New Features: Charts and Graphs is released!

The day has come! We've released a big redesign and expansion of your "Stats" section, now retitled "Charts and Graphs."

The highlights are:

* All the old stats
* Lots of new… Charts and Graphs—29 pages worth!
* Full tabular data; click on a chart to see it
* Links into the catalog, so you can use Charts and Graphs to improve your data
* You can now filter everything by collection, read date, etc.
* All pages and individual Charts and Graphs have "Share" buttons, for easy posting on social media. (They look good now; we're working to make them better.)
* Pretty and mobile-friendly

You can find yours at https://www.librarything.com/stats/MEMBERNAME/overview
Check out an example (Abby's) at https://www.librarything.com/stats/ablachly/overview



There's a lot here, so let me start by asking for your help segmenting the conversation:

1. This topic is for general feedback and questions
2. There's another topic for bug reports at https://www.librarything.com/topic/334488 . If people post bugs on this topic, we may move them.

We're eager to hear your feedback!

I believe members will be especially pleased with all the links in the data. Pretty much everything in Charts and Graphs can also be seen in your catalog. So, for example, you can now view a chart of when your reviews were written, or how many of your books were written between 1450 and 1550, and then click to see the data in your catalog!

Congratulations to Lucy knerd.knitter, who did most of the coding, and Chris conceptDawg, who did most of the design!

Excited to dig into this, the linkable functionality especially.

Is there a way to hide the huge graphics (which I hate, but that's me - I'm a text person, not a graphics person), or to move them below the lists?

For example, when I go to "author- dead or alive" or "author - gender", the graph is so big that it takes up the full screen on my desktop. And when I am working on those pages, I want to see the list of names.

Wow. Just, wow. This is amazing. Thank you!!

Very vivid way of letting me know about my bad data I need to fix. (This is a good thing!)

I never would have thought one could have TOO MUCH data...

Just kidding! I'm like a kid in a candy shop.

ETA: And it can be filtered by collection? Oh man, this is great!

Also, >5 cpg:, same here. So much work to be done.

Thanks, LibraryThing team. The new Charts & Graphs area is pretty, and so far, the features are working for me.

Oh, wow! I am also not a visual person, but I actually kind of like this! I also appreciate that the colors are slightly muted, so it doesn't hurt to look at (sensory issues).

I won't have time to dig in until later, but let me say THANK YOU FOR THE MAP WITH LINKS.

This is so very cool. I would definitely use this as a good example of showing data graphically.

>3 lilithcat:
Agree. It would be nice to be able to select the display format for some of the data.

For example, I liked being able to view "language"/"original language" and "from where" as a simple list (or, if needs be, I would also be OK with a vertical bar graph). The pie charts aren't working for me -- the low-numbered items are all lumped together under "other" and I can't scan it quickly to get a sense of the numbers. The list view, which is available only after clicking the "enlarge" button on the chart, only displays a portion of the entries at a time and requires paging through.

Nice as the map is, I would also find it easier to view author nationalities as a simple list as well.

Possibly my dislike of the pie charts for the above cases has to do with the fact that these are not statistics that I think about in terms of percentages, which is what pie charts are best suited to displaying.

What do people think about the bubble charts? Don't hold back.

"Paper" and "Paperback" are confusing. I assume "Paper" means not an audiobook or ebook.

It’s all so pretty!

I have some issues, some of them are new and some old.

* I’m not sold on the name “Charts & Graphs”. I think “Stats” was better.
* Regarding the book stack height chart, I wish there was a way to change the measurements from feet to centimetres. Height in feet tells me nothing. And I’d love it if instead of (or alongside) a column, we could have an image of the building (or whatever).
* For the genres chart, I think a doughnut/donut chart would work better, and be more truthful, than a sunburst chart. (My collection of children’s books is 65 times the size of my art & design collection, but the sunburst chart doesn’t correctly reflect that.)
* Can we hide certain charts? It’d be great if we can. The Dewey chart means nothing to me since I don’t (and never have) used Dewey for either my own collection or in a library.
* The world map for the nationalities is tiny, but maybe that’s a bug or just my (iPad) screen? Someone suggested in a different thread that it’d be better if the map was focused on smaller areas, which I agree with. Maybe maps of the continents? But at least a bigger map.
* For the doughnut charts, where the chart piece is too small to fit the name of the piece, please add the name on the outside instead. Otherwise it’s impossible to know what they mean.
* The image for the Original language chart is not aligned with the charts on either side of it. Again, at least on my screen.

Not big thing. Otherwise, looks great!

>12 conceptDawg: I like the bubble charts.

>13 Doondeck: Maybe “Physical book” could be an alternative term?

>12 conceptDawg: I like them! They're different, but in a good way.

>14 PawsforThought: Thanks for all of the feedback. We'll look into some of these items.

>12 conceptDawg:

I don't like them at all! I don't want to encounter unexpected movement when I go to a web page*. And they don't tell me anything! It's motion for motion's sake.

(Well, you did say "don't hold back"!)

*It's not quite as bad as going to a site and having noise blasted at you, but it's close.

>18 lilithcat: What motion are you talking about?
None of our charts are animated (except the loading graphic).

>14 PawsforThought:

I’m not sold on the name “Charts & Graphs”. I think “Stats” was better.

I agree with this. I went to my profile and wondered what had happened to the "Stats" tab. As I said earlier, I'm not a graphics person, so when I see "Charts & Graphs", my mind doesn't equate it to "Stats". When I opened that tab, my immediate thought was, "I don't see any stats here!"

>19 conceptDawg:

Isn't that what you meant by "bubbles"?

Have we lost the mean and median number of copies for our library?

Generally I think the charts are OK but there are too many of them in the overview.

>22 andyl:

They are under Cataloging in the Members who share your books box.

>21 lilithcat: The bubble charts are the ones like Entry Dates by Genre on the Overview page

>22 andyl: I think that data is still at the top of the Books -> Cataloging pages screen.

>24 knerd.knitter:

Thanks, I didn't get down that far on the page, because my initial reaction was "I never want to see this page again".

I'm sorry, but that graphic is worse than the rest. WHY can we not have a simple, normal way to see these things as we did before? Why must everything be so ferputzed? What is this, Goodreads?

The bubble charts might be more useful if we could zoom in.



Related note: On my phone, the labels on the chart are cut off.

I'm finding it rather annoying to have to scroll past large graphs for types of book data that I don't care about, don't deliberately enter (and in some cases can't properly delete because of the green supplied data thing) or have turned off in my user settings (e.g. book dimensions).

If these were just a line of text that I could expand if desired, it would be less bothersome, but as it is I find these graphs distracting and they make it more difficult to quickly find the statistics I am interested in.

>28 spiphany: Agreed.

I really like them!

If I filter on a read year, how do I get back to seeing all years? There doesn't seem to be an option for "all". Oh, it resets if I choose a different collection or "all books".

>19 conceptDawg:

While I don't share lilithcat's aversion to graphics, that loading graphic does seem unnecessarily annoying. It looks like pie charts or something are rendering, and then disappear to be replaced by something completely different.

(FF 91.0 on Windows laptop)

>31 AndreasJ: It's just a generic loading graphic for "chart is loading" without having a different loading graphic for each chart type. Maybe one day.

>31 AndreasJ:

I'd actually prefer if it was a more generic "something is loading" graphic, probably one of those spinning things. Something that simply says "loading" to me.

That's enough grumpiness for now, though. On the whole it looks pretty promising with a lot of fun things to explore.

While it's great that there's a media option that links out to the catalogue so I can see how many books have incorrectly imported as audiobooks, it would be even better if 'format' was a catalogue viewing style, at least I couldn't see it in my styles options.

>31 AndreasJ: ditto Chrome on Win10 desktop.

>34 reading_fox:

It's there. It's called "media". You'll find it under "Physical" in the settings.

>31 AndreasJ:

I'm not completely averse to graphics; they have their place. What I am averse to is the prioritization of graphics over text, and having them so large that they take over the screen.

Where are the total pages? I've been tracking my pages read for 11 years using the stats here, it's a major loss for me.

Edit - honestly would prefer an option to go back to what it was if it can't have this simple stat. It looks great but I would really like this back.

>37 waitingtoderail: Under Books - Measurements. There’s a section called Totals and Averages. First column, first row: total pages read.

>38 PawsforThought: OK, thanks PfT!

I find this really not intuitive.

Amazing!!!

Best thing that's happened to me all week! :D

Getting better the more I look at it - love that I can chose which collection to look at.

I like the loading graphic.

For my own catalog (lots of data over 14 years), the bubble charts look fantastic on desktop but unreadable on a narrow phone screen.
For other catalogs with less data or over a shorter time period, they look great on mobile but lots of white space on desktop.

>14 PawsforThought:

* I’m not sold on the name “Charts & Graphs”. I think “Stats” was better.

I hear you, but I think "charts and graphs" is more inviting. A number of members, indeed staff, have told us they never looked at "statistics." Also, while they are statistics underneath, the data is presented visually first where possible.

* Regarding the book stack height chart, I wish there was a way to change the measurements from feet to centimetres. Height in feet tells me nothing. And I’d love it if instead of (or alongside) a column, we could have an image of the building (or whatever).

