MobileRead For the 2016 categories, as a 1st step, can we....

[GeoffR]

I'd be interested if there were more SF/Fantasy categories, and fewer literary and non-fiction categories.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Nyssa

I wouldn't want a "forced" series read. We get first books in a series, regardless, for any genre.

I've replaced that one with Free for All and changed January to one we've never even thought of before.

Also how is a Modern Classic defined as "before or after WWII"? Did you mean "before or during"?

That was a mistake. It's been fixed.

[Luffy]

Originally Posted by Synamon

I'm actually more disappointed in the lack of discussion. You seem very concerned about all the "old" books, but the most recent new book, The Bat, got only 5 posts in the discussion thread. That's horrible. Not that most of the discussion threads last year were much better, but they usually got to double digits.

I don't think it matters how many books get nominated, it matters that no one is reading or participating in discussions about the one book that is chosen by vote. I'd be interested in knowing why this is.

Is one book every month too much to handle? I know some of the nominated books have been long and even as a voracious reader length is something I consider when I vote. Some of those older books are shorter which is another advantage in addition to their easy availability.

Originally Posted by Synamon

Is there is a different crowd?

What attracts people to MobileRead? People come here to find information about their new ereader. They come here to figure out how to use calibre. They come here to download books from the Patricia Clark library. Something else?

In the last case they are clearly interested in public domain books. In the first case their new ereader has opened the door not just to bright shiny new ebooks, but also to the vast repository of free classics. One of the big advantages of ereaders over paper is the availability of quality free reading material.

Originally Posted by Dazrin

As for new people, I am thinking of all the people who post in the "What are you reading" thread or "The Martian" or "The Dresden Files" threads but don't participate in the book club. Looking through the last few pages of the "What are you reading thread" I don't see any classics mentioned, maybe I missed some, but I do see a LOT of science fiction, fantasy, YA, mysteries, and other genre books.

We have a lot of people in just the Reading Recommendations forum who are fairly active but don't participate in the book clubs. Right now it says there are 29 people viewing the Reading Recommendations forum and I know I have seen that number a lot higher at times. I know this is a very small sample of who reads MR as a whole (1103 users active right now), but it is still 4x the number of voters for the recently closed Literary Club vote and more than the current book club vote total despite being a single snapshot during the middle of a work day rather than everyone who passes through over 5 days.

I am one of those users who post everyday but have never actually discussed a chosen book of the month. I don't like Literary books, I have been unsuccessful in choosing good SF books, I don't enjoy Horror, nor classics. For now I'm busy with book groups from other sites. But I would love to participate here. I'd enjoy observing the discussion here. But the book must be right.

[HomeInMyShoes]

Originally Posted by Synamon

I wanted to respond to this portion of your post. I'm actually more disappointed in the lack of discussion. You seem very concerned about all the "old" books, but the most recent new book, The Bat, got only 5 posts in the discussion thread. That's horrible. Not that most of the discussion threads last year were much better, but they usually got to double digits.

I don't think it matters how many books get nominated, it matters that no one is reading or participating in discussions about the one book that is chosen by vote. I'd be interested in knowing why this is.

Is one book every month too much to handle? I know some of the nominated books have been long and even as a voracious reader length is something I consider when I vote. Some of those older books are shorter which is another advantage in addition to their easy availability.

I can agree with no one reading or discussing being a problem (since I have no gauge whether people read it or not). The Bat was one of those with 5/10, but The Picture of Dorian Grey was 7/16. Who voted and didn't bother to discuss? We could find out, but there is nothing to gain in forcing people to read when they vote. I like votes because its a general interest in what we might be reading and if the nominations at least looked interesting to start. We will lose people who don't finish a book, we will lose people that just got too busy, or rethought their vote later. But if there's no interest in voting we can't possibly have any interest in reading. Call me an optimist in that sense, I care about the potential. It's probably flawed, but it is also a much easier number to measure than number of people involved in a discussion. Without looking through each comment I can't know if people just chimed in saying I read that book in high school and it blew chunks or if they said they weren't going to reread it at this time.

Votes is the number of votes a title garnered in the first round of voting (not in the runoff if there was one) and discussion indicates the number of users involved in the discussion (not the number of posts in the discussion):

Title                       votes   discussion
The Iron King                    10     11
The Cricket of the Hearth        15      8
The Bat                          10      5
The Man Who Would be King        13      7
The Grapes of Wrath              14     11
The Dispossessed                 16     11
Rites of Spring                   8      4
Hyperion                         17     10
The Cuckoo's Calling             13     12
the Picture of Dorian Gray       16      7
Outlander                        10     14
All Quiet on the Western Front    7      9
*

* inferences made from this data are prone to error, lies and misjudgements

There's lots of non-participants in the discussion. Discussion participation can trail by quite a bit since the vote. I'm sure there is a stale date at which point the data is relatively indicative of how successful a month could be deemed. The Bat was terrible indeed (I personally haven't found mystery to be a very good genre), but overall we are sticking around ten participants in the discussion each month.

