I don't spend my life in Jayose's library. However, once in a while, I would go there and spend a couple of hours reading, looking for new books, sometimes refreshing my memory with older ones.
It would be nice if there was a way to quickly spot a book that one has already read. Maybe a (read) or (unread) mark after the title, or just a different colour for the title font, anything as see fit. A "read" flag would be set as soon as the book is open, to keep it simple, and of course it is the player's responsibility to read the content. Ok, so far, you can tell me that it's up to me to remember if I read something or not; even when hundreds of volumes will be available; yes, but...
It gets useful when a book is updated. If I do remember that I read a specific book, well, I'll probably won't read it again. Meanwhile, words may have been changed inside, following the inconsistencies hunt, world development, whatever... So, if all statuses are set back to "unread" for all players after a change (or from "read" to "updated" if you want to be more precise), we'll know that we'd better read it again.
It can be a bit heavy on the database (flagging each book for each player), but at least it's technically simple. Not to mention other uses you could come up with (quest requisites, statistics for the setting team, etc.)
Hem... I hesitated adding the following in the same post, but here it goes: It would also be nice if Jayose advertised his books a bit. If only to mention the latest additions to his shelves. I may be a rare case, but I don't read the automatic NPCs' messages anymore; I tend to overlook them as some sort of repetitive "pollution" in the chat box. That would be one way to renew our attention. Or we could ask him about his latest entries (at the time I'm writing, I realise I haven't even tried to ask this, so forgive me if it's there already; now I know I should have kept that in a separate post
).