We are averse to adding options for every chart--as some clearly want. But we are considering adding a general preference for units.

* Can we hide certain charts? It’d be great if we can. The Dewey chart means nothing to me since I don’t (and never have) used Dewey for either my own collection or in a library.

We're going to be resisting chart options as much as we can. But I understand the objection. We'll see.

* For the doughnut charts, where the chart piece is too small to fit the name of the piece, please add the name on the outside instead. Otherwise it’s impossible to know what they mean.

Mouse over (or, on mobile, click) the region. The graphing library we're using here does a lot of the work for us—and takes it out of out control. This is, I think, the best we can do without a radical change.

This makes me so happy! Thank you to all of the LibraryThing staff for listening to the community and making awesomeness like this happen.

>43 Ciarda:

Thanks!

I started looking at "Read In xxxx year" and now I can't see a way to unselect it -- a reset, or an "All years" option in that drop-down menu.

I found that clicking the drop-down to change the Collection or clicking over to "All Books" does reset the date drop-down to just "Read In" (all years), but it would be nice to maybe have a blank or a reset option added to the read date drop-down, if it's not too complicated.

(All this data and the visual representations are pretty cool! I feel guilty that my husband is being productive and I can't stop looking at my graphs and lists. (And now he literally asked for my help with something so I'll go be productive too -- ha!))

>28 spiphany: or have turned off in my user settings (e.g. book dimensions).

It now respects that setting. If you have book dimensions turned off in your profile, the graphs on that topic will be gone.

I like this a lot. I especially like the genre charts... which makes me wish I liked the genre feature more. But that's not really a complaint about this.

I'm not a graphics person at all. Pictures meant to convey information do not work for me. I have to really work at interpreting graphs and charts (and that bubble chart thing tells me nothing). I have to be told what the little symbols on my car's dashboard mean; cannot ever remember which of the arrow arrangements means "Close the elevator door", and which one means "Open the elevator door"; cannot assemble anything from graphic instructions and get frustrated by such things. All of which is to say this feature was more useful to me when it consisted of statistics expressed in words and numbers. I know a lot of effort and creativity went into it, but now I have to exert a lot of effort to make any sense of my stats, and I probably just won't.

I'm enjoying all the visual info! My first glance feedback:

Saving the images doesn't seem to save the right section of the screen. The "How tall is your book stack" and entry dates by genre cut off the labels on the bottom, rendering the image less meaningful (meaningless in the case of "how tall") I wanted to share that image but had to print screen to get it right.

Options to remove certain graphs a la the homepage would be appreciated. I don't need to know that 100% of my entries are books, for example.

Being able to interact with the data, drill down, and bring up the books within a reliant segment is great. I don't know if this was your diabolical plan all along, but I am feeling incentivized to fill in missing data to clean things up and make these charts more robust and accurate for myself. (The "books with" section looks particularly dangerous, since I didn't even know librarything was tracking that stuff.)

It would be great if I could create a Genre graph but for select tags somehow. I find that format much more interesting than the tag cloud we have now. Or even a straight bar graph of top 10 used tags or something would be interesting.

Some of the charts would benefit from more description. The Book Popularity seems to underrepresent the number of copies. To know from looking that the vertical axis is showing percentages instead of the number of books, someone must figure it out by either comparing the chart and table or by counting all the bars on the chart.

https://www.librarything.com/stats/MEMBERNAME/sitecompare

>51 timspalding:

We started working on the "help" pages for this. But I don't think enough people know the pages are there--just click the "help" link at the top right of any page. When the LT2 design can be applied to all pages, we'll make that clearer. But anyway I think that's the best place for it.

>51 timspalding: I don't know what coding is involved so am guessing there's a simpler option for the Site Comparison page: Add the percentage sign to the graphs. Then there could be a line of description with the chart, like the Original Publication Dates chart has.

>42 timspalding:

while they are statistics underneath, the data is presented visually first where possible

Stats & Graphs, then? Or Stats & Charts. But it IS stats, not just charts and graphs.

We are averse to adding options for every chart

First of all, it's not EVERY chart, it's the one/s with measurements.

Secondly, why? I understand that it is a lot of work, but if it would lead to more people using the features, isn't it worth it? Especially since these stats can help point out bad data (or no data) and making that visible is good both for individual users and LT as a whole.
Also, if you're going to make people use just one unit of measurement, it'd make more sense to use the metric system - since all but three countries in the world use that one. I understand that LT is an American company and a lot (most?) users are American, but sticking to imperial measurements only is not exactly welcoming or helpful to people from every other country in the world.

We're going to be resisting chart options as much as we can.

Again, why? Being able to hide (or even remove) things is a normal (and much, much appreciated feature) of both the home page and the work pages. Forcing people to wade through graphics that has no meaning to them is just going to make it less likely that they'll use the data/charts at all. Making it more accessible (by making it more adjustable) is a good thing. This also applies to people who've indicated that they'd prefer text info instead of charts. Again, I understand that it's probably a lot of work but adding a possibility of clicking "Show as text" would be very helpful to a lot of people.

Mouse over (or, on mobile, click) the region.The graphing library we're using here does a lot of the work for us—and takes it out of out control. This is, I think, the best we can do without a radical change.

So why not do a radical change? I don't want to have to click to open if I'm just skimming through.
Also, it look REALLY BAD to have some names be visible and some not. Like, atrociously bad. And if the library you're using can't allow for better, you should use something else.
If you're not giving users enough data at a glance, it makes the feature at best less useful and at worst it's straight up disinformation.

Loving the map for nationalities. Like others, I'd like a simple list to go with it, and I'd like to be able to make it bigger (or zoom in). It would also be great if all countries' names displayed on hovering - not just the ones that are filled-in. It would make it easier to see for which countries I still need to find authors for Read around the World or Reading Globally challenges. And would it be possible to change the colour of bodies of water from grey to blue? At the moment, they're almost indistinguishable from unfilled-in countries.

>25 knerd.knitter:

Thanks. I swear that wasn't loading for me last night. Or maybe I just saw the main counts and assumed it was the same as the overview and scrolled past that section whilst it was loading (the loading placeholder is small and faint).

>42 timspalding: We are averse to adding options for every chart--as some clearly want

Would you consider a general option to collapse/expand or to hide individual items? i.e., similar to options that already exist on many pages to toggle between cover view and list view?

Or a more text-based basic layout in which the graphics for individual sections/subsections are only displayed when users select that section?

I like the availability of the graphics, but the presentation of a page full of nothing but graphics is visually very distracting -- each image fights for the user's attention and this makes it difficult to focus on locating the information one is interested in.

>56 spiphany: Yes to everything you wrote. I was trying to say the same thing.

I like what I've seen so far. I even started using a different site a matter of days ago to see what graphical options there were, and most are now present here.

Media chart (circles within circles at the top of the first/initial page) should have a link in the text breakdown to books without a media type set.
My Paperbook division has Paperback, Hardcover, Spiral Bound all listed as subdivisions, but there are 22 books missing from the subdivision level. And I see no way to find those books to fix the info.

I feel like there's an aesthetic disconnect by not showing anything in the outer ring if the prior inner ring had the end of that tree of distinguishing categories. e.g. Paperbook, Audiobook, Ebook make up one ring but Ebook doesn't have subcategories while the other two do. So the outer ring is empty where the inner had Ebook.

Charts on the Measurements page don't follow proper graphing axis notation. The 0 should not be under a column when ranges are used for the bars, it should be under the y-axis. Each number across the bottom of the graph should be at the point it divides bars.

I am another person that would also prefer Metric measurements (as default, but a toggle that remains set would be fine).

Being able to hide charts from pages would also be good for me. I have rated a single book here, should probably remove that rating, and the chart provides no meaningful information.

What is the source for the "dead or alive?" graph? It does not seem to be a single field (and it' wrong fro some of my authors so I'd like to correct it).

Ok, weird behavior : when I scroll down, the listings in the left frame follows. So far, so good. When I open subcategories (Books, Author, etc.), it stays in place. Good. Until I open enough than the text in the frame is longer than the available space, then it jumps to the top which makes it look like it "disappeared". Working as designed?

>59 Kuiperdolin: That info comes from "common knowledge" on author pages.

OK but there's no field "Dead or alive". There is a date and place of death, and presumably it considers the author "Dead" if one (?) of these is filled, but what of the other three options?

>62 Kuiperdolin: That shouldn't be happening. I get how some authors can get assumed to be dead - "born before 1900" for example. But it should definitely not happen for every author

Thanks to the Librarything team for all the thought and hard work that has gone into this.
Will take me some time to find my way around, but already finding that the graphs are highlighting errors in my manually added data.
I would agree that graphs and stats (or charts and stats) is a better description than charts and graphs.

>12 conceptDawg: The graphics are giant and take forever to load, at least in my catalogue on my desktop. (I don't do LibraryThing on my phone, the app is too limited.) And they're so big it's hard to read any real information in them. Information that I actually used to check on (like number of pages read) is now hidden away.

I'm really not in favour of the constant Goodreads-ification of LT. If I wanted to look at a lot of charts and graphics, I'd go there.

