Oku Product Updates 09: Data Edition!

Summer’s here in the northern hemisphere and people have been getting in their beach reading! While we’ve made some time to enjoy the sun, for the most part we’ve been keeping cool in the shade heads down on some fundamentals.

Product wise we’ve been been all about improving our book data, search, infrastructure and Goodreads importer.

A lot has been worked on, some of it obvious and some of it behind the scenes, but with our recent changes we’ve set the foundations of a system that ensures our book data should get better as time goes on.

Outside of app changes been having some productive chats about strategy which has us more excited about the direction of Oku than ever. We can’t wait to show you, but that’s for another time.

Enough chatter, let’s take a look through some recent highlights.

Add Missing Books or Suggest an Edit

Like I said, book data is a fundamental issue for us. With the number of books & editions out there and more being released all the time it’s not really possible to keep on top of everything when there’s no single data source. The only truly viable way to solve it is to let our members add missing data and improve it where it’s weak.

Lots of you have asked for this and it had been bugging us too so we’re glad to finally have it out. Big thanks to those who has contributed already - everybody on Oku benefits from that. We’re thinking up some ways to recognise this more officially. ❤️

Filter book searches by author

Some new author filters will appear when you’re searching for a book that help you find what you’re looking for by refining the results.

Search result accuracy

Quite a bit of groundwork had to be done in order to make any headway on more accurate search results and we’re happy to have seen some small improvements from that earlier work.

More searches are resulting in people finding the results they want, and those that can’t will now have the option of adding any book that is missing.

That said, results accuracy is still below our standards and this is very much an ongoing project, so we’re expecting results to get better as we improve the code & expand our database.

Book page refresh

The book page was tweaked a little to make ratings clearer, create some room for future plans and generally bring things in line with the rest of Oku.

Goodreads importer now on iOS

Our first iOS update brings support for the Goodreads importer to the app itself. This eliminates a long-standing issue for iOS devices with the Goodreads app installed, which is no longer able to hijack the connection process.

Grab the app on the App Store

Imports have been powered up

Lots has been improved to make the Goodreads importer more reliable, including:

• a more robust connection process which now works on iOS devices

• support for 99% of previously missing books

• ability to disconnect & reconnect your Goodreads account to do a full re-sync, importing any books which were missed the first time around

As before you can sync changes any time from your account settings page.

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If you read this far, well done. Look our for our next edition & remember you can catch us on Twitter too where we post more regular updates.