There were lots of comments to my recent blog entry small improvements so I thought I'd respond to all of them here with a new blog entry.

Love the label idea but, what would make it even better is if you could print the labels for all books you've accepted with one click and format so that several go on one page rather then use a sheet of paper for each one.

That's a great idea. The only tricky bit is that I don't know where your "page break" is, so some labels will "page wrap" from one page to the next (1/2 the label on one page, 1/2 on the other) which is not so good. The solution is for me to make a PDF for you, but that's a lot more technically demanding for me. There is a "page break" command for HTML, but IE doesn't support it (it works in Firefox).

Related problem: Mysterious Press-published books with an ISBN beginning 999 are being given a variety of countries instead of languages for "Published in". For example, 9994135600 is "Armenia", and 9994698648 is "Nepal".

Thanks for pointing that out, and giving me specific examples. I'll work on fixing that.

I am not happy about the removal of the "reserve for friends" button. Is there anyway you can add buttons or something that would provide a list of my friends so I can add them to the "reserve" box with only a few clicks?

vs:

Bless your hearts for ditching the "just your friends" option, which made it seem so easy to be exclusionary... the opposite of everything BookMooch encourages!

What I'm planning on doing is having an "add a member" button to the reserve function, which lets you easily find members by name/email/userid, and add them one at a time. Your friends would also be listed there. This is how the "add an administrator" feature works with the forums.

I think the problem with "reserve for friends" before was that it was the 1st choice, and thus pushed people to most often reserve for friends, whereas it probably should be used sparingly, when appropriate, rather than as the default. So... my plan is to leave the reserve feature as it is now (as you to specify the member(s) to reserve it for) but make the user interface for adding members easier, and list the friends there. Seems like a reasonable compromise, agreed?

I was wondering why my copy of The Road printed in Nigeria only has US price markings on it.

and:

I noticed when I posted one of my books by ISBN it didn't list the author. I removed it and hand typed the information but it still didn't print author's name. I think it would be good to know who wrote a book. thanks.

Can you provide an ISBN or URL to the book that shows your problem? I can't look into the problem otherwise.

The next problem to address is dormant accounts. If a person hasn't logged onto bookmooch for a year or more, why is her/his account still active?

Indeed, that is next on my list to work on. The plan is to auto-vacation accounts that aren't logged into for 3 months.

re: Logging on/off. All I do to log off is close down that window. Computer dinosaur that I am, is there something else I should do to leave the site?

The dinosaur approach is exactly correct: the easiest way to log off is to close your web browser.

you will find some time to fix the search in non-latin characters, like greek.It is something that used to work but has stopped and now it is impossible to search if a greek book is available or list it in the wishlist.

Sorry about that, I do have that on my list of things to fix: it's very, very trick to get searching working for all languages.

In the meantime, you can find books with non-english characters using the book's ISBN code.

Also, just curious if they dormant accounts are 'vacationed' will they still be visible to others or will they be hidden?

In languages with less demand, such as Catalan, and in some kind of Spanish books, some moochers do not enter because demand is low (and they may not be requested nor find what they were looking for), but they answer when requested. I'd reconsider it. I personally never had problems with three months, up to the moment. Maybe six, nine months?

Thanks for all!

Gonzalo

If auto-vacation happens, then it should definitely be longer than 3 months.

I also think it would be good to indicate upfront whether a book is reserved on the wishlist, and not show a mooch button unless it's reserved for you.

As frustrating as it is to see a book listed as available that is from someone who won't send to your country, I'd like to point out that it can still be useful to see that information. In the case of a book where the owner won't send to your country all you need to do is go over to the angel thread on the forums and request an angel from that sender's country. The entire angel network functions on the ability to see books that are listed from users only willing to send to their own country. I would encourage people to give requesting an angel a try. I have received many wonderful books this way, and am glad that I was able to see that the book had been listed even if it took a couple extra steps for me to acquire it.

--Dirk

Yes, as for me, I'd really appreciate. A book published in Spain may be published in Spanish, but many are in Catalan, and some in Galician or Basque. And, of course, a Catalan reader gets lost if (s)he has to look for Catalan books in the middle of all of the Spanish books (from Spain or America).

I do not know how it could be done. The ISBN per se doesn't include the information. Amazon isn't quite an expert in the field (logically) and many Catalan books are missing from its database. Personally, when I add a catalan book I try to remember to include in the title words as "català" or "catalan". But many might have been already introduced by another user without that option.

Thanks for all, as always

I did find a work-around. If I know I'm going to turn down the request, I immediately cancel the reservation. One time, even that didn't work.