>56 spiphany: "Or a more text-based basic layout in which the graphics for individual sections/subsections are only displayed when users select that section?

I like the availability of the graphics, but the presentation of a page full of nothing but graphics is visually very distracting -- each image fights for the user's attention and this makes it difficult to focus on locating the information one is interested in."

That is well said. I find the new graphics confusing and uninformative, as well as annoying.

Just for the record, I love the new graphs. They are everything I could have wanted, almost, from this feature.

Being able to filter stats by collection is something I've wanted for a long time, so I'm delighted to finally get that feature!

Having to click on graphics or on parts of graphics to see numbers/labels means some info seems less accessible than it did before. Especially on a phone, where it is a click rather than mouseover. But being able to filter by collection is amazing.

>59 Kuiperdolin: What is the source for the "dead or alive?" graph? It does not seem to be a single field (and it' wrong fro some of my authors so I'd like to correct it).

This is a good reason for us to work on the help page. Dead or Alive is based on whether there's a death date. If there's a birth date, but no death date, people are assumed to have died if they are over 120, or something.

>53 PawsforThought:

We're trying to avoid turning stats into the homepage--where everything can be changed, reordered and modified in dozens of ways. The problem is that extensive customization tends to make things complex in an exponential, not a linear, way. Various charts "need" each other on a data level. The design overall is laid out one way, and would be laid out differently if the order and presence of the charts were different. Designing the page to work and look good is a task, but designing it to do so in any order is a much larger one. And in the end, what is gained? I believe the detriment to users here is pretty small. Don't like a chart? Skip by it.

I understand that LT is an American company and a lot (most?) users are American, but sticking to imperial measurements only is not exactly welcoming or helpful to people from every other country in the world.

Right. No, I said we'd look into changing that, because it's a global setting, like the time zone.

>69 timspalding: I never once said the stats page should be changed "in any order". I want to hide certain charts from view (collapse them).
I'm not the only person who is bothered by this, multiple people have stated that they find the mass of charts difficult or unnecessary.
And the gain? More people using the stats/charts! Improving the data. Isn't that one of the main points of remaking the page? If people don't find the page usable, they won't use it.¨
And I don't see how making the stats page more like the home page is a bad thing - I understand that it's a lot of work, but if it makes users more likely to engage with the page it's worth it.

I said we'd look into changing that

You also said, as I quoted, We are averse to adding options for every chart, when I wasn't talking about "every chart". You were answering other people's concerns when I was pointing out one specific issue.

>58 Avron: and others who mentioned confusion and frustration with media.

There is still media data available here: https://www.librarything.com/membermedia/MEMBERNAME that will help with the books that are in a category but not the subcategory; a choice was made about how to do the links, and maybe we need to update it to link the way the other screen does too, but it's a complicated set of data, so we tried to make it as comprehensible as we could.

>58 Avron: "I am another person that would also prefer Metric measurements (as default, but a toggle that remains set would be fine)."

The toggle should remember what you choose!

ETA: I stand corrected, the button remembers, but the graphs go back to reflecting Imperial. knerd.knitter is working on that bug.

>69 timspalding:

Don't like a chart? Skip by it.

Easier said than done, when the charts/graphs take up the entire screen. They are really HUGE. Honestly, I could not tell at first that there was any text at all. And, of course, the main "charts & graphs" page is nothing but graphics. So there's no "skipping by them".

>14 PawsforThought: Stack Height chart is now available in Metric. One thing is that you have to go to the Measurements page to switch, but if you switch it there then when you go back to Overview, you will see it in Metric as well. Currently, we don't have a Metric/Imperial button on the Overview page; we will work on adding one, but at least right now you can get the functionality.

>74 knerd.knitter: Thanks. One item down.

>69 timspalding: : Then "unknown" means there's no birth date? There should be a way to flag folks as alive even if you don't know their birth date. "Not a person" from having "n/a" in the gender as I recall, which is its own problem...

>71 knerd.knitter: Oh, that explains my mystery 36 books. Well, sort of. It's the paperbacks. But why is it only counting the paperbacks? I have hundred more hardcovers than paperbacks.

>69 timspalding: I can understand not allowing the order to be changed but how about just allowing them to be hidden and remembering that between sessions? That could be done through HTML and not affect the rest of the code at all. Being able to not see charts that are not useful to me would be a tremendous improvement given how many charts you've added.

>78 jjwilson61: That's exactly what I want. I've never asked for the order to change. I just don't want to see the charts that are useless to me. Collapsing/hiding is great.

>76 Kuiperdolin: From what I remember you can put anything in the birth and death dates and it counts for the alive/dead calculation. So you could put c. 1950 in the birth date or even just Alive if that is all you know.

>76 Kuiperdolin: You can enter anything into the "birth date" field, such as "1940s" or "20th century". I think even "unknown" will work

>76 Kuiperdolin: We put 20th century or something like that in birth date field, it marks them as alive. Similarly, any data in the date of death field will mark them as dead

Loving the Charts and Graphs! Lots to explore 😊 Thanks LT Team.

Neat, neat, neat! Wish I had more time to futz about with it and pick it apart. But there's a lot of awesome in here. :-)

>82 SandraArdnas: We put 20th century or something like that in birth date field, it marks them as alive. Similarly, any data in the date of death field will mark them as dead

Yes, but if you put a parseable date in, like 1820, it will calculate if they CAN be alive. If it's 1820, it thinks them dead.

Never mind. Nothing to see here. Enjoying this new feature a lot though!

How marvellous! Much easier to see where I really need to spend some time sorting things out. I'm quite sure I don't have 57 unique books!

A suggestion about Work Duplicates: most of mine are because I have the paper book and an ebook, identified by holding them in different collections. It would be nice to show Collection or ISBN to make things clearer before delving in.

While the graphics are nice, can we have the numbers at the top (before the graphs) to be linked to the correct subpages or the correct section on the overview page? That will allow one to jump to what they are interested in without needing to scroll through the graphics or through the menu to get to "series" for example...

Charts are brilliant - well done. I work for a tech company and know just how tricky graphs can be to get right. Great job.

(Oh, and I've sympathy for the ' can you not just...' suggestions!).

Where's the "Connections" link that was in the statistics page?
The list of books owned by the top 100 similar libraries (or the users on my private watching list) is basically my favourite feature of the site so yes, I definitely want to have it.

(The stuff that is found on the page, there's some nice stuff, I appreciate the infographs though I also would appreciate the possibility of dropping some of the graphs based on the things I am not using, like ratings)

Edit: oh, now I found it, it's renamed "Shared books" (which I thought was the renamed "vous et nul autre" despite it showing up lower...)

>90 hdcanis: I think you mean the page under Social -> Shared Books https://www.librarything.com/stats/MEMBERNAME/connections

The charts and graphs are great, I do miss the averages for ratings and publication date. And the breakdown of the Dewey decimal stats into smaller subcatergories, the one large grouping isn't all that interesting.

>92 stretch: Averages for Ratings and Publication Dates exist at the top of the Ratings/Review screen (https://www.librarything.com/stats/MEMBERNAME/ratingsreviews) and Cataloging screen (https://www.librarything.com/stats/MEMBERNAME/cataloging) respectively. The Dewey Decimal stats are still broken down to the tens on the Dewey Decimal page (https://www.librarything.com/stats/MEMBERNAME/ddc).

I think people aren't all seeing the subpages. What do you all think?

>94 timspalding: Took me awhile to realize that there are subpages yesterday - and it is almost impossible to know they are there on a phone screen. Maybe a note at the top to point that there are more details somewhere?

>94 timspalding: I'm jumping back and forth between the main thread and the bugs thread, and there are a couple cases where people have issues with the Fiction vs Nonfiction, when what they want to see is in the Genre subpage. So, yes, I think some people aren't seeing everything in that menu. (But to be fair, there's A LOT in there, and easy to miss something or get a little lost.)

>96 HeathMochaFrost: As one of the people who has issues with the Fiction/Nonfiction graph, I have a question for you: Do you think that a breakdown between Fiction/Nonfiction (which I have no problem with) is OK if it doesn't actually include everything that is either fiction or nonfiction, as long as the subgenre information is squirreled away somewhere else?

Spoiler alert: I don't.

>95 AnnieMod: it is almost impossible to know they are there on a phone screen

To be honest, I think that there is so much data here and so many graphs, that ultimately a phone will never be a good platform to navigate it, responsive design or no responsive design.

>98 anglemark: True if you want all of the data. But it should be easy enough to go to the series page for books in a year or collection to see where you left off multiple series - this is the only UI that shows me this list in an easily scroll-able format. And there are other pieces of data like that...

>97 rosalita: Hi! I want to give you a careful answer, but I'm taking a quick break at work so not enough time, will have to wait until I get home. But my spoiler alert is: I'm not sure? But I think you have a good point.

>98 anglemark:
Yep. I've been struggling with this for a while on the LT2 redesign. LibraryThing is DEEP. There are some places in the original design that we had 4-5 levels of navigation at the top/side of the page.

Fitting all that on a mobile device AND getting content on the screen at the same time is quite the challenge.

