Reading Percentage Circle
Hi,
Is it possible to turn off, or at least hide, the reading percentage circle? This seems to me to be a gimmick. Logos may be able to record how often and how long I have had a resource open. It cannot possibly know if I have read a single word. Many books are surely for reference, not for reading through.
John
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I can't find it to discover if I can turn it off although I know I occasionally see a percentage read somewhere...[:$]
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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Hi,
It is new in the 6.0b release.
It is an optional column in the library, and appears when books in a collection or on the shortcut bar are moused over - but only if that book has been opened.
John
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John Houseago said:
Is it possible to turn off, or at least hide, the reading percentage circle?
John Houseago said:It is an optional column in the library, and appears when books in a collection or on the shortcut bar are moused over - but only if that book has been opened.
As you've discovered, you can turn off the column in the library. But there is no way to turn it off or hide it in the popup that comes up when you hover over books in collections (it's odd that this popup only comes up there, but not in the library under similar circumstances) or on the shortcut bar. I agree it's probably irrelevant or inaccurate most of the time, but I did at least ascertain that Logos doesn't think I've read an entire book simply after I've paged through the whole thing quickly to skim it and see what it's about so I can tag it appropriately. They must have some algorithm for how long you have a page open before paging to the next page in order to consider that you've "read" that page. Regardless, I'm not likely to find that measure of any interest to me. I do sometimes like Kindle's offer to sync me to the last page read when I open a book on a different device than the one I was last reading it on, but then again in Kindle my opening of books is 95% for the purpose of reading them, where in Logos that percentage is more like 5%.
I think the reading percentage circle is non-intrusive enough that you can ignore it. I hadn't even noticed it in the hover popups until you mentioned them. I hardly ever go around hovering over books on my shortcut bar or in my collections tool anyway.
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Found it! It also appears on the new tab created by clicking on the + tab. Can't say I find it very intrusive so I see no particular reason to be able to disable something I have trouble finding in the first place. I can see some circumstances it might be useful in telling me whether I've merely opened or at least skimmed sufficient material to have formed an informed rating for a resource.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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Thanks, Rosie. You are right to say that it is non-intrusive It does not, however, offer any meaningful information and therefore I ought to be able to turn it off!!!
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Logic alert! The information is meaningful ... just not useful to you. While your reason for wanting to turn it off, the logic obviously extends to many features ... which being dependent upon the user. The additional opportunity for instability/bugs/ code complexity justifies the lack of ability to hide feature that annoy particular individuals.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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Interesting, but I must disagree.
Since Logos does not know what I have read, as opposed to what I have opened, the name 'read percentage circle' is misleading. Whatever else it is measuring Logos is not measuring my reading. Since Logos has not said what is being measured I maintain that the figure is meaningless. What is it a percentage of?
I fully accept that no set up will please every users, and will not have much difficulty ignoring this feature.
John
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John Houseago said:
What is it a percentage of?
It's a percentage of the portions of the book that have you have opened in a Logos app. Logos divides each book into 1 million 'sections' (so it can keep track of the reading percentage to 4 decimal places). Each time you have the resource open on your screen, Logos records the 'section' number where you started reading, and the 'section' number where you finished. There's obviously some guesswork on its part as to whether you actually read it, or just happened to blindly open it without reading it.
It's actually fairly sophisticated (i.e. it doesn't just assume that if you jump to chapter 7, you've already read chapters 1-6, as Kindle does). Whether it's useful or not is, of course, entirely dependent on whether you have a use for that data.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Thank you, Mark, for this informative response.
I have followed the practice, learnt I think from your excellent videos, of having a standard layout for sermon preparation. I automatically open a number of resources, though I may not consult many of them for a particular sermon. Do these count as being read each time?
John
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John Houseago said:
I have followed the practice, learnt I think from your excellent videos, of having a standard layout for sermon preparation. I automatically open a number of resources, though I may not consult many of them for a particular sermon. Do these count as being read each time?
I've only studied how the data is stored, not exactly how it is created. Judging by my own data, it seems likely that opening a book causes the visible portion to be marked as 'read'. But I'm not able to tell whether Logos counts resources that are open in the background, and move by 'following' a Bible.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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<rant>
I have to say, does it cause anyone else to wonder how "features" like this get implemented in Logos, yet for years we jump through hoops to simply delete personal books from our libraries, or we struggle with managing the thousands collections and tags in a microscopically small "Show Collections" window in the Cited By Tool, where we are expected to select and move collections/tags into a desired order?
There are other small annoyances like this that are the bane of users' usage of Logos I am sure, and this doesn't even include adding features that people beg for like images in Notes, fuzzy search, and many more. Logos does a great job of listening and guiding on big features, but seems content to ignore and/or not even comment on little usability things. I have long dreamed of a major release that just did an excellent job of improving usabiity, with non new features. Clean it up!!!
Logos is a great product - but I often wonder how much it is seriously used by those who make decisions on priorities at Logos. And then reading about features like this percentage read, that no one seems to have asked for and few if any seem to want or need, is exasperating.
</rant>
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Mark Barnes said:
I've only studied how the data is stored, not exactly how it is created.
This IS the problem.
I have resources that were actually totally read, yet the circle either doesn't even appear or is only "light grey" in colour.
There is still something incorrect in the "creation" or manipulation of Logos' data.
As presently constituted this reading circle is a hit-and-miss, occasionally, accurate indicator.
Regards, SteveF
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What this feature needs is an option to manually mark a book as "finished".
At the moment, after nearly 15 of years of using Logos, I only have two resources marked as finished (two very brief documents: Search BDAG Help and a personal book of a Chronological Bible Reading Plan).
What have I done with that 15 years?
There are some books that I read before Logos started counting which bits I had read (or even read in dead-tree format), so they are marked as "unread". There are also many that I have read substantially but failed to read every word of the indexes, so they are still marked as "reading".
It just needs a "mark as finished" option on the resource information panel. This would move the resource into the "finished" category and override the blue circle with perhaps a solid blue circle or a tick/check. It would probably be sensible for this option not to actually affect the percentage read calculation but only to override its display.
At the moment it is a bit of a muddle and not much use to me, but this one simple addition would make it useful.
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Three points:
- The data is only for the period of time after the you began running a version of Logos in which the feature was implemented. It does not attempt to show the last 10-15 years.
- It is absolutely true that a finished function is the most useful aspect of this sort of feature and is needed. It would be nice to be able to reset back to zero for rereading as well.
- I suspect this is a "keeping up with the Jones" type feature i.e. something that is so common in reading apps that Faithlife felt it necessary to include
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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Jonathan Pitts said:
What this feature needs is an option to manually mark a book as "finished".
Jonathan Pitts said:It just needs a "mark as finished" option on the resource information panel. This would move the resource into the "finished" category and override the blue circle with perhaps a solid blue circle or a tick/check. It would probably be sensible for this option not to actually affect the percentage read calculation but only to override its display.
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