YEAH, SURE, BOOKS ARE GREAT...(no--use the internet! books are stupid!)

Ohhhhh, hello!  Guys--GUYS, have you heard of the LIBRARY?  It's amazing!  It's free, and if you know how to work the website, you can suggest that they purchase books for you!

"If i was looking for a book on astrophysics, where would i find one?"

"Off the top of my head, i'd have to say a bookstore.  Or a library."

While physical books are stupid, downloadable audio-books are the best thing to happen to my commute since i got my AC fixed!  And the library buys the majority of the books is suggest.  For this reason, i now have 122 books on my wish list.

But how does one decide the order in which to "read" them?  My first logical choice would be to read them in the order i added them to my wish list.  But The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (book #7 on my list) for example has 0 available copies, and 2 people on the waiting list.  Now i hate waiting as much as i love audio-books, and i flat out refuse to sit in traffic without something to listen to to sooth my raging brain.  And i love spreadsheets as much as i hate sitting in traffic, and these numbers are BEGGING to be spread all over a sheet!

By my formula, i'd have to wait 6 days for a copy to become available if i placed a hold now.

So i put all the books from my wish list on the library's website into a spreadsheet.  I've a column for Order, which shows what order they are in my list.  There're also columns for the number of copies the library owns and how many patrons are on the holds list.  A book can be checked out for a maximum of 21 days.  With this information, i developed a formula to estimate the number of days i'd have to wait for a given book, if i put a hold on it.  If there are a negative number of patrons on the holds list, that means there are that many copies of the book available for checkout immediately.  This will make the wait period 0 if there's just one available copy, but a negative number if there're any additional copies available immediately.  Though there's no such thing as a negative wait period (i can't check out the book in the past), this does show the books with a lower demand.  From that, i can sort them by Wait, highest to lowest, and the books at the bottom of the list are theoretically the easiest to check out immediately.

So, The God Delusion has high demand, but so do many other books!  CRISIS!

So now i can plan on subsequently holding the book with the highest demand (denoted by Wait), that i've wanted to read for the longest (Order).  I also added some handy columns to keep track of which part of the audio-book i'm at, and my place.  But however will i know which books i'm currently holding, have already checked out, or am unable to download!?  Well, how about if we color code it!?

#equality

It's so easy!  Green denotes books i've checked out, on my Bookshelf.  Orange denotes books on my hold list, waiting to be available to check out.  Yellow denotes books available to check out from my hold list--when a book becomes available, you have 3 days to check it out before it passes to the next person on the hold list.  Since i may be reading 4 other books currently (as can be seen in the image above), i'll let the yellow book sit in limbo until the last possible hour.  Red denotes books that can't be downloaded to an iOS device.  I still haven't figured out a convenient way to listen to these on the go.  Bringing my laptop in the car and hooking it up to an aux cable seems excessive.  For now, they're Bad Red.

Now here's a dilemma:  i currently have 4 books on my bookshelf.  Which do i read first!?  They all have the same demand!  I COULD read them in the Order i added them to the list.  But there's a 21 day limit on all checkouts, so there's kind of a self-destruct timer attached to each book.  If the demand for each book is even, shouldn't i read them in the order they're going to self-destruct?  Enter the next column!!!

Are you worried about the place holder columns?  Don't be--they're only hidden!

So we've added an Expiration column, and that helps us see that we should start with Christine, since it expires in just one day!  So relieved we solved that conundrum.  But alas, the solution of one leads me to see another:  when i checkout Outline, and another slot opens up on my Holds list (the limit is 10 books), what will i hold?  Let's pretend Where Men Win Glory and The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl aren't on the list.  The next 4 books are all by Stephen King, and all have approximately a 21 day wait.  I could read them in the order i added them to my list.  But since they're by such a prolific author, i kind of want to read them in the order he wrote them!  Prepare the next column!!



Now that we've added the release (publication) year, it's easy to see that the next book i'll put a hold on is Antifragile, as i should catch up on older books before reading Stephen King's sequel to The Shining!  Anyway, that about wraps it up.  Every morning, i start my day by going through my entire wishlist and updating the Copies and Patrons on holds list columns of my spreadsheet.  Then i resort the columns, and decide which audio-book i'll listen to for the rest of the day.  Hit me up with any suggestions!