>100 HeathMochaFrost: No rush — I'm not going anywhere! And I am looking forward to hearing your perspective — it's always good to see things from a different point of view, because others might point up aspects I haven't considered.

Overall I really like the update, especially the ability to easily filter by collections and date read. I do wish that I was able to turn off the graphs and see the info strictly on charts: I think the graphs are really cool and I like being able to see a different display of my stats, but my internet connection is slow and it takes forever for everything to load.

Generally, I'm for visualizations of data since they can be very useful and can illuminate aspects that may not be noticeable otherwise. I was rather looking forward to how this was going to turn out, though, I would not have chosen these _particular_ visualizations, (especially the bubble graphs which, once I figured out how to read them, dislike quite a bit, and they really don't work for my data because I have 1 big bubble and so many microscopic ones that I can't even hover over them with the mouse.)

However, I agree with >73 lilithcat: that the graphs as presented are way too large on the computer. It isn't information-at-a-glance if I have to scan them horizontally with my eyes and not see all the info at once. I feel you're losing the benefit of the visualization in that case. For comparison, on my 19" monitor at normal zoom, the bar graphs for Review Dates and Read Books Over Time are 4.75 inches wide each. About twice as wide as I'd choose, but at least I can see the chart in one glance. But the How Tall Is Your Book Stack bar graph is 14.5 inches wide! That's just unnecessary. I don't have a 19" monitor because I only want to see one thing on it. I have a 19" monitor because I want to see all the things and I do not want to scroll.

Also, when you click through a graph to get the data, I don't like that it's a full page lightbox which I then have to click into to scroll. The text info is much too spread out and separated from the labels. I really, really want the data to be as easily available as it was previously in nice thin columns in addition to the charts and graphs.

I just checked out the page as viewed with my phone, and it looks so much better than on my desktop, and much of that is because the graphs are only 2.5 inches wide. However, I don't use LT on my phone.

tl;dr limiting the width (and heights) of the charts and graphs to be much smaller would make it more appealing to me, and much more useful. Clicking to embiggen is fine, when needed. Retaining the tabular data points in a concise way would also be much appreciated.

In general it's very cute. A couple of thoughts:

I would really like the number back for average book rating -- I try very hard to maintain my average and median close to 3.0, to make the distribution relatively normal.

Also, for things like "Author Dead or Alive" and "Author Gender," you really, really need to show the "unknown" category in the small graph, not just the zoomed one. My "Alive or Dead" stats show 1456 dead, 934 alive. That makes it look like 39% are alive. I of course do not know the exact numbers for my entire library, but I think it closer to 20% alive. I have many, many shelves of books by dead people. :-) Zooming in on the graph shows that I have 1635 authors whose status is unknown to you. If you have to make an assumption, in my case, you can generally assume they're dead. :-) But a graph that ignores 41% of my authors has... problems.

Looking up the 45 items listed as by "Not a person" showed some strange results, but that's a small enough fraction that it's forgivable.

Admittedly my library is exceedingly obscure. But some academic libraries will also be very obscure.

>105 waltzmn: Average Rating is available on the Ratings/Reviews page at the top (https://www.librarything.com/stats/MEMBERNAME/ratingsreviews).

I'm also confused by "not a person" for dead or alive. Where does that information come from?

>107 norabelle414: From CK, it's those that used to be n/a, that is organizations, editorial offices, two or more authors under single pseudonym and similar cases that are not a single person and gender is not applicable and neither is the alive/dead status.

>106 knerd.knitter:

Average Rating is available on the Ratings/Reviews page at the top (https://www.librarything.com/stats/MEMBERNAME/ratingsreviews).

Yes, I know it's there. But why not list it with the graph? Doing so has no real cost and increases clarity.

And I stand by my point about listing the unknowns in the other stats. I'm sure it's not statistically significant for many users -- but if you don't show it on graphs like mine, you give a truly distorted picture. It may not be deceptive on author gender (since it was so hard for women to get published in the past), but it is definitely deceptive on alive or dead -- my library looks far too modern.

>102 rosalita:
(I'm sorry this is so long and I hope it's not too rambling!)
For the most part, I agree with your perspective that if there is data for a book/work that indicates it's in one of the fiction subgenres or one of the nonfiction subgenres, it should be included in the fiction vs nonfiction graph. I almost wandered into that conversation myself, when I noticed that 20 of my 32 "not set" books all had Biography & Memoir in the Genre field. (There were also a couple of Business and a few Reference, and a handful that were truly blank.)

I had assumed that "not set" meant no genre had been selected. Since biographies and memoirs are by definition nonfiction (or *usually* aim to be factual), why weren't they included? And as you said in your post here
https://www.librarything.com/topic/334488#7581274
it would obviously make sense to include the fiction subgenres, at least those that include "fiction" in their names (Historical Fiction, Science Fiction, etc.), into the Fiction & Literature category.

Then I saw this post https://www.librarything.com/topic/334488#7581236 where knerd.knitter said the graph is a breakdown of the two "super-genres" of Fic & Lit or Nonfiction. Obviously, those 20 Biography & Memoir books didn't have the genre "Nonfiction" added to them, so they fell outside "Nonfiction" and into "Not set" in that graph.

For me, the "super-genre" of Fiction & Literature is a much better fit, and I don't hesitate to put it on all my fiction subgenre books. The largest "subset" of my library is in the collection "Imaginative Literature." Unlike Dewey, where fiction, poetry, and "literary essays" are in different Dewey numbers, I want to have each author's novels, poetry, essays, basically anything by the one author, all located together. I call the whole big bucket "Imaginative Literature." I also have a collection called "On Romance Shelves" that is only split from Imaginative Lit because they're physically on their own shelves in a different room.

My gosh rosalita, I'm sorry this is so long! I'll try to wrap it up!

Anyway, in my Fic vs Nonfic graph, I would expect that "Fic & Lit" is basically equal to my Imaginative Lit and my On Romance Shelves collections, because that's right in line with the way I think about and organize my own books. (There was actually a short period where "Fic & Lit" was changed to just the super-genre "Fiction." I was one of those who said to Tim "no no no, please bring back Lit," because poetry and plays fit there better than "Nonfiction." I was relieved when it was re-re-named "Fic & Lit.")

It helps to know that the graph's data is driven by only the two "super-genres," but I agree it's not intuitive, and it's annoying when a lot of users are assigning only the most appropriate one or two genres, and don't want to have more genres listed than are actually necessary. I mean, Tim described it as "similar to bookstore genres," and lots of stores do split out mystery, romance, sci-fi, etc., and usually don't also have copies of those same books in their main Fiction section. And even Tim agreed (here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/334488#7581352) that "General Nonfiction" should be part of "Nonfiction" in that graph.

I wish I could hide the circular "Media" graph because it is so wrong that it would make my stats profs cry. The segments aren't nested right (why is All in the middle? why is Paperback outside of Paper Book?) *and* also the sizes are wrong (why is All the very smallest? Why is Paper Book so much smaller than Paperback, which it is a superset of?).

It doesn't make any sense and it makes my brain hurt and it's bad design.

I have lots yet to discover, I suppose. By and large I'm liking it though.

>111 reconditereader: I think you don't use Excel graphs much, right?
That's the right format for that type of graph: you have 100% of the data at the centre, then progressively split it up outwards.

So "all" in the centre, then for example on mine comes "book", also an interrupted circle because I don't have non-books here, then those books are split into "paper" and "ebook" (a small sliver because I've got 2 out of 988), and finally those "paper books" get split into "paperback", "hardcover" and in my case "nothing" (because I've got a few that I kept just as "paperbook" in the media field, since they're foreign and don't fit into the usual dychotomy.

Don't mix it with pie charts: basically this format is a bunch of pie charts altogether.

I LOVE ALL THESE GRAPHS!!!

One question: what is the correct name for North Korea? I have two authors from North Korea, but the map doesn't light up there. I have tried the names North Korea and Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

South Korea lights up fine on the map though.

Edit: I have now also tried 'Korea, Democratic People's Republic of' and that didn't work either.
Edit 2: It seems to work now, thank you!

>107 norabelle414:
If you write n/a in the gender box on the author's profile, it will say 'not a person' on the graph.

>115 tmrps: Sounds as if some people are putting "n/a" in the gender field for actual individual people, instead of "agender". Alternately, putting in the founding dates or folding dates for organisations in the birth and death fields.

I figured out my confusion re: "not a person". The English CK for an author had gender "unknown" but a different language's CK had "n/a" which superseded the English version to place the author in the "not a person" category.

While you can now switch to metric, at least in the Measurement subsection, the Totals and Averages chart/list is still only imperial.

This is a really interesting way to present things and track personal activity on LT.

I do have one question however

Re: Publication Dates

Since more than half the authors in my collection are dead, and many are nineteenth century authors, it seems strange to me that the Publication Dates graph represents 2000 - 2009 as being the period with the greatest number of my catalogued books published. I realize that is because the editions I have of someone like Zola were published in those years, but would it be more representative to use Original Publication Dates in this chart? Possibly there could be an option to select either.

