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Originally Posted by ZodWallop
It shouldn't be confusing. Really, why is there a sort by author and an author tab? The two should be combined and easily could be without losing what either of those views currently offer.
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Read your statement and look at the Nook. You screenshot clearly shows that you lose information when you combine the lists. One show all books sorted by author. The other shows all authors with some hints that there might be more than one book. I want to see both because of how I look for books. If just changing the sort order also changed the displayed data, it would be a bad thing.
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But it could be done by using the same UI as the Books tab to let the user sort by covers or list view. I think the cover/list view should be consistent across all tabs in My Books. Even if you hate it, it wouldn't impact you.
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Consistency is good, but, consistency where there isn't any real consistency is bad. The information displayed on the four tabs is different. Therefore they should be displayed in best way to display that information. The first tab is a list of books. Therefore display the books. The author tab is a list of authors, so display that list with useful information. And the only useful information I can think of is the authors name and the number of books. The series tab is different again. The useful information is series name, authors and number of books. Therefore it is displayed differently. A "series cover" could be good, but, how to define it would be the problem. For collections, it is similar to the author in that the useful information is the name and number of books.
If anything is added to author, series and collections lists, I want to see the number of unread books in each. And a filter to only show me the ones with unread books. That would be useful to me when looking for something to read.
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That says more about your opinion of Kobo's design team than anything else.
As you can see in my screenshot, each item on the Nook clearly lists the author's name.
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No, that says something about the design of the covers you are seeing. In my library, I have plenty of books where the authors name is not easily read when the small cover images are generated. On the full screen cover it is usually OK, but, on grayscaled, thumbail sized covers, the author isn't always obvious or readable.
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The height difference comes from the dimensions of the covers. Not anything done by the software. The stack of five are all self published books by that author, so I takes the covers I gets. And as you can see in the attachment, I have the same non-matching cover height issue on the Kobo. So yuk there too, I guess.
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My "yuk" was more about how the "stacks" are misaligned. No one actually stacks books like that. And a lot of people who saw a misaligned stack like that would straighten it.
And the comment about the size was me trying to work out if it was something done for the number of books or from the covers. The 2 and 3 books are consistent but that appears to just be because of the covers involved.
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I don't expect Kobo to completely ape the look of the Nook. They could use the same shadow effect already used in series (though really, if it is just one book, get rid of the shadow).
What are the use cases for an author list (with the number of books by each author) vs. a list of books sorted by author?
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Because I am browsing through my books looking for something. If I know the author, I go to the author list. If I have no idea what I want, I go through the books. And sort depending on my feeling at the time. Or just to change what pops up as I scroll. And if I don't have something in mind, I frequently just tap on the slider and see what turns up or start scrolling from there.
And for the record, it is rare that I know what I will read next when I finish a book. I know what I won't read as a broad idea, but, look for something to grab my attention.
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Anyway, on the Nook, stacking can be turned on and off. If the software were updated and you had the books stacked and list view on the author tab, you would have what you have now. If stacking were turned off and you used cover view, you would have what is already shown in My Books - Sort By: Author.
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Sorry, but that doesn't scan. I think you are saying that in the list you showed on the Nook, you can turn the stacking off for the author and it will show the full list of books. Which would just be the same as Kobo's book list when sorted by author. But, you might be saying that turning off stacking just displays one entry for each author without the misaligned stack.
In either case, my choice would be the way that Kobo does it. Clear definition of what the various lists are via the tabs. Improving the look of some of those lists is probably possible. But, I don't think there is any real advantage in a cover view for the author or collections tabs. And I wouldn't turn down a series tab that didn't show the covers.