[HomeInMyShoes]

And I'll throw out my list of categories. I've removed everything non-genre except for the Patricia Clarke Memorial Library. It's a large portion of why MobileRead exists and we should celebrate it.

JAN SecondChance
FEB Romance
MAR Thriller/Suspense
APR Humor
MAY Fantasy
JUN PCML
JUL Fiction
AUG NonFiction
SEP Mystery/Crime
OCT Horror
NOV Science Fiction
DEC FreeForAll

I like JSWolf's idea of Second Chance in December and a book from last year in January, but I think it's easier on the admins to put SecondChance in January.

[Synamon]

If you assume that only those who voted for a particular book will read it, then yes increasing initial voting is worthwhile. I read books that I didn't nominate or vote for because I want to participate in the bookclub when I can. Anyway, without discussion there isn't much of a bookclub to participate in.

The Bat was in the foreign category, not mystery.

I'm not convinced that the categories matter that much, there is always plenty of overlap and variety. I agree with sun surfer that classic / public domain / semi-literary books are being chosen because those participating are choosing them. The only way to force that to change is to change the selection criteria to eliminate those books from the club and by extension to discourage those participants. I'll step aside now, good luck going forward.

[HomeInMyShoes]

Right, I knew that. I'm not saying that people don't read books they don't vote for. I'm sure we all do that at some point. We change our minds, we find some spare time, there's many reasons. And I agree without discussion there isn't much of a bookclub.

I do believe that even without discussion, there is still value in the nomination process.
It's part of how I find new directions in reading and it is often with books that don't win. The biggest reason that I participate is to find new things to read.

[WT Sharpe]

What I'm seeing it's that so far several people are of the opinion that we should all either nominate our own lists for 2015 or else support someone else's list. It seems like a plan to me. Does anyone object to doing it that way?

[Dazrin]

Having people post lists is ok, but I am still for using sun surfer's suggestion from last year which is a poll with up to 30 different categories to vote on (below). We would take the top 11 categories, plus Runners-Up in January, and a volunteer (or 2-3 working together) would decide the order.

More details from that suggestion in the spoiler:

If there is a tie that would effect the final list (e.g., the 12th and 13th most popular items are tied) we will have a single choice run-off vote. If we still have tie, the winner will be chosen by either WT Sharpe or another volunteer.

30 choices is the maximum allowed by the software I believe, so that is where the limit came from.

The vote could be a fairly long one (1 month plus) at this time of year in order to allow as many people as possible to see it and participate.

If we want to reduce the number of literary titles we should consider replacing or just removing some of these categories (+).

Here is the slightly updated list of categories:

1. Action/Adventure**
2. Award Winners +
3. Banned/Challenged Books +
4. Classics
5. Contemporary
6. Fantasy*
7. Fiction***
8. First in a Series
9. Foreign (Originally Non-English) +
10. Free-For-All
11. Historical Fiction
12. History (Non-Fiction)
13. Horror
14. Humor
15. Indie
16. Mystery/Crime*
17. Non-Fiction
18. Not Classic or Contemporary
19. Patricia Clark Memorial Library
20. Planes, Trains and Automobiles (and Boats)
21. Philosophy
22. Pulp Adventure
23. Romance
24. Science (Non-Fiction)
25. Science-Fiction*
26. Short Stories
27. Thriller/Suspense*
28. Travel**
29. Westerns****
30. Young Adult

+ These categories tend towards more "literary" choices and might be removed/replaced if we want to avoid that.
* I removed the combined "Science-Fiction/Fantasy" and "Mystery/Thriller" categories in favor of the separate categories. We could add them back if wanted.
**I split up "Adventure/Travel" into "Action/Adventure" and "Travel" to more accurately describe the fiction and non-fiction flavors of this category.
***Added "Fiction" as a semi-Free-for-All month.
****Added "Western" as a 30th option.

[treadlightly]

I second (third?) Dazrin/sunsurfer's suggestion. Using the 12 most popular categories/genres should theoretically lead to the most book club participants. Quibbling over individual lists led to us using last year's categories again this year and it seems few are happy about it.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Dazrin

Having people post lists is ok, but I am still for using sun surfer's suggestion from last year which is a poll with up to 30 different categories to vote on (below). We would take the top 11 categories, plus Runners-Up in January, and a volunteer (or 2-3 working together) would decide the order.