>119 SassyLassy: If you click on the "cataloging" subpage, you can see both the Publication Dates graph (again) and the Original Publication Dates graph. The Publication Dates graph on that page has the disclaimer ("Date is the edition's publication date, not date of original work.") but that's absent from the graph on the Overview page.

(It's always been that way and I don't like it so my personal workaround is that I put the Original Publication Date in the Publication Date field for all of my books)

>110 HeathMochaFrost: Thank you for that very thoughtful response, HeathMochaFrost. You laid out the various aspects of the situation very clearly. I think my dissatisfaction with this chart/graph stems from two things, one that could be easily fixable by Tim et al. if they want to, and one that is more about me.

1. Given that the stated dataset for the Fiction/Nonfiction graph is those two super-genres, rather than what I think 99% of people viewing such a graph would expect (that it would show the total number of fiction vs nonfiction books in a catalog), it needs some sort of label clearly stating where the data is coming from to avoid confusion.

2. I have always tagged my books by genre, so I was delighted with the new Genres feature that meant I no longer had to do that. And part of that for me means using the most granular sub-genre(s) possible, because the way I think of these things, any book that is labeled Historical Fiction is also, obviously, fiction. Ditto for other sub-genres, such as Horror (fiction) or Biography (nonfiction) or what have you. I only want to see the "big bucket" genre on books that don't fall easily into an existing sub-genre. So this graph will never be interesting or useful to me the way it is currently constructed. That's OK; not everything can appeal to everyone. But it does prompt me to join my voice to the chorus asking that individual charts/graphs be hideable the way that modules on the work page are.

>119 SassyLassy:

Since more than half the authors in my collection are dead, and many are nineteenth century authors, it seems strange to me that the Publication Dates graph represents 2000 - 2009 as being the period with the greatest number of my catalogued books published. I realize that is because the editions I have of someone like Zola were published in those years, but would it be more representative to use Original Publication Dates in this chart? Possibly there could be an option to select either.

I agree with what you say about the uselessness of Publication Dates, and completely ignore the Publication Dates as a result. But I don't think there is a real fix here. Most things from the manuscript era don't have a publication date. What is the publication date of the New Testament? The individual books range from around 50 C.E. (1 Thessalonians) to perhaps as late as 150 C.E. (2 Peter, depending on your viewpoint). But even after it was all written, it wasn't found in a single volume -- the first complete copy of the New Testament is the Codex Siniaticus of the fourth century. And as late as the seventeenth century, you'd still find manuscript copies of the Gospels, or Acts and Epistles, without the other part.

Plus those various manuscript copies don't agree all the time. Sometimes, as with Mark 16:9-20 (omitted by the two earliest manuscripts) and John 7:53-8:11 (omitted by almost all early manuscripts), the differences are extremely substantial.

Or what is the original publication date of Homer? Eighth century, when it is hypothesized it was first assembled? Sixth century, when it may have been written down? Fifth century, when critical work started to try to establish a fixed text?

And what's the publication date of Shakespeare? The date the play was first performed (which is often uncertain)? The date of the first printing (which may be a bad quarto that doesn't represent his text)? The date of a better quarto? The date of the First Folio? What about King Lear, which many editors now think existed in two independent forms?

I could go on for hours about this :-), but the point is, for many books, the original publication date is impossible. I find Publication Date useless -- but I think Original Publication Date is, too.

We could maybe do it by centuries. Even that would cause arguments, but at least it wouldn't be hopeless. :-)

I think publication date is interesting, as showing the age of my books as physical objects.

I'm also interested in OPD, for the depth and extent of historical sourcing among the texts.

Each has its limitations, and each contributes a different awareness.

I would quite like if we had graphs for both Publication Date and Original Publication Date.

And for a pony, I’d like a graph of the differences between PD and OPD for my books.

I want to offer some praise for the "Book Popularity" chart, which threatens to give me a swelled head about my library.

>125 paradoxosalpha:

Acc’d that chart, my library is heavy on the obscure and esoteric. I fear, though, that in actuality it’s mostly heavy on Swedish.

>124 AndreasJ: Both Pub Date and Original Pub Date appear on the Cataloging subpage: https://www.librarything.com/stats/MEMBERNAME/cataloging

I'm wondering though, does the Ratings vs. Pub Dates on this page: https://www.librarything.com/stats/casvelyn/ratingsreviews draw from Publication Date or Original Publication Date?

>127 casvelyn: Ratings vs. Publication Date uses the Publication Date, not Original Publication Date.

>114 tmrps: Who are your two authors from North Korea, because I don't see them on your Nationalities page.

Edit: Nevermind; I found one, Bandi who is listed as North Korea but shows as Not Set... We'll look into it

Edit #2: fixed! we were missing a mapping.

>128 knerd.knitter: Thanks! That's what I thought. I really like the idea of comparing rating to date, it's not something I would have thought to compare. But it would probably be more interesting/relevant if it used Original Publication Date. Otherwise there's not a good way to see how my ratings change over the decades/centuries, because so many of my editions were published in the last 30 years, regardless of when the actual text was published.

On the other hand, some books being originally published so long ago would make rendering the graph a whole lot more interesting on the back end, probably.

>113 ScarletBea: Thanks for the explanation; I still hate it though. It hurts my brain and it's the very first one. Can't they let me hide it? *sadface*

>127 casvelyn:

Ah, thanks, I'd missed that.

Something'swonky, I note, with the The Histories, which has the OPD set in CK as c. 420 BC, but shows up in the chart as published in the 480s BC.

>132 AndreasJ: There's so much data there, it's easy to miss stuff! My problem is usually "I saw a graph that said ____ but now I can't find it again!"

Where do I dig down to find the list/qty of Cataloguing Sources? I looked around but don't see it. Thanks.

>134 Crypto-Willobie: Click on the "cataloging" sub-page and it's third from the bottom. Click on the chart for more details.

>135 norabelle414:
Sigh... but where do I find the Cataloguing Sub-Page?

I think we need a Master Table of Contents for all the sub-sub-sub places...

>136 Crypto-Willobie: If you're on a computer or other wide screen it's on the left side under "books". If you're on a phone click "overview" at the top of the page and then "books" and then "cataloging"

>125 paradoxosalpha:

I want to offer some praise for the "Book Popularity" chart, which threatens to give me a swelled head about my library.

Dunno. I'm embarrassed that I'm only 19% obscure and 15% esoteric. I was hoping for at least 50%. :-)

(I did at least manage only 0.43% "Top 100" and 1.10% "blockbusters." But maybe I should be figuring out what those are so I can throw them out. :-p)

>137 norabelle414:
Doh!
My eyes were so taken by the central panel of mega charts, I didn't even notice the left-side menu...
Thanks again.

So, is anyone else listening to Grandaddy's Chartsengrafs? https://open.spotify.com/track/33sHR2EayAboR9oLRo6hX6?si=6f61604929244fc5 ?

Very happy to be able to see all the books I read in any given year since I joined LT. Unsurprised that in 2020 the number of books I read was about double that of any other year.

My reading rate suffered in 2020, because I used to use my commute for regular daily reading.

How do you calculate Book Stack Height?
I have almost 700 more books than my friend and his stack is higher than mine.
I'm confused.
Great job though
Thanks

>142 paradoxosalpha: Good point. And in any event, sometimes too much free time is not conducive to reading, an activity of unavoidable self-reflection which can be painful in bad circumstances.

>143 silversurfer:

I have almost 700 more books than my friend and his stack is higher than mine.

It's not the number of books, it's the thickness of the books. If you look at the "book details" for a book, you may* see "dimensions". That's where it's drawn from.

* I say "may", because that information doesn't exist for all books.

>143 silversurfer:

Your friend reads thick books! :)

Also, of course, the data might not be perfect. There are some tools later on the page to spot problems.

I was confused at first at the Controversial Books list because I thought it was going to be my books where my rating differed the most from how everyone else rated it. Now that I know what it actually is, I think it would be cool to have the list as I thought it was.

>147 jjwilson61:

No, indeed, that might be interesting.

Love It! Love everything about charts and graphics! My only feedback would be MORE PLEASE! This is my new favorite thing on the website.

>149 Krisbee:

Thank you. knerd.knitter was saying she might print out a few comments and put them on her wall; I think you made the print pile :)

>146 timspalding:
"There are some tools later on the page to spot problems"

This keeps getting better!

>1 timspalding: Just find the whole thing HIGHLY AMUSING!

E.g. Under 'Living or Dead' authors LibThing has "NOT A PERSON" Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein... There's a possibility even late Pres. Richard Milhouse 'Watergate' Nixon had heard of them!???

Then there's Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, John Wyndham etc. "Unknown Fate"... EXTRAORDINARY Science Fiction!???

>152 tommi180744: Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein is not a person. They are, in fact, two people. Likewise, ARTHUR C. CLARKE / ROBERT SILVERBERG / JOHN WYNDHAM / ISAAC ASIMOV is not a person. The system is designed to have one and only one person in the author spot, with additional authors added below.

