would be good when showing only a few books but one of the other options would be desirable when see all books is selected.

I like Zoe's suggestion of a separate list of books in the "wishlist" category.

As do I, as long as it comes with an option not to show that box on the profile.

>25 timspalding:

I have to say, I hadn't notice how checkmarks were working on some of these pages, probably because I don't look at the connections/other series pages. To me this is just an example of how checkmarks are being used poorly. (Not to mention the occasional ambiguity of when surfing other people's pages in general with "Your books" instead of replacing with the name of the person).

To me, checkmarks should always, always be relative to the person logged in. They're a shorthand to remind me if I've read the book or not.

If there's interest how the other folks have categorized or placed something in a collection, then it should be done differently.

I'd rather have brackets to the right of the title/author like {PortiaLong's unread} or make it easier to click into the person's library and restrict what gets returned by series. (Now that last one's really a pony, I know ;) ).

And yeah, more checkmarks more places. It's a great shorthand.

sweet!

I would have thought that I would prefer to have "books you share" listed by author, but popularity (low-high) is definitely more interesting.

I love it! And popularity low-high is awesome!

Thank you, Tim.

Thanks, Tim, for this. I'm with #28, I like to be able to sort by author.