bayang
Thoughts and feature ideas from a grateful Jelu user
Hello @bayang
First of all, I’d like to sincerely thank you for your amazing work on Jelu. It’s a real pleasure to use — elegant, efficient, and exactly the kind of tool I was hoping for to track and organize my reading. I truly appreciate the care and attention you’ve put into it!
I’d like to take the opportunity to suggest a few features that could make Jelu even more powerful and flexible. I hope these ideas might be useful:
🔹 Enhanced statistics It would be great to have more detailed stats — for example, by author, genre, tags, etc. — with visual elements like pie charts or graphs to help better visualize reading habits.
🔹 Additional book status options When adding a book, it would be nice to have a “loaned” and "lost" status, in addition to the existing “owned”, “to read”, and “borrowed” options. This would help track books we lend to others (a real pain in the a** IYKWIM...).
🔹 Cleaner summaries
Could summaries be displayed without HTML tags? (I’m not sure if this is related to my French edition of Jelu, but I systematically see tags like <p> in the description.)
🔹 Attach documents to a book For academic readers like myself, the ability to attach a PDF or Word document directly to a book entry would be incredibly useful.
🔹 Edition details in auto-fill It would be helpful to be able to specify the edition in the auto-fill section, and also to select a cover from a list of suggestions when auto-filling data.
🔹 Original publication vs. edition date In addition to the original publication date, could there be a field for the specific edition’s publication date? This would be useful for older works that have been reissued.
🔹 Page count and translators Currently, the number of pages and translator details don’t seem to fill automatically (this might be linked to my French version, idk?). It would be great if they could.
🔹 Automatic reading progress When a book is marked as read, could the progress percentage automatically be set to 100%?
🔹 Start date of reading It would be great to be able to modify the start reading date when adding a book, not just the finish date.
🔹 Custom metadata and quote providers The option to manually add providers for book metadata — and also for quotes — would be very welcome (for example, I’d love to get French-language quotes which can be found in specialized websites).
🔹 Recommendations section A section offering recommendations based on books already read would be a wonderful addition! But I also know it could be complicated to add such a feature.
🔹 Tag translation In the French version, the tag names aren’t translated. I personally have no issue helping with the adjustments if you can indicate how to proceed — I’d be glad to contribute.
Thanks again for your time and for considering these suggestions. Whatever your roadmap, I’m very grateful for Jelu and look forward to seeing how it evolves!
Best regards.
The borrowed status is supposed to be used for the books you have lent to others, but maybe the translation is wrong. For most of those use cases actually tags are the way to go, you can use tags to add genres but also to mark a book as lost, torn, in the living room etc.....
Summaries have html tags because we receive them that way. Those tags should be used inthe book detail page, the summary is displayed as html so you should not see them but maybe there is a bug.
Attach documents : I have already thought about this one, wondering if pdfs or epubs should be attached to their page. But in the end I decided to not add this as Jelu is only a book reading status tracker and only this.
The page count and translators come from the metadata provider so maybe the provider you used did not provide them.
Tags are suggested by providers but it is up to the users to add them in their preferred language in the end. It would not be possible to translate everything through crowdin because any user can add any tag at any time.
Recommandations are also a nice feature to have I agree, but it is quite complicated indeed.
Hello @bayang
About the “borrowed” status: It’s likely a translation error, indeed. Could you please explain how the Crowdin translation system works? I’d like to review the French translations and contribute if necessary.
Regarding tags: I hadn’t thought to use tags this way—I assumed they were for keyword descriptions of a book’s content. I would have preferred to adjust the book’s explicit "status" directly in the settings for more precision, but I get it.
Summary display issue: I’m attaching a screenshot to make this clearer. Based on your description, this does indeed seem like a bug. It could be every HTML tag, even if on the images it's just the
.
PDF attachments: Given Jelu’s focus on reading tracking, being able to attach PDFs/EPUBs would still be highly valuable. It would allow users to keep all relevant materials linked directly to each book—supporting deeper engagement and study—without cluttering the interface. Would it be complicated to implement? Maybe I could help (it would be incredible for me, really)?
Metadata providers: I undeserstand, scrapping isn't a viable way to deal with providers. Idk exactly what providers are used in Jelu but in case, here is a list of French / international metadata sources with documented APIs that could be easily integrated to Jelu:
- Google Books API;
- Open Library API;
- WorldCat Metadata API;
- ISBNdb.com API;
- OverDrive Metadata API;
- Thoth (for open‑access academic metadata)
These could enrich the data quality, especially in French or multilingual contexts. Again, I would be happy to test these integrations once available, provide sample ISBNs or metadata for testing, help shape user documentation or test cases, assist with translation improvements via Crowdin.
Thank you again for your responsiveness and dedication to Jelu. I truly appreciate your openness and look forward to future enhancements!
Best regards
The html tags are in the raw summary but are actually rendered as html in the book detail page, this is normal.
For translations you just have to create an account on crowdin and then you can contribute : https://crowdin.com/project/jelu
I can see the translation for borrowed is misleading, in one spot we have :
"borrowed": "Le livre est prêté"
which is the correct transaltion, and in another spot it was translated as "emprunté" whereas "prêté" would be better.
For metadata providers there is the possibility to use inventaire.io, have you tried it ? I find it quite nice, it is even possiblke to specify the locale you want to use , see : https://bayang.github.io/jelu-web/configuration/ (Adding other metadata providers)
A comment to this
🔹 Tag translation In the French version, the tag names aren’t translated. I personally have no issue helping with the adjustments if you can indicate how to proceed — I’d be glad to contribute.
How are the tags translated? It seems that they are only avalable in english and I didn't find any expression in Crowdin
In my german version it looks like this:
A comment to this
🔹 Tag translation In the French version, the tag names aren’t translated. I personally have no issue helping with the adjustments if you can indicate how to proceed — I’d be glad to contribute.
How are the tags translated? It seems that they are only avalable in english and I didn't find any expression in Crowdin
In my german version it looks like this:
Tags are user supplied, it would be impossible to translate everything. When you use auto metadata import some suggestions are provided by the metadata provider you used, but in the end, the tags you enter are yours to choose.
PDF attachments: Given Jelu’s focus on reading tracking, being able to attach PDFs/EPUBs would still be highly valuable
I second this as once I add the book I can attach ebok file so once I want to read the book I can simply take the ebok file and send it to my ebok reader.