This is a terminology question. By "person", LibraryThing means "individual human being".

booksaplenty (#141):

I suspect that almost nobody read the same amount in 2020 as in a typical year - I'm on the "much less" side of the divide, since trying to keep working while also facilitating homeschool meant there was no longer any such thing as leisure time.

tommi180744:

Bob Woodward is a person. Carl Bernstein is a person. The two of them together are, in fact, not a person. This is not hard.

>155 lorax:

Besides the extra work and such—we too were homeschooling—many also went through a period of reading-inhibiting psychological stress or depression around this. Mine was relatively short, but I know people who couldn't get any reading done for many months. Book sales soared, though, and this tracks with how, when I got my reading mojo back, I was a madman. So, as you say, I doubt it was a typical year.

I had a rebound too. Read Gene Wolfe's entire Solar Cycle, among other things.

Another factor damping my early pandemic reading was a rush to get some of my manuscripts completed and into print before I got infected and killed.

Okay, I have some suggestions for further development of Charts & Graphs (suggestions for more charts).

The ones I think should be *fairly* easy to do:
For both the author gender and the author nationality charts, I’d like to have a similar chart showing those things, but related to the number of books I have. So it’s not “how many women author do I have in my library?”, it’s “how many books do I have that are written by women”? In my case, the difference would be quite big, and it’d be interesting to see that difference.
Same for nationalities, not “how many Australian authors do I have?” But “how many books do I have by Australian authors?”

The ones I understand would be super tricky (or even near-impossible) to make but which would be super fun to see:
* A map showing the location of the action in the books (obviously only for books that take place on Earth and not in space or a fantasy world). There would be a difference between that and the author nationality map.
* A timeline of real-life events in the book (again, obviously not for make up events like the Hunger Games and such). Could be a lot of fun to see how many of your books that take place during WW2, if you seem to favour books set during the Middle Ages or have never read something set during the French-American wars.

Something to develop in the future?

>159 PawsforThought: I certainly love the idea of a library-wide timeline chart of book events. Sounds really cool.

>159 PawsforThought: The "how many books do I have that are written by women" etc. information can be seen if you click on the chart or map. It would be nice to see a chart of that as well, though.

>161 norabelle414: Yeah, it would be nice to have the chart. Especially since not everyone will click on the charts for more precise info.

Very nice. I think the graphics are well done and, of the group, I think the site vs member section is the most interesting. One observation (please note this is not a complaint nor a request for a change of any kind): a well known tenet of metrology is the precision of the final calculation can be no more precise than the precision of the least precise measurement used. The star ratings are to the nearest .5 therefore anything finer than that is empty precision.

Since the idea of the Controversial Books is to give some kind of numerical rank ordering the empty precision is fine but if someone wishes to use the numbers in the Controversial Books for any kind of analysis they would need to remember this rule of metrology because, if it is applied, the book list becomes a series of book clusters. Again, your efforts with respect to statistics and graphical representation of member reading data is appreciated.

alco261:

Except ratings are decisions, not measurements. If I rate something 4.5 stars, that's exact, it's not a best measurement of something that could be anywhere from 4.26 to 4.74.

>159 PawsforThought: Related, much of my collection is cookbooks, and I'd like to see a map which shows where the books were published, especially through time. The Library of Congress used to have this feature, but made an update, and that feature didn't survive.

>165 RecipeClippings: Oh, yeah, that could be tons of fun.

>143 silversurfer: I have a mix of e-books and paper print books. I'd like to be able to separate the two mixes, so I could estimate the "height" of the paper books. Why? So I could estimate how much shelving I might need when I move and set up a new library space.

>122 waltzmn: I have a collection of vintage cookbooks, mostly e-books (and newer ones, mostly paper). For me, the original publication date is important (and usually can be found). Yes, some manuscripts have a range when they may have been written, but once we get into the era of the printing press, most (not all) books have an established printing date. Then we get into editions, since usually each edition differs from previous or subsequent - new recipes added, older recipes deleted, many recipes revised. Sometimes these changes are minor, sometimes major. So, for me, Original Publication Date is very useful, whereas the reprint date of a very old book isn't helpful.

>165 RecipeClippings: "....used to have this feature, but made an update, and that feature didn't survive."
I find that to be true of almost every software update ever published.
And it's always the features I used the most, or liked the best.

That said, hooray for the Graphs & Stats! (I like that suggested title).

RecipeClippings (#167):

Entering zero for the physical dimensions of the e-books should work, no?

>159 PawsforThought: For both the author gender and the author nationality charts, I’d like to have a similar chart showing those things, but related to the number of books I have. So it’s not “how many women author do I have in my library?”, it’s “how many books do I have that are written by women”? In my case, the difference would be quite big, and it’d be interesting to see that difference.

We are currently calculating both. Are we sure it's using the author number now? Anyway, we could add it by book. I'm just worried about gilding the lilly too much here.

>161 norabelle414: >159 PawsforThought: PawsforThought: The "how many books do I have that are written by women" etc. information can be seen if you click on the chart or map. It would be nice to see a chart of that as well, though.

Ah, right. Good. We're showing it.

The ones I understand would be super tricky (or even near-impossible) to make but which would be super fun to see:

Both would be cool.

>168 RecipeClippings:

I have a collection of vintage cookbooks, mostly e-books (and newer ones, mostly paper). For me, the original publication date is important (and usually can be found). Yes, some manuscripts have a range when they may have been written, but once we get into the era of the printing press, most (not all) books have an established printing date.... So, for me, Original Publication Date is very useful, whereas the reprint date of a very old book isn't helpful.

You seem to have misunderstood my point. I said from the start that I preferred original publication date to the edition publication date. I have no personal use for the edition publication date, which dramatically distorts the contents of my library. I merely pointed out that, for old works, original publication date cannot be established. (And the data is giving the graphs trouble -- the Gilgamesh epic gives wild results.)

I do have to make a couple of points. First, we can date old manuscripts with pretty high accuracy -- to the nearest century, anyway. This is done by paleography, looking at the style of the writing, the use of incidentals, the type and color of ink, and many other things. Almost every manuscript can be dated within a range of 100 years, and many can be dated more closely than that.

But a manuscript date is not the date of the work. They give us the latest possible date of the work but not the earliest, and in some cases -- the books of the Bible, the Iliad, the Odyssey -- the copies are much later.

Also, don't assume that just because something is printed, we know its date. Early printed books don't tend to have publication dates -- many don't even have title pages! The Gutenberg Bible has no date. Most of William Caxton's books have no dates. It was a long time before it became entirely standard even to indicate a printer. (Even a number of the pirated Shakespeare quartos don't list a printer.)

Once again, I'll stop before I list too many instances. :-) Bottom line: I'd prefer Original Publication Date, but we need a way to deal with approximations, with the approximations getting much greater when the books are older. And we also have to have a way to decide in cases of conflict. (E.g. the book of Ecclesiastes is dated to the tenth century B.C.E. by conservatives who think it's by Solomon, to the second or even the first century B.C.E. by those who have looked at all the imported words in the Hebrew.)

>167 RecipeClippings: If you have a Collection of only print books, you can filter the display by that Collection so only the "height" of those items is included in the final measurement.

I have ebooks in a separate Collection, and was amused to see the "height" of all those "pages" when I chose that Collection to view measurements. :-)

>171 timspalding: In what way would it be “gilding the lily”? It’s not not affecting the already existing charts, just providing more exact information.
If it’s an over-abundance of charts you’re worried about, that is easily fixed by allowing users to hide/collapse charts they’re less interested in. (Yes, that’s a very unsubtle hint.)

Very interesting and could be informative and useful

>164 lorax: - The rating system is a Likert scale which is ordinal and it is a measurement scale. In this case the rating steps are in increments of 1/2 from 1 to 5. When you analyze Likert data and generate estimates of means and standard deviations all of the rules of metrology concerning significant digits comes into play.

I really like all the fun graphics (I like lists with just the numbers as well, as an option, since I keep track of these things in a spreadsheet to make sure I eventually get all the essential data on a record).
However, I'm seeing a lot of comments here about a "book stack height" chart based on physical measurements, and I can't find that graphic on my overview or listed in any of the categories in the left side-bar menu. (Google Chrome browser, Windows 10)
What am I missing??

>177 librisissimo: It's the third row on the first page when you open charts & graphs, or under books-measurement

>178 SandraArdnas: "It's the third row on the first page when you open charts & graphs, or under books-measurement"
Something about my display is different then, or I (metaphorically) can't find my glasses because they are on the top of my head.
Also, I only have one page, no "next" button or indication that there are additional pages. (desktop view)

In "Charts & Graphs" in "Overview" my screen shows:
First row: Your Books Over Time
Second row: Media, Publication Dates, Ratings
Third row: Genres, Fiction vs. Nonfiction (about which I will say more later)
Fourth row: Entry Dates by Genre
Fifth row: Dewey Decimal Numbers (I personally use LCC, but the DDN chart is much simpler for a quick look)
Sixth row: Books With -- etc.
Seventh row: Author Gallery
Eighth row: Author Dead or Alive?, Nationality, Gender
Ninth row: Ratings, Reviews, and Read Dates Over Time
Tenth row: ditto in different format
Eleventh row: Languages, Original Languages, Book covers
Twelfth row: Talk Messages
(no 13th row; superstition or just coincidence?)

