Seen John's new "recent books" innovation?

It looks fab, and works really well!

It is beautiful; a huge improvement!

And even those crappy, pulpy titles look attractive. Sigh, I just don't know why there aren't more copies of Codex Seraphinianus. Just because it retails for a bit less than $800?

I have serious bones to pick with the huge amount of changes he made in this area.

-The delay. I understand the reasoning of anti-spammers and newbies not getting overwhelmed, but we've had both those problems for years, why address it *now* in *this* way? A 24-hour delay to display a book in "recent books" completely defeats then entire purpose of a "*RECENT books" feature. As I explained in my blog-post response, by the time the 24-hour hold is lifted and a "new" book is displayed, chances are 100 MORE books have already been added!

-The wishlist bias. Seriously. Do we REALLY want to go down this road? What happened to free-for-all, anyone can grab the book? Again repeating what I said in my blogpost response, waiting until ALL wishlist-emails are sent out for a book could very well mean waiting a MONTH for super-popular books to show up in the "recent" books feature (and super-popular books may not even make it to that feature at all, which makes it even worse. Say, a book with 100 wishlisters has sat there on the site for 15 hours, and there ARE people who would want it if they noticed it in the recent-books, but nope not going to happen.)

I love the *look* of the new feature, love the covers.... just don't like these major changes.

I'm neutral on the changes - don't like or hate them particularly - but I am glad to see John paying attention to the site again. It seemed like he was a MIA owner for quite a while there.

Thanks to you all, I checked in after a short absence, and checked out the new 'recently added' format. Takes some getting used to, but my first beef: while i was browsing, some new books were added and i was shot back up to the top (beginning)... bummer, that means it takes longer to go through the list if i want to do it methodically.

That may be a plus for those in search of "hot" books that might just have been listed... but it is a bit frustrating for those of us just browsing.

I agree with GlendaHam. The new format is designed to be more visually appealing and I just think it wastes time.

I like it :)

It works for me. I like it and think it's think it's an improvement. In fact, I have that new BM feed link set as a link on my new LT Home Page and check it as frequently as I did the old BM RSS feed. It has some good books.

I'm going to have a problem to keep from requesting too many of them. This new BookMooch display gives a better sense of what each book is about than just the title and author as was done on the old BM feed.

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I just think it wastes time.

I disagree.

I never used the recent feeds much anyway, so it doesn't make much difference to me one way or the other. However, it is heartening to see John putting time and effort into the site again, especially the efforts around cleaning up the book database.