Hi all:

I hope no one takes offense, but I find my ability to do a relevant search too limited.

Here is my wish list::

1. Be able to search for author by gender.  I prefer Male mystery writers.

2. Be able to search for reader by gender.  I also prefer Male readers. 

3. Have Unabridged, or Abridged, included in every book description.  Too many times I have to click on "Buy from Amazon" and go to their website to find out this information as I only listen to Unabridged books.

Hopefully, items #1-2 above do not make me a "bad person".

Any chance to get these search options included?

Thanks, this is a great site.

Chuck

Somehow I think gender searches will not be high on their To Do list, but if you want to suggest adding Search options, send your suggestions to The PaperbackSwap Team through Feedback via the Contact Us link in the lower right under Company. They do take our requests into consideration.

As for #3, if that information doesn't come in with everything else from the database source, then it is all done through manual data edits. If it is something you are passionate about, you might want to consider getting on the data edit team and take that on as a personal project. You can always submit data edits without joining the data team, but I found that I get a lot of good information on submitting proper data edits in the data forum.

PBS uses a 3rd party database. They can't add anything to the search criteria because there is no possible way to go back and add the correct values to the tens of millions of records that came with the database. Also, new records get added all the time by the database vendor and by members here. The only ones that PBS can add fields to are the ones added by members, and those are a teeny, tiny fraction of the data.

As Melanie points out, you can edit the existing records to add more information to the descriptions, but again, you can only affect a tiny fraction of the records in the DB, because no human can update millions upon millions of records by hand.

Chuck,

I also only listen to audio books (never have time to actually read a book anymore).... and I like your suggestions. I don't really care about the gender of author/narrator, but I hate having to figure out if the book is unabridged or abridged.

Also, you might want to check out the audio book virtual box in the game section of the discussion forum. We swap audio books and in the descriptions we not only list them as abridged/unabridged, but we also list how many CDs and how many hours. You also have to swap for equivalent value audio books ... ie you can't swap an abridged for an unabridged book.

If you do decide to help with edits, a narrator's name can be added to the listing, too.  It should go in the author box.  The author box might look like this:

Michael Crichton, Scott Brick (Narrator)

Once that's been added, you can click on "Scott Brick (Narrator)" and come up with a list of all the books where Scott is listed in exactly the same way.

And you don't even need data edits if you take a look at tags.

Although I think data edits to the title are a very helpful way to indicate Abridged/Unabridged.

tags are the perfect mechanism for noting "Male reader" or "male author" ... in fact, I have seen very similar tags (although the ones I have paid attention to usually relate to "female author"). They also display like search results do when you click on a tag ... so you see a list of all books tagged with the tag.