I also want to add my appreciation for the fact that Bookmooch exists and to John for the loving care he gives it. The only upsetting thing about Bookmooch is the amount of time I spend on the site. Thanks, John!

BTW, please add my appreciation for this site and all that you do. My husband is not so sure it's a good thing since piles of books are taking over our small house.

And I second Robin's suggestion of a reminder email. That would probably suit people who log in seldom due to low demand, and people who currently don't have time for BookMooch for one reason or another.

The Book Mooch concept is a good one, however, though many individuals have requested my books, the vast majority of my searches for specific books -- usually book club type books -- have turned up empty. Very frustrating. I'll keep trying though.

"On vacation" should be for those of us who have the misfortune to be separated from our BookMooch accounts for a time, not for those who login, but don't respond to requests (nor reminders, nor plain old emails) from folks who had their hearts set on a book from their list. A kind message to ask these folks if they would like to remain members, but warning that they will be set to inactive seems appropriate.

This could help declutter a bit. After all, on vacation members' wishlists are still posted, even if their inventory is not. (I recently posted a new book, saw 4 people were wishing, but all were "on vacation" with lengthy times since log-in.)

Thanks, John, for listening and for all you do to make this such a blessing to book moochers everywhere!

It is never okay for someone to not wait for permission on an 'ask' request.

If they do not cancel when you asked them to, then click 'abuse.'

The system needs to be flexible though, as many have bio messages allowing some within their region to goahead and mooch (say within Europe, or within NA), or have given advance permission for other reasons.

On topics -- the data comes from the publishers, to Amazon and then through to Bookmooch, so is not 100%. It takes a little while to see which topics are most commonly used correctly. The Bookmooch 'recent' topics list has been vetted and those are used correctly most of the time.

One has to think that mail prices are not the same anywhere. It is fairly more economical to send books from UK to Spain than from Spain to UK. The same happens when comparing the US and Spain. (I just mention cases I know well). Therefore, with the same amount of money, what you'll be able to do really depends on which country you are.

I guess this is something one has to think for himself. If you really mooch internationally, you should do the effort to send internationally. There is something of a moral duty (imho).

But some cases are simply impossible. Recently someone asked me for a kind of economical edition which was nearly four times cheaper to buy with free delivery in his country than to send from my country as an used book. What should I do? I offered to buy the new book. It was logical from the economical point of view, but hardly logical from the moocher point of view.

I guess this is something one has to think as well for himself. If sending a 2-pounds-book across the sea will cost the sender as much as it would cost the user to buy it new, isn't it somewhat unfair (unless he really, really can't afford it otherwise)?

These are only ideas I brood over, I do no mean to criticize anybody. As far as my experience goes, most of the users of the system are nice people who do as much as they can. In my experience, I have not found any relevant abuse. On the contrary!

Thanks to John for this space and all its hard work, and to all the moochers who send internationally.

Now that I'm writing this, this seems like a lot of work for you, John. Feel free to disregard:)

That being said, my only suggestions are:

1. An ignore button for books that you have on your wishlist, but either won't send to your country, or the condition is not to your liking. That way it won't continue to pop up in your list. You could just ignore that specific users listing, and only see when new editions come up.
2. The ability to delete more than one book at a time. Sometimes, I like to clean up my list by deleting titles that I've already mooched (multiple editions on my list) or have found elsewhere. It's a bit time consuming to manually go through and delete every title, especially with a long list. If I could highlight a few and delete them all at once, that would be great!

Just a few suggestions. Again, love what you're doing. I'm a book moocher for keeps.

i do have one small comment/suggestion:
i have a fairly large and static wishlist (3 pages long), mainly because the books i like are esoteric non-fiction. on the occasions when something on my wishlist is moochable, and i request/secure it, i must then manually delete that book from my wishlist. twice i have accidentially mooched a book more than once, because i forgot to delete it from my wishlist and so forgot that i already had a copy. would it be possible to have an auto-remove function for the wishlist, so that if i successfully mooch a book, that title will disappear from my wishlist?

<3 the site!

Thanks for everything Jon!

Can you please add some topics to the database?
A topic named 'martial arts' would be great as now it
is impossible to find everything.

Kind regards,
J

Hope that helps, M

My Mooches given and received update ok - it's just my pending page. If I have a lot of books going backwards and forwards it's a bit of a nuisance as I have to remember what they are!!

Can anyone suggest a 'cure'.

Many thanks.

Eileen.

Did what you said and it worked!!

Great site by the way.

Many thanks.

Did as you suggested and decided on 'automatically'.

So now, hopefully, whatever status my 'trades' are at they will show until finalized.

Eileen.