Reading List Enhancements

[falo2k]

Idea Description

As discussed on the reading list discord, a brainstorm of enhancements people would like to see to reading list functionality.

1. Edit toggle for lists rather than constantly active drag handles. When I use a touch screen stuff just slides around too easy.
2. Enhancement to the layout to make lists more navigable. At the moment you can see ~12 characters of the reading list name, which is often not enough, especially if you have to use the list names for organisation, ordering, etc. so you're using characters for distinction, dates, and the like. A few ideas:

• Make the name dynamic so it scrolls on hover
• Make the reading list page a list view rather than tiles, so that you can have longer names. Arguably, the merged cover is a nice idea, but doesn't help me with distinguishing lists as much as the name does
• Allow the ability to sort by (and auto-generate from first issue) the start date of the list
• An ability to group lists /put lists in folders for organisation (with some nesting possible).

3. The Issue #xx is above the series title which would be better if it was Series (Year) Issue #xx in one line
4. Dynamic boxes (whatever that is called) where the issue info is in so that they scale with more info right now they are cut off at the bottom
5. When adding issues with missing items (or potentially if Kavita has mis-mapped an item), it would be nice at creation time to be able to search for and select the correct / an alternative issue rather than having to go through multiple steps later to add issues, then move them to the right place. This could be for fixing mappings with bad metadata, replacing issues with TPBs, or swapping in a special edition for an original print. In the case where a user might want to substitute TPBs (in the list) for component issues, they may need the ability to add entries on the fly at this point.
6. So the one above might be tricky if you let an issue span issues I don't know just saying if letting a TPB be selected for multiple issues is tricky don't spend too much time on it
7. What is promoting? Is it really just upwards chevrons next to a name?
8. In case it doesn't (because it doesn't work for me) I would love for Panels to support importing a reading list to the app with the manual order along with it. I've seen this claimed to work but it just does not
9. Consistency between the sort order when editing the list and the order mentioned for missing issues. When adding a list, missing issue is 1 indexed, but then you come to manually correct a list and it's 0 indexed.
10. Some sort of feedback / tracking at the server level when books are removed from the server that were part of a reading list. This can happen with upstream metadata changes because ComicVine be ComicVine, so a series name changes and those books end up getting re-created with no memory of their old home in a list. If the list could remember the CV ID data it could also potentially offer an ability to rebuild this?
11. An optional setting / hierarchy for OPDS to only feed unread issues into lists. The Panels guys don't want to offer any ability to jump to most recent unread in views over OPDS, but with long reading lists this can be a navigation pain. Suppressing the already read titles server side would help this user experience.
12. Support for alt name series matching if available in tags for a series (e.g. the wonderful https://comicvine.gamespot.com/52ww-iii/4050-18485/ that used to just be World War III).
13. If a direct match for a series not found, try dropping any leading "The" from series names when trying to match. One of the more common "slaves to the indicia" changes I've seen with older volumes on comicvine causing list matching problems.
14. If possible, an option to do ONLY id matching (or prioritise ID matching if it's multi-step). That would remove the name change problem altogether (though still risks of CV reusing IDs, but there's only so much you can defend against).
15. For list updating, let us have the option to over-write lists (after warning us that the name already exists). At the moment, if I want to update a list because it's been refreshed at source or I have more books, I have to go through multiple steps to find, delete, then import.
16. Retain placeholders for items that are not mapped at creation time. Have a management screen that can flag if issues have been added to the library that now match the list so you can fill out the list after creation.
17. Have an option to feed over OPDS a back-to-back single issue representation of a reading list so you don't ever have to break your flow by finishing an issue, going back to the list, and selecting the next book. Appreciate this may introduce complexities as lists potentially change over time, but if I could get it to take me to the point in this virtual comic that represents the furthest read issue in the current state of the book that would be pretty cool.

Idea Category

Feature Enhancement

Duration of Using Kavita

1 year ish

Before submitting

• I've already searched for existing ideas before posting.

[majora2007]

As discussed in said discord, I'm very open to doing another pass on the reading list items. Let me just give some off the top of my head thoughts on this.

Edit toggle for lists rather than constantly active drag handles. When I use a touch screen stuff just slides around too easy.

Seems like a no-brainer, don't know why I didn't think of this when I built it.

Allow the ability to sort by (and auto-generate from first issue) the start date of the list

I'm not against this, but would like to gather more potential sorting fields/derived data before I think about doing something like this.

What is promoting? Is it really just upwards chevrons next to a name?

This is shocking to hear. Promoting is the ability to make something PUBLIC rather than just for yourself. You can assign users with just this role as well.

An optional setting / hierarchy for OPDS to only feed unread issues into lists. The Panels guys don't want to offer any ability to jump to most recent unread in views over OPDS, but with long reading lists this can be a navigation pain. Suppressing the already read titles server side would help this user experience.

I like this idea, we can probably keep it simple and add it in a Reading List (no-unread) route from the OPDS home feed. Using a config in Kavita would be quite weird and lead to a lot of potential strange management.

Consistency between the sort order when editing the list and the order mentioned for missing issues. When adding a list, missing issue is 1 indexed, but then you come to manually correct a list and it's 0 indexed.

I need more clarity on this.

For list updating, let us have the option to over-write lists (after warning us that the name already exists).

I originally wanted to do something more expansive with the CBL v2 implementation, but since it keeps getting the back burner, this might be a good hold over.

I'd like the community to rally together and add as much color to reading lists so I can really tackle it well and leave you with a good experience until we loop back again.

