Dashboard Overview #
All management of your reading library is done from the dashboard. There are five key areas on the dashboard:
Reading Summary #
The Reading Summary displays statistics about your reading progress throughout the year, including the total number of books in your library, how many you are currently reading, how many you want to read, and how many you’ve finished reading. You will also see a tally of how many books you’ve completed in the current month and the current calendar year. A visual progress bar displays your overall status of books read against the number of books in the library.
Highlights #
Keep track of favorite passages and quotes from your readings. Add ratings and personal notes.
Authors #
Maintain an index of authors for the books in your library. By default, the minimal view is selected, but you may choose between various views to show reading status by author or only favorite authors. Opening an author page will give an expansive view of all books written by the author, with views for “Unread” and “Read”.
Genres #
Maintain an index of genres for the books in your library. By default, the reading status by genre view is selected, but you may choose between various views to display genres. Opening a genre page will give an expansive view of all books within the genre, with views for “Unread” and “Read”.
Bookshelf #
The bookshelf holds all of your books. This includes books you have read, are currently reading, or want to read. By default, the Recently Added view is selected, but you may choose other views to see books you’ve finished reading, are currently reading, books that are audio only, a status board for a visual overview of reading statuses, and a handy view for quickly adding book covers.
Getting Started #
Adjusting Layout & Aesthetics #
Depending on the size of your screen, you may wish to adjust the widths of columns and/or the size of the book covers to match your viewing preference. The default book cover size is medium. To make smaller or larger:
- From the dashboard, navigate to the “Bookshelf” area
- Click the ellipsis (three dots) next to the blue “New” button
- Select “Layout”
- In the “Card Size” option, select the desired card size (small, medium, large)
- Optional – turn off the “Fit image” toggle to stretch the cover image to fill the frame
Adding a New Author #
Once you’ve defined the default templates, you may begin adding authors.
- From the dashboard, navigate to the “Authors” area
- Click the blue “New” button. A new author will generate from the template and populate the page
- Change “New Author” to the name of the author
- Optionally – click the “Favorite” checkbox to add the author to your favorites list
Adding a New Genre #
A default list of genres has already been populated for you, however, you may wish to add new genres to the list:
- From the dashboard, navigate to the “Genres” area
- Click the blue “New” button. A new genre will generate from the template and populate the page
- Change “New Genre” to the name of the genre
- Optionally – click the “Favorite” checkbox to add the genre to your favorites list
Adding a New Book #
- From the dashboard, navigate to the “Bookshelf” area
- Click the blue “New” button. A new book will generate from the template and populate the page
- Change “New Book” to the name of the book
- In the “Author” property, search for and select the author of the book
- In the “Genre” property, search for and select the genre(s) for the book
- If the book is part of a series, enter the name of the series in the “Series” property and the book number in the “Book #” property
- Manually upload a book cover or enter the URL for a book cover on the web
- Enter any additional metadata that you have for the book, as much or as little as you would like
Adding Book Covers Dynamically #
To quickly add book covers for large groups of books, you may use this little hack that sources the covers for you from openlibrary.org, as long as you have populated the ISBN for the book.
- From the dashboard, navigate to the “Bookshelf” area
- Select the view for “Add Covers”. By default, this view will show only books in your library that do not have covers
- Populate any missing ISBN-10 numbers in the ISBN column. You will see the “Cover Formula” column populate with URLs
- Drag down the “Cover Formula” column to highlight the URLs for the selected books
- Click the “Copy to clipboard” icon in the corner of a highlighted cell
- Drag down the “Cover” column to select the same rows
- Click “CMD + V” on Mac or “CTRL + V” on Windows to paste the cover image URLs into this column
If there is a match on the ISBN number, the cover images will generate. Note, there may be some that do not generate. If this is the case, these covers will need to be added manually.
Importing Reading Highlights #
There are many options for automating the import of your notes and highlights from your e-reader, including both paid or free services that parse and render the text from a file. Because of the wide array of options, this system doesn’t favor any specific method. Try searching the web for “my clippings parser” to see a number of various solutions.
Updating Reading Status #
When you begin or finish reading a book, update the status so that it will be reflected in your reading summary.
- Open the book
- In the “Status” property, select the current reading status
- In the “Date Started” property, enter the date you started reading the book, if applicable
- In the “Date Completed” property, enter the date you finished reading the book, if applicable