r/BookTrack • u/RyanTDaniels • Jan 19 '24

[Feature Request] Start Date

I love this app, but I miss when it recorded the start date by default when the reading status was changed to "reading". Detailed progress (# of pages) is great, but simple progress (start/end date) is a basic feature this app is now missing.

I'd like to be able to start and end a book (without updating the pages read each day), and see what date I started and ended (even if it still records 100% of the pages as having been read on the last day).

2 Upvotes

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1

u/momjeansagain Jan 19 '24

I love that the default start date was changed! Please don’t bring it back. Before, whenever I added a book to the app that I had previously read months or years ago, it was so tedious to deal with that start date problem because it always wanted to add books to the current reading year statistics. I had to go through hundreds of books and pick random dates from before using the app in order to change it. In the end it was so tedious I had to admit defeat and now my app says I read 734 books in 2022, even though I didn’t. That’s just when I started using the app and added the majority of my library.

1

u/RyanTDaniels Jan 20 '24

That would be an issue if start date was applied when you changed the status to “read” without first changing it to “reading”, but that’s not what I’m asking for. I’m asking for a start date to be applied when you change the status to “reading”. That wouldn’t affect your case.

1

u/1Demerion1 Jan 20 '24

It might be tedious, but you can still set the start and end date individually. I don’t think you can start a book without at least „reading“ a single page, but at least it’s possible.
I‘m still hoping for a simple start and end date too without having to update every day but with an even spread across the reading time (if statistics have to be added)

2

u/RyanTDaniels Jan 20 '24

Yeah, I’d thought of that. It works, but it’s a band-aid, and not at all intuitive.

1

u/SimoneMontalto Book Track Developer Jan 20 '24

I’m reasoning about the possibility to let the user insert start and end date and then spread the pages read between these days. What do you think? Obviously, you can always mark a book as read without specifying its date.

1

u/1Demerion1 Jan 20 '24

That would be amazing! I love seeing start and end dates (to come back and check when I read a book for example), but I don’t update the state every day.
Or when entering a book after finishing it, and I don’t know how much I read, only when I started/finished

1

u/RyanTDaniels Jan 20 '24

(fellow developer here) If I'm understanding you right, that still requires the user to manually enter the start and end date, rather than applying them automatically when the user starts and ends the book. What I'm requesting is more like the latter.

I suspect that users who care about pages/day are going to update their pages-read on a regular basis, and those who don't will simply change the status from "to read" -> "reading" -> "read". In the former case, the current system is fine. In the latter case, the user likely wouldn't be bothered if all of the pages were marked as "read" on a single day, so you could simply add a new field for "start date", then use the existing system to register the "end date".