Bookshelves / page suggestion

I believe the Book Shelves function, or more specifically the individual book pages themselves (especially from the reader perspective) could use some love!

First of all, the cover image seems to be a blown up low resolution thumbnail, even while a high resolution image often can be found on one of the linked services. A high resolution, full width image would be so much nicer!

Secondly, the “View on…” buttons could just as easily be on the bottom of the page. Because the first thing a reader wants to read is the book description / summary. Only after reading that info, a “view on…” button really makes more sense.

Finally, a small segment on the top of the page with minimal generic book info like title, author and publishing date would give each book page the attention it deserves!

2 Likes

Good feedback, thanks! We’re still figuring out the best way to get the best cover photos, and currently we use a few different services. I think we need to update those to get multiple resolutions so it looks better on the book detail page.

I would love some additional control here-- sometimes I get some really weird book covers, and being able to choose a source or even preferred size would help a lot with my bookshelf page-- there are times where for whatever reason, an old book image is cached or where the image will change randomly and it’s a bit unpredictable.

I’d add my other desire for a configurable display order for shelves and books (which can just be a display number property in the JSON that is set with drag handles on the website pretty please).

Thinking about this, I think there are a couple next steps we should take to improve this:

  • Keep track of 2 sizes of covers, one for smaller thumbnails and one for a medium/larger version.
  • Let you choose your own cover image and make sure it “sticks” and isn’t replaced by something else automatically. There is a page here to add a book manually and use your own image, so something similar for editing books too.

I think that’d be great-- a picker that shows the potential sources, let’s me choose a source, and then maintaining two size classes would be perfect.