MobileRead Book Challenges discussion

1. Is there such a thing as having too many shelves? If yes, how many are too many?

2. Do you look at your friend's/group mate's book shelves?

3. Does having genre specific shelves help you to recommend books to others, or help you to choose a book to read?

4. As far as genre, does seeing how others shelve their books help you to shelve your own?



My answers:

1. Possibly, depending on how minimalistic one wants to be. I have not quite found that limit as yet.

2. I do look at others shelves occasionally - see question 4.

3. I find it does help with recommendations to others, but not with finding a book for myself.

4. Yes! Sometimes I'm not quite sure how to categorize a book, especially if I have not read it as yet. I will therefore look to find a common placement.

1. Is there such a thing as having too many shelves? If yes, how many are too many? It depends, but I'd say too many would be more than 10 exclusive shelves or 40 non-exclusive shelves. My opinion may change when my numbers get there. :)

2. Do you look at your friend's/group mate's book shelves? Yes, I look at others' shelves. If they've read something I like in a favored genre, I'll see what else they have shelved with it.

3. Does having genre specific shelves help you to recommend books to others, or help you to choose a book to read? It helps me choose a book, especially since we can select multiple shelves (historical fiction + romance, for example).

4. As far as genre, does seeing how others shelve their books help you to shelve your own? It can, especially if it's a book/author I'm not familiar with.

1. Is there such a thing as having too many shelves? If yes, how many are too many?
I don’t really think there are too many shelves – unless they get silly. I try to not go overboard but I would say 80-100 would be too much.

2. Do you look at your friend's/group mate's book shelves?
Yes! :-) I love looking at people’s shelves in my favorite genres.

3. Does having genre specific shelves help you to recommend books to others, or help you to choose a book to read?
Yes, it helps a lot with both.

4. As far as genre, does seeing how others shelve their books help you to shelve your own?
Sometimes. Most of my shelves are really general so I sort of ignore other people shelves. I pay the most attention to the shelves of people who read my same genre and who rate like I do.

1. I don't think there can be too many shelves, because it is all individual taste. I don't have mine broken down into genre on goodreads because I don't want 50 shelves, but I do have those genre shelves on my Nook.

2. I have mostly looked at peoples read lists. Sometimes there might be a book outside my regular genres that a person with similar tastes has loved and I wouldn't find it otherwise.

3. It helps me choose what to read since I am usually in a mood for a specific genre. But I don't usually look through my GR shelves, it is usually on my readers. I do sometimes read one first because a lot of my friends here on GR have been raving about it, so I decide to give it a shot.

4. Sometimes, but I mostly make mine up according to what I think I would like to choose from. I have genres like romance, and subject matter like teen angst, or beings like vampires and fae, etc...

50 sounds like a lot, but I have 70 tags in Calibre so I can see myself having as many shelves here. I've already combined a couple of them (like mystery/detective with thriller/suspense, and juvenile fiction with young adult) to keep the number of shelves down.
I wish we could add a description or note the shelves so that I could shorten some of the names.

Edit: I changed my mind on combing the mystery, and suspense genres. Even though my of the books share both genre sets, I like having them apart.

1) Nope. The more the better. I like things to be very specific.

2) You bet!

3) Yes, but so far only with books that are also on their "read" shelf and have been rated. I do enjoy browsing by genre, though.

4) Yes. I have gotten ideas from others here although haven't had time to implement them yet. I hope to add shelves and organize soon.

1. I could see there being too many for me, but plenty of people could probably comfortably exceed my limit.

2. I look at their "read" shelves.

3. I don't go looking for books by genre often (sometimes, but not often)--what's more useful to me is to do the "compare books" feature and then, if we seem to have similar tastes, I browse their "read" books.

(I wish Goodreads would let me pull up a list of people whose shelves compare really well with mine--wouldn't that be a nice way to find new friends and reading recommendations?)

4. Occasionally I decide to improve my Calibre library meta data. How people shelve things in Goodreads does help me out with that--but I don't shelve books by genre on Goodreads. My shelves here are more a record of what I read when in what format (and whether I liked it enough to favorite it or not). I did, at some point, add a "favorites-horror" shelf (in addition to my just plain "favorites" shelf). Maybe someday I'll some other "favorites-genre" shelves...maybe not...I don't know.