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A few questions
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CaptainHaddock
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Join Date: Apr 2004
Location: Nagoya, Japan • 日本 名古屋市
Status: Offline
Jan 16, 2008, 09:11 AM
 
So I'm trying out the demo of DL 1.x in the hopes that DL 2 will be out before too much longer.

My book collection covers almost every format and genre as well as three languages. As such, DL's current book display options and data retrieval methods are fairly inadequate. I was wondering if the following will be possible in DL2:

• What Amazon France calls "poche", Amazon US calls "paperback", and Amazon JP has two or three equivalents for. Practically everything, from genres to publishers' names, have different terms in each language. Can I associate linguistic equivalents together so that if I group my books by format (for example), all softcover books will actually be together?

• In addition to the translation issue, fields like "genre" usually have many terms listed. It would be nice if I could re-order these, or even better, tell DL2 to automatically rank the genre "linguistics" (e.g.) as more significant than the genre "non-fiction" when sorting books by genre.

• It would be nice to merge data from multiple Amazon sites, or at least change which source a book's info is taken from without creating a new entry. This is because many books are listed on multiple Amazons, but with different data.

• It would be nice to be able to sort books by more than one criteria. E.g. I might want to sort by language, and then genre, and then series.

• How about dragging-and-dropping genres and other data from one book onto another?
     
CaptainHaddock  (op)
Grizzled Veteran
Join Date: Apr 2004
Location: Nagoya, Japan • 日本 名古屋市
Status: Offline
Jan 21, 2008, 11:19 AM
 
Hm, not a peep. I assume the answer is "no" to all the above.
     
mdc
Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: NY²
Status: Offline
Jan 21, 2008, 12:00 PM
 
The Delicious Monster staff has probably been at MacWorld all of last week, and are scheduled to arrive at work very soon (it isn't 9am yet on the West coast of the U.S.A.).

I'm sure one of them will check the forum shortly.
     
Delicious Monster
Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: Jun 2006
Status: Offline
Jan 30, 2008, 05:35 PM
 
These are all pretty good ideas, though they do present some challenges from a UI standpoint. For example, Delicious Library 2 does have localized formats, but they don't sort together. If you sorted by format and expected your softcovers to sort next to your poches, where would that go? Under s? Under p?

We do some cool stuff, like sorting by value regardless of currency, so something that's 19 GBP will sort as higher in value than something that's 20 USD, but I don't see anything in your list that really jumps out at me. Perhaps we should discuss these in terms of 2063's smash hit, Delicious Library 3.
     
agentsarah6
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Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Perpetual Beta
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Jan 30, 2008, 06:29 PM
 
Originally Posted by Delicious Monster View Post
Perhaps we should discuss these in terms of 2063's smash hit, Delicious Library 3.
At least you've found some humour in the situation.
     
CaptainHaddock  (op)
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Join Date: Apr 2004
Location: Nagoya, Japan • 日本 名古屋市
Status: Offline
Jan 31, 2008, 02:35 AM
 
Originally Posted by Delicious Monster View Post
These are all pretty good ideas, though they do present some challenges from a UI standpoint.
Well, all the sorting functions are pretty much useless without them.

If you sorted by format and expected your softcovers to sort next to your poches, where would that go? Under s? Under p?
My poches, softcovers, and ソフトカバー books shouldn't sort next to each other, they should together as if they were the same category. This unified category could be called softcover or whatever I want to call it.

Likewise, Kodansha and 講談社 are the same publishing company. They shouldn't be off at separate ends of my book collection if I sort by publisher.

We do some cool stuff, like sorting by value regardless of currency, so something that's 19 GBP will sort as higher in value than something that's 20 USD, but I don't see anything in your list that really jumps out at me.
Sorting by anything other than name or price is entirely useless for a multilingual book collection. That doesn't strike you as worrisome? Isn't cataloguing and sorting books the entire purpose of this program?
     
REBELinBLUE
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Join Date: Jul 2007
Status: Offline
Jan 31, 2008, 06:15 AM
 
If I'm understanding correctly, what you want really for the first request is the ability to enter a "sort name" "sort format" etc, a value for certain fields which is only used when sorting. DVD Profiler has this and I always found it handy.

For example DL sorts my DVDs wrong, "Stargate SG1 - Season 10" appears after "Stargate SG1 - Season 1" rather than "Stargate SG1 - Season 9". In DVD profiler I could overcome this problem by entering a short title (only used for sorting, doesn't replace the actual title) for each of the sets, for example "Stargate SG1 01", "Stargate SG1 02" etc. Even better you could use this to sort movies that are sequels but don't have a number in the title. i.e I had "Lord of the Rings 1" "Lord of the Rings 2" and "Lord of the Rings 3" for the sort title for Fellowship, Two Towers and Return of the King respectively. Basically similar to how iTunes has the "sorting" tab in a tracks properties, although I've never used that so don't know how it works.
     
CaptainHaddock  (op)
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Join Date: Apr 2004
Location: Nagoya, Japan • 日本 名古屋市
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Jan 31, 2008, 11:22 PM
 
Originally Posted by REBELinBLUE View Post
If I'm understanding correctly, what you want really for the first request is the ability to enter a "sort name" "sort format" etc, a value for certain fields which is only used when sorting. DVD Profiler has this and I always found it handy.
That would probably work, so long as I could make it a rule. I.e. tell DL to use "French" as a sort label for books in "français" so they stay together if I sort by language. I wouldn't want to have to apply this to every single item (after all, if I have to enter all my details by hand, I don't need DL2, I just need a database).
     
 
   
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