First of all - great site and I appreciate having something like this available.  The following is only offerered as something that I think would be helpful in reducing false expectations when listing books.

I know that you can get the number of copies of a book in the system by adding it two your reminder list.  To me it would be far more helpful to simply have that information shown for my posted books.  It seems the information is already in the database and the code is obviously already written to show it on the reminder list - why not move or copy it over to the posted books?  That way we don't need to create a second duplicate list soley to see how many copies are out there.

Knowing that there are 697 copies of the book in the system is useful ... there is no reason to add 1 more and wait 3 years for someone to order it.  I realize that in some cases there might situations where a book is very popular and 100 copies might go in a few months -- but most of the time if I see a book with that many copies I would rather just donate it rather than have it gathering dust for a couple of years or more -- other people might want to wait it out - but at least we would have some indication of what to expect.

Also a popularity index of something like?:

(Copies ordered / Copies available) * 100 = index seems like it would be fairly easy to put in.  I would assume both numbers are already in the database ... but maybe adding more sql requests in real time would be cumbersome to the system.  Possibly just something that could be updated once a day or week?

Some sort of system to know how many are in the database has been asked for off and on for years, but I think TPTB don't want people to really know because it may scare off new members who don't realize that some of those huge lines, WL and FIFO, can move pretty quickly. So people wouldn't post as many books.

I think they could have done it long ago if they were interested.

Cindy,

Thanks.  Someone else also indicated that the owners/management of the system doesn't read the forums and that I should send it via contact us - so I did (but if, as you say, it has been suggested for years then I doubt it will really matter).

Your point about them not wanting to discourage people about the huge wait on the FIFO on many books is no doubt one of the reasons.

I understand the allure of being able to brag to the public that you have 4 Million books available, but when 1 Million of them are Nora Roberts and John Grisham I am not really sure it is presenting a fair picture.

Still it is a good site once you discover that it really isn't going to help you clear out a large number of your books ... or at least not very quickly.

Gary

You could run a deal on them and earn some credits while moving them out of the house.

They mentioned at one time they were working on showing on bookshelves how many are posted the rate they are being requested.  This was supposed to happen around when they took away the reminder list and implemented the new WL. But the new WL has been talked about for 3yrs now at least.  So maybe they've decided not to do it at this point.

I was curious about the proposed popularity index, so I contacted the team about it back in May.  This was part of their reply: "We do have the popularity index in the works, and we hope to be able to bring that out before too much longer."  What exactly "too much longer" might be, though, is anybody's guess.