A lot of the books I order are in depth history monographs that often have only one copy in the system.  When I get the daily digest or pull up titles under a genre search for books posted in the last hour or two, there are many titles listed that are no longer available.  I kick myself for not getting there five minutes sooner to order the sole copy of a book I really would have enjoyed..  I assume people already ordered these books that no longer can be ordered.   Some of them presumably were on wish lists.  However, I find it surprisng that ALL these books were on wish lists.

What I am really asking is this....what is the fastest search I can do for books of a particular type like history?  How can I get "on top" of these titles and be the first foot in the door to order them. Is it simply to use the hour by hour search for books posted and narrow it by genre?  Is it to click on the books that scroll across the screen on the first page as "recently received"?  (I assumed the latter doesn't actually reflect all the books listed, or does it?)  I also assume the "genre" searches we do on the first page (choosing three fields) aren't necessarily recently received books.  Does anyone else have this same problem and how do they deal with it?

Any advice on "fast searches" would be much appreciated by this relative newbie.

One thing you can do is set history (or anything else you're interested in) as a favorite genre under your settings and you will get a personalized recently added one the home page.  That still might not help you if the books are wishlisted or otherwise being ordered quickly.

When you use the book browser are you searching only for posted books?  If you make sure you search all books then you can find books you might like and add them to your wishlist so you will get first crack at them.  You can also add them to your reminder list if there are some you're not sure about but would like to be able to check up on quickly.

Go to the Advanced Search page and setup a search for your genre in Posted Books that's sorted by Date Posted / Descending. You can save this search and just reload it, or bookmark the results page.

I think this works better than the Daily Digest if you follow a single genre, because you don't see the books that got requested before you got there. You only see the ones that are currently available. You can also eliminate audio books if you want, which you can't do with the Daily Digest. The downside is that you have to remember to check the list, you don't get that convenient daily email reminding you to click the link.

When you look at a book, what does it say under "Members Wishing"? It will give you an indication if the book is on people's WL and never was available even as it was posted, as it went directly to someone's WL.

You have about 75 more spaces on your WL. You might just go and put the ones you really want on your WL.