More details from that suggestion in the spoiler:

Spoiler:

If there is a tie that would effect the final list (e.g., the 12th and 13th most popular items are tied) we will have a single choice run-off vote. If we still have tie, the winner will be chosen by either WT Sharpe or another volunteer.

30 choices is the maximum allowed by the software I believe, so that is where the limit came from.

The vote could be a fairly long one (1 month plus) at this time of year in order to allow as many people as possible to see it and participate.

If we want to reduce the number of literary titles we should consider replacing or just removing some of these categories (+).

Here is the slightly updated list of categories:

1. Action/Adventure**
2. Award Winners +
3. Banned/Challenged Books +
4. Classics
5. Contemporary
6. Fantasy*
7. Fiction***
8. First in a Series
9. Foreign (Originally Non-English) +
10. Free-For-All
11. Historical Fiction
12. History (Non-Fiction)
13. Horror
14. Humor
15. Indie
16. Mystery/Crime*
17. Non-Fiction
18. Not Classic or Contemporary
19. Patricia Clark Memorial Library
20. Planes, Trains and Automobiles (and Boats)
21. Philosophy
22. Pulp Adventure
23. Romance
24. Science (Non-Fiction)
25. Science-Fiction*
26. Short Stories
27. Thriller/Suspense*
28. Travel**
29. Young Adult

+ These categories tend towards more "literary" choices and might be removed/replaced if we want to avoid that.
* I removed the combined "Science-Fiction/Fantasy" and "Mystery/Thriller" categories in favor of the separate categories. We could add them back if wanted.
**I split up "Adventure/Travel" into "Action/Adventure" and "Travel" to more accurately describe the fiction and non-fiction flavors of this category.
***Added "Fiction" as a semi-Free-for-All month.

We've done that before and that's why some of us are putting up pre-made lists because the results were far from optimal.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by treadlightly

I second (third?) Dazrin/sunsurfer's suggestion. Using the 12 most popular categories/genres should theoretically lead to the most book club participants. Quibbling over individual lists led to us using last year's categories again this year and it seems few are happy about it.

That idea is no going to work well. It still leads to some of the problems we have now. One of the problems is these rather old books being nominated. There are a lot of people who would rather read something more modern and that is why (IMHO) some do not participate because we aren't reading enough modern books.

[treadlightly]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

That idea is no going to work well. It still leads to some of the problems we have now. One of the problems is these rather old books being nominated. There are a lot of people who would rather read something more modern and that is why (IMHO) some do not participate because we aren't reading enough modern books.

I don't believe the category selections directly relate to nominations. If most people want to read modern books, a category like "Classics" won't win.

[Dazrin]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

We've done that before and that's why some of us are putting up pre-made lists because the results were far from optimal.

True, except for the fact that we have not done that before.

For 2010-2011, pilotbob* ended up choosing the categories in a thread similar to this. For 2012 we did a month by month nomination/voting method that took forever and took way too much effort. Last year I tried to listen to too many different opinions on how to choose the list and made it so confusing that we ended up keeping the 2012 choices (my fault, I should have made the options simpler).

And looking back at that history, I am wondering if we can't all continue to post our lists and let our Grand Muckity-Muck make a command decision after looking at them. We know we aren't going to get consensus anyway and I think WT Sharpe could give us a better (more equitable, balanced, etc.) list than just a plain vote by doing something similar.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

That idea is no going to work well. It still leads to some of the problems we have now. One of the problems is these rather old books being nominated. There are a lot of people who would rather read something more modern and that is why (IMHO) some do not participate because we aren't reading enough modern books.

Which is why I suggested removing some of the "literary" categories like "Award Winners" and "Banned/Challenged" which look good on paper, but don't work as well in practice (IMO).

Also, since we are discussing this so early in the year, if we do a poll we can afford to leave it open for a month or more which would hopefully let many more people vote on categories they would actually read. Hopefully that would draw more people here. I will end up having a link in my signature to the poll to try and advertise it more.

Note: I added a 30th option to the list "Westerns". This was suggested in the 2010 thread and had some traction, so I added it to round out the options.

* I see that pilotbob also provided a definition of Classic for the club in that thread, "A book that is in the public domain (or older than 50 years or pre-1900, whatever) and still in print."

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Dazrin

* I see that pilotbob also provided a definition of Classic for the club in that thread, "A book that is in the public domain (or older than 50 years or pre-1900, whatever) and still in print."

And that definition while not wrong, it not properly encompassing all classics. So it's not really a usable definition. There are classics that are less than 50 years old and are not public domain. So that definition is out the window.