Bookpedia: need a more flexible "Times Read"

[vanderdecker]

I've been slowly going over a BIG collection of books I've added. But I'm a bit confounded by the Mark As... function.

There are books I'd read some years ago, but the closest I can Mark them is "Read Last Month." Surely there can be a more flexible implementation than this?

Version: 4.6.8, if that's an issue.

[Nora]

The "Mark as" feature just provides a quick shortcut for some of the more common options. If you want to be more specific for an entry use the menu View > Last Read History and enter your reading dates into the window that appears.

[vanderdecker]

What if I don't have a date? I'd have to put in some random, bogus entry, and that's tedious to do when the date has no meaning. Being able to simply put a Yes/No, or a number for times read, would be more flexible. I would normally use Last Read for something I'd read very recently, where I have an idea of when. There are hundreds of books that I'd like to simply click a "+1" or the equivalent.

[Nora]

You're right, if you have entries with a specific 'date read' and entries without then a fake date might be confusing. You could use one of the custom checkboxes as 'Read' but then it won't increase your read count automatically since the field isn't linked to the Last Read feature.

The advantage of the custom checkbox though is that you could then create a smart collection based on that (for example "Custom Checkbox 1 is not checked" and "Last read is not [blank]") to get all those entries that haven't been marked yet and then check them all in one swoop with the multiple edit window as checked.

[vanderdecker]

Are checkboxes only in 5.x?

[sjk]

Are checkboxes only in 5.x?

Yup. From Bookpedia - What's new? [Version: 5.0 (08/11/11)]:

• Added 8 new custom fields: two date fields, two checkboxes, two tag fields (aka multi-value, blue bubble fields) and two regular text fields.

If that's not enough to justify upgrading, you might want to skim through other 5.x changes there to see they pique your interest.

[vanderdecker]

I'd posted about this on another thread. The thing that would get me to update without question is more-robust ebook handling.