Thanks to the feedback from many of you, I've made a bunch of changes/improvements to the recent books page:
http://bookmooch.com/recent

1. the admins asked me to put a delay on posting new books to "recent books" so that (a) scammers who post books and are shortly thereafter caught, don't cause a lot of people to be upset (admins catch them quickly and vacation their account). and (b) brand new users who post a lot of books to their inventory, have a chance to take some off if they start feeling overwhelmed. So... if you put a new book in your inventory, currently the system will wait 24h before posting it to "recent books", and it'll also wait until everyone on the wishlist has been notified.

   So that's why, after I restart the BookMooch server, you won't see any "recent books" for a few hours, until the delay the admins asked for has expired.

2. there is now an "rss" feed version, for those of you who know what to do with that. There's an RSS icon on the recent books page that you can subscribe to. It also supports the "search" field, so you can subscribe to any number of new-book subsets that interest you.

3. the "blinkiness" on how the recent books page was doing its periodic refreshes is now fixed with some javascript magic. The page auto-refreshes every 60 seconds (or every 10 minutes if you're running IE8/IE7/IE6, with a blink). The way I'm doing this is a bit of scotch-tape-and-scissors, so if it doesn't refresh for you, let me know, and do tell me what OS and browser version you're using.

4. for those who use it, the "recent books API" now works again.