Introduction
Hello everyone! I know I’m not very active on this forum, but I’ve got an interesting idea to share. Before this I just want to say that I love that there were updates for Plex Music, some of which were showed in this forum post of mine.
Plex Music isn’t perfect yet, so I really hope more updates will be there in the future. If you need people to test something about Plex Music feel free to DM me. I’m also able to ask the DutchHipHop Discord for help, since I know some people there also use Plex and run against the same things I mentioned.
But without further ado…
Plex Books
I like using Plex to have my audio and video on one place, since there is no one place which hosts all the things I like. Some things are medium-exclusive, like cd’s or dvd’s for example, some things are promotional media and other things are just online only. This combined with the fact that I also make my own stuff makes Plex ideal for having everything together. Plex supports audio, video, images. Makes sense, right?
So why not books?
Reading material comes in different sizes on different platforms too. Think about books, magazines, comics, pdf-files, gaming-manuals, guides, flyers, and so on. These can come from scans, archives, ebooks, and your own stuff from Word for example.
In the hobbies I like there’s a lot of material, but this might be ideal for school and studies too. Think about ebooks, summaries, readers, maybe even PowerPoints and handouts. Also reading your library while you’re on the go, plex is ideal for that too, that way you don’t have to carry everything with you.
Examples
I made some examples in photoshop. The first one is an example for a magazine. As you can see the Plex-layout is perfect for this one. For the ‘seasons’ I grouped them together per year, with the first cover for thumbnail. Once you click on a season/year you go to a sub-menu with all the issues from that year.
This second example is for a comic series. This series has 7 comics, so a sub-menu for a year isn’t necessary. For the title of the individual comics I used the issue number (issue 01, issue 02, issue 03, special 01, exclusive). For the subtitle I used the release date (or the month and the year only, when the day wasn’t available). If the actual release has a name that could be displayed on the page for that specific comic.
I also think that it would be a good idea to include the following information on the first page:
- Publisher
- Country and/or Language
The last example is for the menu with all the releases. I made it so that below the poster it shows the amount of releases (9 comics, 285 magazines, 1 book). I’m not sure if it would be better to group everything together, or to keep single releases (like books, solo pdf’s) and releases with multiple issues (like comics, magazines) separated . Mainly because the solo-releases don’t need an extra sub-menu and I immediately think of the difference Plex has between shows and movies.
Outro
I also posted this on Reddit (Reddit-post), because I feel like there are more people over there, then on this forum. That way you’ve got more feedback!
Edit 1: Speaking of which I also found this post from januari 2013 from u/evora for the ‘PlexReader’ which has 2,5k upvotes, so there is cleary a want for this. Also within two seconds of posting this on r/Plex there is already someone who thinks this would be awesome (comment link).
Thanks for reading!
Hope you like this idea!
Sincerely,
Cinnamon