My side-bar under "Books" shows (cut-and-paste from the screen):
Cataloging
Reading Dates
Ratings/Reviews
Book Covers
Genres
Dewey Decimal
Tag Cloud
Site vs. Member
Controversial Books (I have some thoughts on that as well)
Collections

Then the other 4 categories, with no "Measurements" under any of them:
Authors
Common Knowledge
Social
Odds and Ends

Replying to myself at 179: I had a thought (that happens occasionally).
I had edited some of my settings a long time ago, and just remembered - (That's usually how I find my glasses as well).

The "menu maze route" is:
Home - Your Books - Other Settings
"I don't want this feature!" section, including the checked boxes for:
"Hide pagination, dimensions, weight and volume fields"
"Hide tag mirror"

So I unchecked both of them.
Et voila! "Measurements" now appear on the third row, between "Ratings/Reviews" and "Book Covers," as advertised,
and is also in the menu list between the same, along with "Tag Mirror" following "Tag Cloud."

However, that does make 13 rows on the Overview Screen, so beware!

(Or am I still missing some other rows that need to be tracked down?)

Question, because I may have missed the answer among all the comments:
For "Measurements" - is "Your books" equivalent to the preset LT Collection "Your library" or is it the total number of records in "All Collections" (either way, some of my records aren't actually books).

FWIW, at the moment my stack is between the Statue of Liberty and Niagara Falls.

My overview page on mobile displays, in order:

• Your Books Over Time
• Media
• Publication Dates
• Ratings
• How Tall is Your Book Stack?
• Dewey Decimal Numbers
• Books With
• Author Gallery
• Author Dead or Alive?
• Nationality
• Author Gender
• Ratings, Reviews, and Read Dates Over Time
• Review Dates
• Ratings Over Time
• Read Dates Over Time
• Languages
• Original Languages
• Book Covers
• Talk Messages

I might not have GenreThing turned on, which could be why genre graphs aren't displayed. The book chart is in that place.

Does anyone have both?

>181 librisissimo: "I might not have GenreThing turned on" (really to asprit; we had a tie!)

Looks like the same situation I had with Measurements.
You have to enable the features you want to see in the graphs.

>181 librisissimo: My stack is currently between the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building despite its much smaller item size. Hmmm.

https://www.size-explorer.com/en/compare/buildings/Statue+of+Liberty/Empire+Stat...

removed a typo

Your book stack's height is calculated off only those books that have their dimension fields filled out (you can do so on the edit book page). The many, many books for which these fields are empty are not included in this particular graph.

There are also many books for which the dimensions are just plain wrong, often due to import errors.

>181 librisissimo: The height of your book stack varies depending on the options you select in the drop-down menus at the top of the screen, so you can see all of your collections, or just the books in Your Library, or a guesstimate height of the books in your Wishlist. (I haven't actually messed with the "Custom" button yet, but that could also have options that would impact your theoretical book stack.)

But see also >185 Petroglyph: - this point is good to keep in mind.

This is so much fun! Thank you LT crew for the continued improvements through the years!

If I could add one more graph...how many books I read in a year compared to how many I've added to my library! Then I can shame myself into spending less and reading more. Lol. But seriously.

Question: Since we now have a graphical representation of books with the various identifiers, are we going to have the ability to edit things like EAN, UPC, LCCN, OCLC, and ASIN? Because at present they are all grayed out and unable to edit. Only import, if your lucky enough for the record to have any of those details

nice! as if i needed another way to spend hours on the internet...

Oh, I love it!

I haven't read all the messages, but I also agree that this can make it a bit easier for me to fix some things (like adding covers to those missing them, among other things).

>1 timspalding: Overall, these are great. But sometimes text is easier to comprehend. For example, I'm accustomed to taking a quick look at how many books I've added and how many reviews I've posted this month vs. the same month last year. On the new chart, I have to hover above a bar to find out this info. There doesn't seem to be a way to drill down and get a month-by-month total as used to be displayed. Below the chart, there is a year-by-year summary, but clicking on it takes me to the actual reviews themselves, not to a further month-by-month total. Am I missing something?

>22 andyl: Agree. We should be able to pick the few we care about and customize them. For example, I just want to see the number of reviews I've posted per month in an easy-to-read text format so I can compare it with previous years. The charts look cool, but actually getting the numbers I'm looking for require too much work.

>191 datrappert:
I also miss being able to see a simple list of books added by month...

>65 the_red_shoes: Amen. Goodreads is so depressing to look at compared to LibraryThing.

>98 anglemark: Yeah, it's like LT is getting redesigned mostly for mobile, only this whole new part is unnavigable on mobile.

>136 Crypto-Willobie: There really needs to be some kind of user guide for the new design, it feels unintuitive and like too much stuff is hidden. Maybe a sitemap kind of page.

>12 conceptDawg:
To me, the bubble charts look like splots of color. It is difficult to compare the sizes of the splots because circle area growth is different from linear growth. Some splots almost cover each other. I don't find them user friendly.

>196 the_red_shoes:
Yes, a site-map (or in this case a feature-map).
Pleeeease?

What is 'Original Publication Date'?

I have 8 books with no publication date, which is correct, but 832 books with no 'Original Publication Date.' I cannot even find this field on the work page to fill it in.

>199 rgurskey: Original Publication Date is one of the Common Knowledge fields on the work page.

>199 rgurskey: Broadly speaking, Original Publication Date is going to be the first/earliest date which a work was published. This will, rather obviously, be easier to track the closer you get to the current era. The field for this information is in the Common Knowledge section of the work page (should be the fourth field down).

Is anyone else having an issue with the Dewey chart not displaying all the data? I have 20 works covering 0XX, 1XX, and 2XX, but neither category shows any results. These are only a small portion of my library, so my guess is that there is a minimum percentage requirement to actually show up in the chart. But just checking with the group to see if that is the case.

On the graph "Ratings, Reviews, and Read Dates Over Time" - where do the dates come from? I show no ratings for 2010, although I read and rated 50 books that year (i.e.) I'd like to adjust my books so these graphs show relevant data. (among other things)

>203 dudes22: The review dates comes from when the review was entered into Librarything. So you'll see the date on the review. If you edit it, that dates changes to the date of the edit.

Rating is the date you entered your rating. again, if you change it, it changes to that date.

The Read Dates come from the Date Read and Date Started fields on your book, found about 2/3 down the page from the top.

Ooooh, niiice! Love the colors! Lots of thingies to play with, even though apparently some things aren't completely finished yet.

>202 Bretzky1: Yes, same for me. I was going to ask about it but thought there must be a minimum, perhaps proportional - I have over 5,500 in the 800s, but only 12 in the 000s, 10 in the 100s and 32 in the 400s none of which show up as coloured triangles.

I'd love to see what this new feature is doing to CK editing traffic. I know I've edited more CK in the past few days than in the past year or two.

>204 gilroy: - I don't see a rating date when I look at editing my book. My graph shows 0 for 2010 and I read and rated 50 books that year. I even changed my "finished" dates because I didn't have any before in case that was what was used.

ETA: It's also showing 364 for 2020 which way off and what started me on this quest.

>208 dudes22: You won't see a rating date. And I'm not sure where it's stored, so you'll have to wait for Tim or one of the other staff to answer on that one.

>207 norabelle414:

I've done less, I think.

I used to check gender and dead/alive stats every so often and fill in info for the "unknowns". But now that information is less accessible, hidden under monstrous huge graphics, so I'm less inclined to do so.

On the other hand, now I can see clearly what needs doing, I have been doing A LOT of CK cleanup and fixing other data. Looks like a lot of people have, so despite the sad trombones of a few (and it's always the same few, isn't it?), I'd call it a successful update.

>211 Bookmarque:

For those who like this sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like. But that is no reason to insult those of us for whom graphics are difficult.

>211 Bookmarque: I'd call it a successful update.

Hear, hear!

And you know we'd all be sad if we ran out of things to tweak in our catalogs! So really they did us a favor.

>202 Bretzky1: and >206 CDVicarage: If you click on the Dewey chart itself, you can see that there are counts for all the Dewey numbers, but because the amounts are so small, they are pretty much impossible to see on the chart. There is no point at which we're leaving them off, but if the size is too small, it won't be visible.

>214 knerd.knitter: Thanks, that what I thought!

I have some books that are not set in the fiction/nonfiction graph. I would like to fix that, but I can't find where to do that. Help?

>216 Ennas: If you click on the chart you will get a popup with a larger version of the chart and tabular data; you should be able to click the "Not Set" link in the table and go to your catalog to find the books without either genre.

>217 knerd.knitter: I can pull up my "Not Set" list, but where do I edit the genre?

I like sad trombones...

>218 Hedgepeth: I believe you can do it on the work page or you can add the Genre to your catalog view and edit there.

>167 RecipeClippings:,
>168 RecipeClippings:,
>172 waltzmn:.

About e-books:
Since around 2013 I have almost only read e-books. As >170 lorax: suggested, I enter 0.0001 as the (metric) dimensions for height, length, thickness and weight. This is not very satisfactory. I also use collections to distinguish paper books from e-books. But even that is not very satisfactory.
Above all, I miss a field for entering the file size. I know this has been asked about before.
It would be interesting to know how much storage space I need to store and back up my e-books. I wrote this information in private comments.

