Book-unavailable banner: dismissal doesn't persist, and wording misleads for non-lendable books

[lokesh]

Problem

The "This book is currently unavailable on Open Library…" banner on book pages has two issues:

1. Dismissal doesn't persist — clicking the X removes the banner, but it reappears on every page load. The <ol-banner> has dismissible but no dismiss-id, so the site-level persistence layer (cookie via /hide_banner) never kicks in.
2. Misleading wording — the same "currently unavailable" copy is shown for all four lending states (preview_only, checkedout, waitlist, locate). For preview_only/locate the book will never be borrowable on Open Library, so "currently" wrongly implies it may become available soon.

Reproducing the bug

1. Go to a book page for a non-lendable book, e.g. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL13424114M (Coming up for air)
2. Dismiss the banner via the X, then reload the page

• Expected behavior: dismissal persists (at least for a while); wording reflects whether unavailability is temporary
• Actual behavior: banner returns on every load; "currently unavailable" shown even for permanently non-lendable books

Context

• Browser (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc): all
• OS (Windows, Mac, etc): all
• Logged in (Y/N): Y/N
• Environment (prod, dev, local): prod

Breakdown

Implementation Details (for maintainers)

• Persistence: add a dismiss-id (e.g. per-edition, short TTL via data-cookie-duration-days) and guard rendering on the cookie in the template. Since the banner reflects live lending state, a short TTL or session-scoped dismissal is probably right — not a permanent one.
• Wording: branch the copy on lending_state — e.g. "This book isn't available to borrow on Open Library…" for preview_only/locate, keep "currently unavailable" for checkedout/waitlist.

Requirements Checklist

• Banner dismissal persists across reloads for a reasonable period
• Copy distinguishes temporarily vs. permanently unavailable books

Related files

• openlibrary/macros/EditionNavBar.html (banner markup + lending states)
• openlibrary/components/lit/OlBanner.js (component; owns no persistence)
• openlibrary/plugins/openlibrary/js/banner/index.js (dismiss-id → cookie glue)

Stakeholders

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[hornc]

Also, on that example . https://openlibrary.org/books/OL13424114M the banner serves literally no purpose: it links to a section lower down on the page that doesn't exist . I have encountered this frequently on other records, it renders the banner a pointless distraction.

Offering "calls-to-action" for their own sake isn't much good if they lead to immediate disappointment.

[tfmorris]

I find this new banner SOOO odd and would love to see it disappear entirely. Why on earth would you advertise your failures at the very top of the overwhelming majority of pages on your site? Not available, not available, not available,... Ok already, I get it!

Until @hornc 's comment, I entirely missed that the message included a CTA, because it leads with "unavailable." If it said something like, "Similar books you might be interested in," I would have discovered that the recommendation engine is abysmal, so definitely not something you want to be highlighting. For Advances_in_Heterocyclic_Chemistry, it includes books from entirely different fields of science, works of fiction, etc - nothing even remotely close.

What's worse than a dead end? Leading the user blindly off a cliff.

[mekarpeles]

Thank you @hornc + @tfmorris

The way we're set up currently (related books load asynchronously) we don't know in advance if there will be alternative books to recommend. The things we can act on

1. make the link a button / call to action
2. make banner hiding/dismissal persistent (local storage?) per book page

@tfmorris, I believe what you're experiencing is a very real frustration hundreds of thousands of patrons are actively experiencing and were getting confused by.

It is very frustrating that so many books are unavailable and we were previously receiving many emails from patrons who did not understand what it could even mean for a book to be unavailable (isn't Open Library a library? why would a page exist if it's not readable). Calling it out may highlight a shortcoming, but it attempts to at least turn some of these bad/broken experiences into a second chance. There are second chances that we should now work towards improving as opposed to rolling back and sweeping under the rug.

This banner just makes it more apparent how many times we're failing patrons. The analytics will show if this intervention is useful. During this time, I agree we should make sure that the feature is working as well as it can be.

1. This may mean creating a better fallback for the Related Books section
2. It may mean focusing our metadata / librarianship improvements on poorly scoring, high demand pages (i.e. pages with the worst or most incomplete metadata and the highest number of accesses).

This is a journey and the way forward is almost certainly one of pain. We'll have to earn a system that works better and along the way we'll certainly see more of our failures (and hopefully then address them)