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."
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
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.
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."
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!!!
.
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."
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
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!
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
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!