library bookshelf: Missing Grouping and custom criteria ordering

[Svetloslav]

The issue I posted yesterday, was already closed, so I could not find it and elaborate further on the subject. Barely 24 hours, I thought you guys were overloaded with work.
When dealing with a big library, the "Table" view becomes cumbersome and time consuming and the "Grid" view is frankly a nightmare. The feature I was requesting was grouping into sections based on a custom criteria. Example could be to group by language, or a custom name related to a specific project. When too many items in the library, everything becomes crowded and when searching with an unknown "Title" and/or "Author", there would be no chance to find the document. I understand, that because of technical reasons, it might be difficult, or impossible to implement a "Smart Search" for terms and other abstract parameters contained in the name, let alone in the book itself. Hence the grouping. It can be done at the moment of adding books/documents and placing them in the correct custom group/section. Or it can be done later as a process of organizing the main library. This will be a real gem for anyone with big libraries of books/documents.

[Svetloslav]

Also, between restarts Thorium always opens in Home, one line sort of Grid view and it never remembers when one sets the view in "All publications" to "Table" view. After a restart "All publications" is on Grid no matter what.

[danielweck]

Hello, your original issue is #2792

[danielweck]

Thorium already provides a search-by-keyword feature, and the table can be filtered by matching terms in specific columns (see screenshot below). Could you please clarify? Thank you :)

[danielweck]

By the way, you can add your own "tags" to organise your bookshelf. There is a dedicated table column to filter by tag keyword, and the column header allows you to sort lexically (alphanumerical) which means that publications with be grouped in batches of rows.

[Svetloslav]

By the way, you can add your own "tags" to organise your bookshelf. There is a dedicated table column to filter by tag keyword, and the column header allows you to sort lexically (alphanumerical) which means that publications with be grouped in batches of rows.

Rrrrrright, all in one omnipotent place, which on its own is unable to remember its previous state. Quite rudimentary. It is obvious you guys have never had to deal with big libraries. I see lack of initiative to develop on something, which value seams hard to understand for those, that are not a heavy user and with many books to organize.
Can I ask how are "tags" supposed to be added to books, because for much that I tried, I could not figure it out?

[danielweck]

Hello again,
Thank you for your feedback, we appreciate your enthusiasm :)
Feel free to contribute design mockups and/or implementation effort.
In the meantime, the current developing team does not have the capacity to satisfy all feature requests, I am afraid.
We will review the project priorities at the next issue triage session, so could you please file individual bug reports / feature requests that are well-scoped and individually-addressable / actionable.
PS: you can add / remove / edit tags via the "publication info" modal popup dialog.
Once again, thank you for your time!

[Svetloslav]

1. Loan (remaining time) - occupies enormous space in the table, where those that loan compared to those that own books are in a great minority.
2. Format - what is the importance, or usefulness of such ordering? It can not possibly give any information about content, nature, or anything else related to the belletristic nature of the library. To me absolutely pointless.
3. Progression - also quite useless, but granted in a very remote scenario might help in giving an idea of which books have been opened, although and again if working with many books in the same time (while researching), such ordering would give more confusion than orientation.
4. Last Read - might be useful and totally overshadows "Progression"
   So, as I stated above one gets only 3 useful ordering criteria: Title, Author and Tags. What if I can not remember the title, or the author? If after this you still can not see the problem I described above, that there is little to nothing, that I could contribute to your effort guys.

[danielweck]

2. Format - what is the importance, or usefulness of such ordering? It can not possibly give any information about content, nature, or anything else related to the belletristic nature of the library. To me absolutely pointless.

I am sorry to hear that you are finding this column useless. There are Thorium users who find it very useful, as it allows sorting and filtering rows depending on the publication format: EPUB, EPUB FXL, DAISY, PDF, Audiobook, Divina.

[danielweck]

1. Loan (remaining time) - occupies enormous space in the table, where those that loan compared to those that own books are in a great minority.

Thorium users who are library patrons or who borrow books from publishers find this column useful, as it allows them to quickly see which publications they should finish reading before the loan expires (or to request a renewal of their borrowing period).

Ideally Thorium would allow users to configure which columns to show / hide. We experimented with a basic/advanced mode but that made the user interface complicated, and there wasn't a clear consensus on the proposed set of columns in each category.

[danielweck]

3. Progression - also quite useless, but granted in a very remote scenario might help in giving an idea of which books have been opened, although and again if working with many books in the same time (while researching), such ordering would give more confusion than orientation.

Again, sorry you are finding this useless, but please bare in mind that other Thorium users will beg to differ.

That being said, in an ideal world the column set would be configurable in Thorium.

[danielweck]

4. Last Read - might be useful and totally overshadows "Progression"

There is a big difference between progression and the last time a publication was opened, don't you think?

[danielweck]

So, as I stated above one gets only 3 useful ordering criteria: Title, Author and Tags.

By "one" I assume you mean: "you" ;)

What if I can not remember the title, or the author?

I would really appreciate if you could elaborate on how to solve the problem of a user not remembering the title / author of a publication they are looking for. Wouldn't they then be reaching for other available sorting / filtering criteria such as the book format, the last time the publication was accessed, etc.?

If after this you still can not see the problem I described above, that there is little to nothing, that I could contribute to your effort guys.

That would be a shame. I look forward to hearing more of your thoughts. Thank you!

[Svetloslav]

What if I can not remember the title, or the author?

I would really appreciate if you could elaborate on how to solve the problem of a user not remembering the title / author of a publication they are looking for. Wouldn't they then be reaching for other available sorting / filtering criteria such as the book format, the last time the publication was accessed, etc.?

The key is order, order, order! Let us examine following example. You have thousands and thousands of books, publications literature etc. You are starting a new research project. You get all related literature together. In the middle of the project one had to move to different projects and at a certain time is returning to that original project. Than to advance has to find quotations from the literature, but has forgotten the author and the title of the different publications. How is one supposed to proceed? Format, Last Read, Loan (remaining time), Progression all of this is worth nothing at that moment. The only one possibly useful is Tags. However, remember you have but thousands of books, and all are into one gigantic pool of data. Tags might help distinguishing, but search results disappear with each and every new search and with every restart. You are stuck!!!! Now if Thorium would have been able to separate and organize projects (portions of your library related to a project) and than withing that portion one be able to further organize the stages of the research from the get-go, than it would be quite easy to refer to the appropriate stage and find within the related literature, the necessary quotation.
On book lending: Maybe 20-30 years ago humanity was indeed reading and was going to libraries and borrowing actual books. I hope you have noticed, that today a rough 97% of the people have not read even 1 book in the last 10 years, but watched millions of videos on YT, TikTok and the rest. From the 3% that do read and notice taken as a number, roughly less than 1% would borrow a digital publication - let us be serious about this reality it simply never happens - well this noteworthy number is neglectable. Yet you have dedicated to it a prominent block of space in the crowded table/list.