Wishlist items to be differentiated in mobile search results

Hi There,

When I am in a bookstore , particularly second hand, I want to be able to search in my catalog to see if I have an item of interest I have found on the shelf. But the Wishlist items come up in the results, making me think I already have it the book - exactly the opposite of the intent.

Please color-code, or in some other way, differentiate Wishlist items from the search results.

Thank you

Alan

Put collections in the view you are using, and you can check it easily.

Another option is to click on a specific collection first, like Your Library, and then do your search.

I prefer use TinyCat for when I'm out shopping. TinyCat displays better on mobile, and the settings allow you to only show whether a book is in specific collections. I've set mine to tell me whether a book is in Your Library or Wishlist, but not to show any other collections that book is also in. I like being about to quickly check "Do I already own this?" without having to scan past information less relevant to the matter at hand.

While >2 MarthaJeanne: and >3 Herenya: are good if you're searching on the website, I think this suggestion might be related to the app.

>1 AlanSBPerkins: If this is a suggestion for the App, can you note which app you're using - Android or iOS?

You can search a specific Collection within your catalog, in the app, such as "Your library" - I hope that helps!

>5 kristilabrie: Android, but it should be both.

I shouldn't have to search within a collection - that would require two searches - one to see if it is in my wishlist, and another to see if it is one of my collections - it should be able to search my entire database and differentiate between Owned books and Non-owned books.

Wishlist is a collection. In my own catalog, the My Library collection (books I own) is disjunct from Wishlist, so any book I find in either is absent from the other. I can find out what I need to know with a single search of either collection.

What am I missing?

I am in a book store, I want to search for a book in my entire Library. It is in one of three possible outcomes:

1. I own the book
2. I don't own the book
3. I don't own the book, but I have explicitly added it to my Wishlist.

If I don't own the book, but it is an author I am interested in, I want to buy the book, regardless of whether it is in my Wishlist or not. And I am not going to do two searches for the book.

The search results should be able to tell me whether I own the book or I don't.

Now, separately, I want to maintain a Wishlist so that I can search by what I have expressly listed as a wanted book, and search for it that way in different situations.

I can't see why this is such a difficult request - I would have thought it was a no-brainer. I must be missing something.

>9 AlanSBPerkins: In your results you can click on the item and see what collection(s) it is in.

>9 AlanSBPerkins: The search results should be able to tell me whether I own the book or I don't.

They do if you search the collection of books you own, assuming you've made such a collection. I have, and it seems to me that it is the natural use of the default "My Library" collection.

Wishlist seems like a totally different issue, unless you search "All Collections," which will confuse your Wishlist and Owned entries. If you acquire the book, then you can take it out of your "Wishlist" if it was there in the first place. If I see a book on my Wishlist, I can look for it in a store while knowing I haven't already acquired it. If I see a book in a store, I can find out if I already own it by searching My Library.

I'm going to give up - I would have thought everyone would have wanted what I am looking for - I have my books in many collections based on genre. Wishlists are conceptually different to other collections. I'll just stop using the Wishlist feature - it's worse than useless in the current state for the way I use it (and thought that pretty much everyone else would use it).

Thanks all for your responses.

You can have books in multiple collections - so a book can be in Your Library and in a specific genre collection.

>12 AlanSBPerkins: Will >10 knerd.knitter: not solve your problem here? If you search for a title in your library, you can simply tap on the search result you want to view the book page, which lists all the Collection/s that book is in. Will that work well enough for you?

No - say I want to look at an author, for example. I am looking at a store shelf and I find a rich list of books available, so I search for all books in my library to see what have I have, what I don't have, and what I expressly have listed in the wishlist. If these results all come back together as one and the same, I am defeated.

I am a software and data architect, so conceptual analysis is something I just do intrinsically. A wishlist is co ceprually different from a collection of owned books - it should be differentiated in the results, either with color, a flag, or in two sections in the results.

I wrote a program to pull all the books out of bookseriesinorder.com, and have been working to match all of that with all of my LT books so I can programmatically complete a wishlist, but it is pointless even counter-productive without that, unless I can be certain that I have correctly mapped all books so don't miss anything, or buy the same book twice - that happens to me more often than I'd like to admit.

Furthermore, it shows a design flaw if someone has to add clicks to find in a search result whether a search result is owned or not owned - surely an important point if differentiation in a collection management application.

It is possible that by focusing on the Wishlist I am trying to "solve the solution", which is like telling the doctor you need 20mgs of some drug, rather than describing the symptoms. In essence what I want is a means to get a single search result that shows me all the results from my LT entries including a field that sys whether it is owned or not.

For a gold star, this would be even better:

A search result with three option to include the results from the entire LT data universe - single example of a book, not multiple editions etc (although I can imagine some people wanting that). The results shoukd then tell me whether i own the book, don't own the book but have recorded it in LT, or neither item it nor have it recorded in LT. Then for those in the third category, some option to filter those results and then mass import into my library as unopened books.

That is what is really at the heart of my wishlist question. (And at the top of my wishlist for LT)

If you look at the author page, various collections are marked. If you look at series pages, various collections are marked. I strongly suspect that to add this information to the general search page is going to cost a lot without being all that helpful most of the time. I really don't want search slowed down.

I also don't see why wish list should be prioritized over other collections such as Read but unowned.

What I do is tag every book in my Wishlist collection with a WISHLIST tag. All caps. Tags show up more visibly in more places on the site than collections do. This way I don't have to worry about which collection I'm in when I search, and because I like to use many tags on my owned books, vs. just the single all-caps tag on my wishlist, they stand out like beacons.

>15 AlanSBPerkins: Well, you fail part of your logic with one assumption.

a search result whether a search result is owned or not owned And this is the failed assumption right here.

Not everyone uses Librarything as a tracker of just the books they own. And they don't always move them to separate collections if they don't own them. Heck, collections didn't EXIST for the first five years at least. So assuming that the book in My Library is owned just breaks down completely.

I understand what you're asking for. You want to be able to tell at a glance that a book falls into a specific collection when searching the app. (None of the marks for the pages show up in the App, >16 MarthaJeanne:. Unless you search the tag list, those don't show up on the App search screen either, >17 macsbrains: ) However, since a book can be placed in multiple collections, you'd need to establish a hierarchy of what qualifies as needing a highlight and what supersedes what within that hierarchy. For instance, if it is in both Wishlist and a Science Fiction collection, which gets priority? What if you've bought one version of a book, but another version is on the Wishlist. They're the same work. Which gets priority there? Wishlist or My Library? MOST users would say My Library.

The problem is the App is a very rudimentary piece of software right now. It can't do much.
You'd almost have to wait for LT 2.0 to finish to get the webpage capabilities OR use Tinycat just for your own search in a bookstore.
In fact, I think those two solutions are better than any change to the app that you're requesting.

The hierarchy of collections would presumably be the same as that used for checkmarks.

I have long wanted the Wishlist to be completely separate from My Collections. I think that would solve everyone's problems. So you could look in My Collections, which would include read but not owned and you could search Wishlist, which are definitely unowned, unread books. However I don't know that this will ever happen as it has been many, many years...

I long ago adapted to the current setup, and a hard barrier between wishlist and other collections would now feel to me like a loss of functionality.

>3 Herenya: Herenya, thank you for this - I hadn't realised tinycat was a librarything thing. I've just had a look at it and it gives me exactly what I want. The one thing that would be nice is a more densely packed tabular list, but this is very useful - it really solves the core problem. Thank you

>20 krazy4katz: I would love a complete separation as well