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Want to Read: WHY?
Released
Dec 6, 2023
For me the most important aspect of a want-to-read list is WHY: who recommended it to me (or how did I find out about it), and when. Thus on goodreads adding a book is a many-step process: click want-to-read, click Edit, go to My Private Notes, add YYYY-MM-DD (friend name, maybe a reminder of a conversation, or New Yorker issue, etc).
For people like me, maybe an option to pop up an immediate "Why?" text box or form when confirming Want-to-Read?
Comments
Last week we launched Reading Journals, which you can use to track why you added a book in the first place. You can make these public, private or followers only.
Goodreads used to have a field like this, designed to call out a Goodreads member for anyone to see, which I thought was awesome! However, I usually was putting more non-member info in that field than a particular person: NPR interview, book club nomination, local library's recommend, etc.
When Goodreads deleted this field I moved my notes to the Private notes field and that's the same field I'm using here on Hardcover.
I'm not tied to any particular option: separate field or a multi-purpose field.
I have a suggestion that might adress this and note taking in one.
When you click on "Currently reading" a new option gets added to the pop-up menu. This option currently only allows the reader to log how far they are in the book right now. Instead, we could have "Reader's Journey" (trademark pending). Directly from the screen reader's can update how far they are in the book as well as add a note or quote they like.
On the Journey page for the book readers can all updates to reading progress and notes in chronological order.
An example:
Your Journey
09.01.2024
07.01.2024
06.01.2024
05.01.2024
04.01.2024
02.01.2024
Rafael Sorry for double posting but I thought this would be better as its own feature request.
Reader's Journey
This concept has come up a number of times in user interviews. Having some context on how you heard about a book, from who, etc. I have an idea for how we could do this using a more generic reading log format, where you can take multiple notes on any book. To be determined though. For now I'm curious to see others thoughts on this.