SOS: Serious Overload of Series discussion
Team Challenge: BookShelf Bingo
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BookShelf BINGO: Tips for Finding a BSB Book

(hopefully it makes sense - I'll use Bone Crossed as an example )
1. Go to GR book page for the book you want to read
Bone Crossed book page
2. Scroll down the page just a bit and click on "popular shelves" (right side) for the book
Bone Crossed popular shelves
3. With that (popular shelves) page open in your browser, click: CTRL-F (Windows users) or Command-F (Mac users) to bring up your FIND option
4. Type the exact shelf name (as shown at the top of the GR shelf page ... newest shelf announcement example: current GR shelf page = urban-dark-fantasy) in the FIND search box
5. With the shelf name in your FIND search box, on the book's 'popular shelf' page, click NEXT as you scroll through each page. Sometimes you find it (EXAMPLE: Bone Crossed is shelved as 'urban-dark-fantasy' on page 3; column 2; 16 down) and sometimes you don't. You still have to scroll through the pages, but this way, the computer does the searching for you.

Provided by our lovely BSB players
Daffodil & Heather suggested:
1. Go to the GR shelf announced for the week (IE: 'young-adult-paranormal' shelf page)
2. Find a book listed that you read and really enjoyed (I'll use Vampire Academy for this example) and click on the link stating how many times that book has been shelved with that tag (IE: (shelved 57 times as young-adult-paranormal) )
3. This link will bring up a page of the people who shelved that book as "young-adult-paranormal"
4. By each person's name, you will see # of friends, # of books, and a link to # of books on that shelf. In this example, Anita has 83 young-adult-paranormal books.
5. If you click on that link it will take you to her YA paranormal shelf where you can search for a book to choose
Daffodil says, It's really worked for me, because I'm looking through the shelf of someone who has similar reading tastes (usually) and I don't have to sort out a bunch of books that don't interest me as much.
Deborah Suggests:
If on a touchscreen (with no easy way to Ctrl-F without keyboard), your browser screen search window/menu-choice/blank that finds things on web may also have a "...on this page" option/section further down. The Safari browser on iPad does (with browser open there's a place to right of menu to enter a website address and another to enter search terms -- enter search terms and glance down bottom of choices that start showing up for "...on this page...").
Natalie suggests:
You can actually use the link to look up any possible shelf. I had to use GR in place of www.goodreads.com since the link was too long to show up
GR/shelf/users/25689074-stars-above?shelf=aliens
For any book, if you click on the number of users next to a shelf, it'll give the above page for the shelf. Then you can just edit the link to look up any shelf you want as opposed to sorting through many pages of shelves/books. Shelves with spaces like series to read will need a hyphen inbetween: series-to-read
So, if like me you see books from a series, but not the one you want to read, I can just go to the book page, click on the number of users for a shelf and then input my shelf and see if it pops up!



Write down exactly what you did then we can see where you're going wrong.



Guess it's back to searching the shelf page for me if not.






I haven't been using the actual lists either. I've just been bringing up the book I want to read and checking there. If there's a lot of shelves for the book I do the ctrl/f thing. So far only 1 hasn't come up for the shelf I first wanted to use it for (but I was able to read it the next weeks shelf).

That's great to hear, Mary. I'm glad it's worked out that way for you. Same here.

Use the link to go to the shelf.
Find a book on the shelf that you read and really enjoyed. (Much easier sometimes than finding one on your TBR.)
Below the title, next to the author there is phrase in parentheses that says "shelved x times as favorite-series". (using this weeks shelf as an example) Click on that phrase.
It will take you to a page of people who shelved that book as favorite-series. Under their name are 3 statistics. # of books. # of friends. # of books on that particular shelf.
If you click on that bottom tag, it will take you to that person's favorite-series shelf. And those books will also be on the bigger GR shelf of the same name.
It's really worked for me, because I'm looking through the shelf of someone who has similar reading tastes (usually) and I don't have to sort out a bunch of books that don't interest me as much.

I love the easy way!! Thanks, Daffodil!!


Some of the free and commercial crawler/harvesting type of apps/softwares will troll thru and save layers of web pages vs. just the one page in view (Instapaper, Sierra iCollect, etc. -- not advertising for any of them because away from my desktop and unable to test on stupid smartphone typing from. Grrrrrrr....vent....moan....groan...stupid autocorrect keeps overwriting numbers of all things)




I'll use her book and explain how to use a web browser to find a it on a shelf. Checking too see if

h**ps://... /shelf/users/25689074-stars-above?shelf=aliens
Now if you change shelf=aliens to shelf=favorites in the main address bar, it will take you to a page that lists all the GR members who have shelved Stars Above on their Favorites shelf. If the shelf has more than 1 word, just insert a hyphen between each word. shelf=to-buy will list members who shelved Stars Above on their To Buy shelf. shelf=daffodil takes you to a page that says "Sorry, no users found." because no one has it on a shelf titled Daffodil.
So suppose we want to see if someone has shelved

1. Go to Vision in Silver's main page and click on See top shelves...
2. Pick any shelf listed and click on the number of people who have shelved it under that listing, not the shelf itself. So for Vision in Silver I clicked on 703 people next to the fantasy listing.
3. Go up to the address bar in your browser and change the ending to shelf=aliens. This will take you to a page that shows 2 people have shelved Vision in Silver on the Aliens shelf.

Thanks so much for sharing!!

How to Locate a Specific Book on a Shelf (or to check if it's there):
There's a quicker way to look up if a you want to know if a book you want to read it 'tagged' on a certain shelf. I learned it in SOS. (Thanks, Daffodil!) Her comment is here. I've been thinking about typing it up for "GoodReads How To..." - but haven't gotten around to it yet. Here's a quickie pic, though.
Using Claimedfor the example, found here on Dystopian Romance.
Pretty fast, once you do it a few time. Save TONS of time wading though each page of a shelf that has 20,000 posts.


✔Done!

In the most recent game of BSB, I found someone who had over 300 books on one of the target shelves and suddenly realized I could narrow it down further to books I had an interest in by using the following method.
Using the same example shelf & person
While looking at Anita's young-adult-paranormal shelf click on "compare books". Then in the upper right corner where the filters are listed, for "their shelves" choose young-adult-paranormal. This will list only books that are also on your shelves. To filter out books you've already read, just go to "your shelves" and choose to-read (or whichever of your shelves you want to look on).
Books mentioned in this topic
Claimed (other topics)Stars Above (other topics)
Vision in Silver (other topics)
Bone Crossed (other topics)
I've had this happen more than once and I finally realized I could use my browser's FIND option to hunt a bit quicker.
Here's how you can do it too.