I'm not exactly an insider, so I'm not aware of the conversation going on in the more restricted forums, but I see the manifold benefits of your approach. Some suggestions, that are not even half-thought yet, and I really think you should wait for discussion/feedback from more experienced people, and I also think some of the stuff I propose would be impossible to parse out of the current informaton:
1. Browse by author is great. Equally great would be if among the writers there were translators for instance like this;
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Conrad, Joseph
Conscience, Hendrik
Constantin, Ernst
Constance, Garnett (as translator)
Conway, Agnes Ethel Conway and Sir Martin
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2.1 I personally would like to see the author also on the browse by Book title page - for two reasons. Sometimes I do not know who the writer is, but would like to know while browsing and at some point there might be indentical titles; so something like
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A Master of Mysteries by The Unknown
A Match by Another Unknown
A Midsummer Night's Dream by Will Shakespeare
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2.2 The Browse by book title-page would be perfect for additional filters. I would like to see something like genre-selection, dramatic/narrative readings, solo/group, language choices to filter this very page.
If it would be possible to flip the page to show all book titles arranged also by author and not just by book title, I could then also filter those results - the benefit being that I could very easily spot all the Jack London books available in German. To clarify, I mean a list like this:
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Aurelius, Marcus
Meditations
Austen, Jane
Emma
Emma
Lady Susan
Lady Susan
Love and Freindship
Mansfield Park
Northanger Abbey
Northanger Abbey
Persuasion
Persuasion
Persuasion
Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice (Group Project)
Pride and Prejudice (Solo Project)
Sense and Sensibility
Sense and Sensibility
Sense and Sensibility - (Version 02)
The Watsons
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Which I then could filter with solo/group, language, genre, or with any other information we come up with and care to put in the database.
3. The page of an individual author just cries for a picture of the guy + some additional info. I am also a bit torn about the current way of presenting the results once I search Edgar Allan Poe, for instance. What we now get is a huge list of individual poems from collections (which I am glad we have, of course, and in multiple versions at that), and then among them couple of collections and longer works.
This obviously needs to be restructured; collections and large works first in chronological order (a choice between that and alphabetical would be great) and then other types clearly structured - as in poems, short non-fiction etc.
I'm sorry if I am reiterating trivialities.