If this information were included in LT, several interesting questions could be easily answered:
How much storage space am I currently using?
What is the relationship (number of books) between books, e-books, etc.?
When and how many e-books were categorized or read in period x?
Could a comparison be made with the height of the stack of books? Example: 1000 pages correspond to approx. X books, which in turn corresponds to a stack with the height of Z.

>216 Ennas: Look for "GenreThing" on the right hand side of the book page, and click on the pencil in that box to edit.

If you don't see "GenreThing" you might have it disabled. To enable it go to your profile page, click on "edit your profile and account," then click Genres on the left.

I've got a question regarding the Library of Congress Classification codes.
I've got books labeled with an invalid code. Yet the source of the book record is from the Library of Congress and when I go to the Library of Congress search site, it gives me the same LCC as what's listed on the book.

So why is it an invalid code?

Examples: Grave Peril , Summer Knight , Ravnica
Notably, these are all paperback books, and they are all coded as part of the Copyright Paperback Collection.

>223 gilroy: When I look at those books in your catalog, I see CPB Box No... in the LC Classification field. Are those the the codes you're talking about? Where are you searching that you find those as the correct codes for the books?

ETA: do you mean this page? https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/search?searchCode=LCCN&searchArg=2002561970&am...

>212 lilithcat: Yes, seriously. I just don't like giant moving graphics.

>223 gilroy: >224 knerd.knitter: It's an invalid code because the CPB location numbers aren't classification numbers. The classification outline is available from this page:
https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/lcco/

And there's a bit of info about the Copyright Paperback Collection here:
https://www.loc.gov/cds/notices/notcopypaper.html

I don't have specific citations, but IIRC, these are likely mass market paperbacks, lots of genre fiction, and not the kind of thing that's meant to last for generations. (I love me some genre fiction and don't want to sound like a snob, forgive me if it's coming out that way.) It explicitly says on that information page:
To bring this vast quantity of material under bibliographic control with very scarce resources, the Cataloging Directorate has had to choose an approach that entails various shortcuts.

They basically get tons of mass market paperbacks and don't have the resources to treat them as well as, ahem, hardcover and trade paperbacks, i.e. more "quality" fiction, not to mention non-fiction. So it sounds like these paperbacks don't get "classification" numbers, they get what we in library school called "mark it and park it" -- only a physical location -- in a specific box, rather than on the library's shelves.

If someone else has more (and better) info about this, please jump in!

>224 knerd.knitter: Yes, that's the page. And that's what was drawn in from the LoC when the record was created.

>226 HeathMochaFrost: That doesn't really help. If that's what the LoC is putting in that field, why is that not valid? This would be like McDonalds claiming to only ever make Hamburgers, but then selling you a fish sandwich. You'd wonder why, no matter what the chart told you. So pointing me to the chart doesn't help answer my question

>227 gilroy: Because it's NOT LC Classification, even though it's used by them. They are using another classification in those cases. Similarly, libraries normally using DDC opt for FIC and some others ocassionally, but that isn't DDC.

Even if LT didn't treat those as invalid codes, the only difference would be that you wouldn't see the invalid code note, but you'd still not benefit from any of the LCC features for those books because the code is not a part of LC classification system and there is nothing to display.

Edit: As an option to get valid codes, http://classify.oclc.org/classify2/ will have any used by any of OCLC libraries

>228 SandraArdnas:
Similarly, libraries normally using DDC opt for FIC and some others ocassionally, but that isn't DDC.

Yes, thank you!!

And thanks for including that OCLC classify link too; I'll probably be using it for some of my own paperbacks. :-)

>224 knerd.knitter: You know, never mind. I don't have the time or the personal bandwidth to deal with that chart right now. I'll just delete the offending codes and move on

The Dresden Files started out in mass market paperback, like most trade Urban Fantasy series do, then hit the NYT Bestsellers list enough times for the first and continuing books to be in hardcover (as well as three other form formats, not counting adaptations). It's today one of the easiest series to find in hardcover in physical bookstores and public libraries in the USA.

Explanations that the LOC errors are because books in The Dresden Files were published to not last is a bit cringe-inducing. That was the situation almost twenty years ago. The problem appears to be that the wrong codes are sticking around after all this time, and LT isn't correcting for the error.

>230 gilroy: Valid codes should have auto-generated now that you've removed the invalid ones. Example: My copy of Grave Peril shows PS3602.U88 in green.

edited to fix typos

>231 aspirit: Explanations that the LOC errors are because books in The Dresden Files were published to not last is a bit cringe-inducing. That was the situation almost twenty years ago.

Yes, I agree. What I meant was that mass market paperbacks (regardless of their contents) aren't produced to last for generations. The typical mmpb that was published 20 years ago is going to be somewhat the worse for wear. They aren't really the wrong codes, but a different system that only tells you that item's physical location in the Library of Congress (or its offsite storage), rather than a more universal classification that can be used to organize the same materials in another library.

I went to check my stats and memes and all I found were these silly colored charts. I want actual data, as per the former stats and memes. This takes way too much navigation, especially on a phone. I am disgusted with this colorful mess. There is no easy way to navigate all the cutesiness. Don't fix what isn't broken. 😕

>1 timspalding: I can't find the useful data showing the addition of books by date. All I see is incremental accumulation by month. Is the data in the old format still available? I think it was daily with monthly totals, and showed the exact number of books added each month.

also do we still have the median (or is it the mean) publication date?

>234 drsabs: and >235 drsabs: The Average Publication Date as well as the entry date data is displayed on the Cataloging page. Click on Books on the side nav on the left side of the screen and select Cataloging.

>233 Raspberrymocha: I agree with you, but I think we're boned.

>237 reconditereader: reconditereader

It's the Outer Limits school of computer programming
"LT controls the horizontal, LT controls the vertical; the end user has to live with the changes."

My list of books without Original Publication Date is still sitting at 842 despite the numerous additions I have made. Why bother correcting/adding data if the graphs are not going to be updated to reflect the changes. It looks like I'm not making any progress.

>233 Raspberrymocha: Agree. I wish there were an option to look at the data itself, not prepackaged visualizations of the data. Hopefully this approach doesn't carry over into the "Your books" page as the LT2 rollout continues.

>239 JacobHolt: You can view the data in tabular form by clicking on the chart; a popup will open with the chart and the data displayed in a table.

I really am enjoying this new feature.

I'm really enjoying the new Charts and Graphs -- my thanks to you for developing this. On the fiction vs nonfiction pie chart, I noticed some books aren't set one way or the other. (Less than 5%, which is amazingly complete). I've marked most of these as fiction or nonfiction myself, is the setting something LibraryThing controls. Or is there something I'm not doing right!

>242 ElizabethChapman:

LT gets the Fiction/Nonfiction data from GenreThing. The feature was introduced here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/333142

>242 ElizabethChapman: Would be nice if there is a third categorie for poetry. Most of the books that are not either fiction or non-fiction are often poetry.

>244 tmrps: The category is Fiction and Literature and it includes poetry and drama

Is there a limit to the number of shared books the charts and graphs show? If so, are they random or how are they chosen?

>246 dara85: I'm not sure what exactly you're referring to. Do you mean the Vous Et Nul Autre page?

>1 timspalding: I would LOVE the ability to edit LCCN and OCLC numbers, now that "books without them" is a category that I have to look at. Is that coming down the pike?

Do you mean LCCN, or Library of Congress Classification? They are not the same thing. Classifications are already editable.

>249 lorax: I mean LCCN (and OCLC, EAN, UPC and ASIN). It bugs me that these books which have these numbers that didn't come in for various reasons when they were cataloged can't have them added, and now the huge number of books without them is shown to me in a big graph along with stuff I /can/ fix. Holes in my catalog data bug me and this is one I can't fill. Obviously not all of my books have all of these numbers, but there are lots of books with LCCNs in particular that are missing them.

>247 knerd.knitter: Once you get into Charts and graphs under Social there is shared books. You can set it to friends, 1,000 books or All. I have added books since I first looked at it and the number of shared books did not increase and I know that some of my friends have this book. Just curious if it uses every book or a select number.

>251 dara85: You can set it to Top 250, Top 1,000 or All (nnnn). I agree that nnnn after All doesn't increase at once as one adds boks one's friends have, I just looked myself. I assume it doesn't update immediately. How long how you been waiting to see the figure increase?

I just stumbled across a chart that showed the distribution of my reading - fiction, biography, etc., and while I couldn’t find a way to view it in its entirety - many of the identifiers cropped off - I really enjoyed seeing my reading displayed this way. Thank you!

>253 AmourFou: Are you looking at your Genres graph here: https://www.librarything.com/stats/MEMBERNAME/genre? If so, you should be able to click on that graph to expand a pop-up with textual data below, so you can read the full text. I realize this may not be the way you'd like to see the full genres (within the graph itself), but I hope that helps.

>156 lorax: Just got back to it. 'Not hard' is true, inaccurate to the point of laughable is still how I see it.