I'm in the process of testing out a few book sites beyond GR like Hardcover and Storygraph. In doing so, I'm adding a lot of books I've previously read all at once. I'm ready to try and build that master list of EVERYTHING I'VE READ, the one list to rule them all. The problem is that this makes my stats really weird, but when I go in to each book to try and label when I read it, a complete specific date is required for both start and finish. If there could be a simple checkbox for "in the past" that would get treated for stat purposes as a specific yet indeterminate date separate from actual dates, this might solve the problem. I'll add that my books weren't properly labelled in GR, so everything I imported says I read it in 2011, but everything I've added manually doesn't show up in any stats because there's no date associated with it. And when I know I read a book like last year or two years ago, I'm kind of forced to make up a date range which takes both a lot of clicking and mental energy. So I'm not sure if it could work with your current stat system to have a few additional date options, like "in the past" and also a vague "YYYY" for the general year I read something without specific reading dates beyond that.
//thanks!
I don't use apps like this regularly enough to know which days specifically I started or finished a given book, but I do know the year and months for each book I've read over the last couple years, so it would be beneficial to only track dates by month+year. (Even better would be a user preference to only show me the months and years in the picker.)
I have this issue also. I have a master list of every book I've ever read, but it gets progressively vaguer the further back I go. More than a couple of years back, I only have months + years, 5 or more years back I only have years, and before that I only have decades (but could guess a year, if I had to).
The two existing work around for the lack of a generic Year or Past options (as suggested by the Hardcover Team) both cause issues with the stats pages.
Not putting any date on a book means it won't show up in the stats at all.
While slapping a January 1st date on every old book will skew the "Genre by Month", "Mood by Month", and "Fastest Read" stats (at least).
Absolutely. I only use Goodreads for looking up a general idea of a book, so I never kept up with it, but I have physical lists of everything I've read since 2011. That's 13 years of books now that I don't quite want to add because I don't have an exact date, just a year. I can deal with making up a month, but I'd like to be able to pick more general dates.
Even the books from ealier this year I don't remember the exact dates. Being able to pick just a year or a month and year, or even "2011 - undefined" would be good.
i've been using 01/01/2000 as my default date for everything i read as a child/teen/before starting to use Goodreads. A single "in the past" button would be useful for me as well, so i don't have to enter that date every single time lol
We released a new way of setting dates today which might help with this.
It's possible to set just the start date, just the end date or both. Or you can not set dates at all. If you don't set dates, we won't associate your read through with a specific year though.
For now setting this to a 1/1/2010 rather than the specific date in 2010 would be the way to do. I'm curious to get more information on why this could be useful compared to setting it to the first of the year?
So for example, you want to be able to set at date as just '2010' or '05/2010'?
I have the same problem so I really hope this one is considered