Abandoned / Unfinished Books?

Hi there,

Since I started tracking the books I've read, I realize there are a few books that I've never finished - sometimes because the book is bad, but also because I ran out of time etc.

When I was using anobii, I could tag such books as unfinished/abandoned and it was sometimes useful if I found myself at a loss as to what book to read next. I would like to have that ability on bookjetty too but maybe there are other options? What do you fine folks think?

Balaji, raised this suggestion to me earlier, honestly I'm undecided about it, reason behind I stick to 3 is for simplicity reason, coz we human seem to associate easier to 3 categories, like, "good, better, best", "less salty, salty, very salty". :)

While for an unfinished book at the moment, if I still want to read it, I'll put it back to wanted, while if I don't want to read it anymore, I'll put it under read, and probably give a bad rating/review. If I need to relook at it, I'll probably tag it, a bit more work.

I know it may be helpful to introduce "Abandoned/Unfinished" category since we may encounter it once in a while. Thus I'm still undecided as it's going to impact the simplicity of the categorisation.

Since, BookJetty is what we all are going to use, and it's quite a major change, I'd love to hear what's your thought on it. Thanks!

Balaji, I got two additional votes for this over Twitter by choonkeat and chuyeow, seems like people are quite keen on this.

I've put this on my todo list. Thanks for the suggestion btw.

Oh yay that's good news.. now comes the hard part - waiting for this to go live =(

@jugend.. good stuff!

Related to this is the usual quandary with the star ratings. Can we get a better "this book sux" rating?

I hate to abandon a book, but whether I stuck it out to the end or threw it away in disgust, I want to vote it down!

But in the 5 star system, that means what? If I give it no stars, it looks like I didn't vote at all. So I reluctantly give it 1 (undeserved) star...

It would be nice to have a differentiator for the "this book sux" rating to eliminate this concern from the site design.

Like a voting scale that starts from: 1 raspberry/brickbat/worm/thumbs down => 1 star => 2 stars => ... 5 stars

Thanks Prata.

Btw, "This book sux" sounds easier to interpret, but having it on top of the star rating, may cause us to have to many buttons, now we already have 'Favorites', 'Own', and 'Wish List'.

I think seeing 1-star rated books maybe good enuff to show books you should avoid, the Abandoned - feature may also help to indicate to-avoid-book.

In the future, as we have more ratings, I'll introduce the bar chart to show the count of each stars, seeing how many 1-star rates compared to the other stars is kind of like 'This sucks' votes indicator, though not entirely, but for simplicity sake. :)

hi jugen, hope you liked the flood of suggestions;-)

"This book sux" I thought could be best approached really simply ... like just changing the icon used for "1-star" to a "thumbs down". So no extra screen real estate or controls required, but just a completely unambiguous voting scheme for users:

1-thumbs down
2-stars
3-stars
4-stars
5-stars

Hm....that sounds practical, but will look as if it is a four star rating with a thumb down vote. Hehe..

Now who dares to say interface/interaction design is an easy job, I think I'll update the mouse-over star tooltip to be more meaningful, instead of '1 out of 5 stars' and etc...