[falo2k]

The sort order vs missing issue thing:
If I add a list that is missing issues, Kavita tells me "Hey, you're missing Batman 16 at position 4 in the list" (the fourth book). As the only way for me to correct this is to add the issue to the list, then go in and manually re-order, it is helpful to use the "Order Numbers" toggle in the reading list settings. As it indexes from 0, it actually needs to go in the 3 position, not the 4 position.

4 is an easy example, but what if I'm trying to find the 57th position? Pain.

[suineg]

Neat on the promotion, as someone riding solo I never looked into it!!

[rmleonard]

When loading a cbl, if kavita detects that a book/issue exists in multiple libraries, instead of causing an error, how about allowing user to choose which library to use?

[heyhippari]

Additionally, Kavita sometimes doesn't find the series/issue referenced in a CBL. It'd be great to have a way to manually match issues, chapters or whatever to a CBL entry, in such cases.

[bhcompy]

Sort by release date would be amazing for cross-series lists (like Dragonlance for EPUB), and really helpful for series that have a hell of a lot of specials (Hellboy et al)

[Cducharme84]

#2962 is still my dream list if we’re talking BIG CBL changes

[falo2k]

One I ran into today - could we get a cover toggle / view without covers? For particularly long lists I've found it can chug while it loads thumbnails for covers as you get further down a list, and if I want to edit the list this can be painful. I don't need to see covers if I'm editing the list, so a cleaner list view option would be good.
Extending from this, pagination for long lists would also be a helpful option.

[Vermoot]

Hi!
Just wanted to add my support and a bit of input to this.

Coming from Komga, one of the biggest things missing from CBL import for me is the ability to "fine tune" the import before confirming it.
Since I don't expect everyone to know how it works on Komga, here's a screenshot to illustrate what I'll be saying:

After importing a CBL file, it tries to match every book in the reading list to what's in the user's library, and shows how it did. Obviously here the red dotted spots is issues I'm missing.
Now, on both the missing issues and the ones that did find a match, you can click on the series or the issue and change it to anything you have in your library.

That would be especially useful to me in cases where I manually edited some metadata in issues to keep my library tidier, e.g. annual issues that have their own series on ComicVine, but I bundled them all together in a "Amazing Spider-Man Annual" series (for example) with all of them regardless of what they are tagged as on ComicVine.

In cases where you have a series that doesn't have the right name, too, you can end up with every issue of a series not finding a match. It would be nice in this case to be able to choose a (library) series and every issue of the same (CBL) series would be set to the same one (maybe with a prompt asking if you want to change all of them or just the one).

I feel like I've been rambling a bit, but TL;DR -> The mentioned enhancements to reading lists in Kavita would be great and I especially support #5, the ability to review and edit an import before submitting it.

[Vermoot]

Here's an additional feature idea:
When importing a CBL, it would be nice to be able to get a list of series included in the reading list, and check them on or off to only keep the ones you want.
For example, I like the CMRO way of ordering issues (not chronologically, but release order with adjustments to bunch up issues by story arc), so if I want a Spider-Man reading list in this order, I could import the whole CMRO reading list (which includes almost every Marvel Comics series), and only keep the Spider-Man ones.

[jncmney]

I’d love a way to export a cbl from a manually created Reading List in Kavita. I’ve done several and have been asked to share them.

Also, today I created a reading list manually. It’s a very simple one that consists of 7 volumes that are in order, so pretty straightforward to add the first one, then the next one, and so forth. The problem is I didn’t notice 3 issues hadn’t imported properly from one on the volumes in the middle. Once I imported them, there’s no way to add them automatically to the reading list, so I had to delete and recreate. It would be great if Kavita could keep track of the reading list, including missing issues, and drop them in the right places when they appear in the library.

[Vermoot]

Another thing I'd like to be able to do is adding multiple series to a reading list, and then reordering every issue by release date after the fact.
Right now, without a pre-existing CBL or manually reordering every single issue, there's no way to do that.

[dgparryuk]

This is the one thing i REALLY want

Reading list -> sort by release date

[LegendaryLass]

Comicrack allows sorting on metadata, but also with a "position" option to maintain the manual order. So you can sort by Release Date, for instance, and lock out the reordering options; but then when you sort by Position it reverts it back to the manual order and allows reordering. This could allow Kavita to do both.

[LegendaryLass]

hi I have some low- to mid-intensity QoL suggestions/requests here. These are in order of my personal priority preference:

1. When importing CBLs, add an option to overwrite existing lists with the same name
2. When importing CBLs, add an option to set some of the metadata for reading lists. Primarily I would like to batch import CBLs and set all of them to promote as they're created/overwritten (should suggestion 1 be implemented), but it would also be nice to, say, auto analyze the matched chapters and set the list's date ranges etc
3. Batch selecting on the Reading Lists page works fine, but can we get a "select all"?
4. Since you are implementing dropping leading articles ("The ", "A ", "An " for instance) from sort title, can we get a similar sort title field for reading lists and perform that same adjustment on the title of the CBL during import and stash it there? and then some sorting options on the reading list page using the various metadata?
5. eventually trackling reading lists as "in progress/completed/not started" and optionally featuring in-progress lists in the on-deck would be nice too. I suppose that's a general "consider stepping reading lists towards operating like series entities" territory so I get it if that's maybe too much but I do think it's worth considering if way down the line

[Iraito]

An ability to group lists /put lists in folders for organization (with some nesting possible).

This so hard, with the ability to add icons too, for comics this is a life saver.

It would be pretty nice to have reading lists for comics and manga with an icon, you enter and find icons for batman, spider-man etc. but only if you enter the comics folder, if you enter the manga one you can find only manga etc.
I think we needs granular control over this.

[falo2k]

Closing this thread in prep for writing up individual issues.