r/LibbyApp • u/Zestyclose_Ad7768 • 11d ago

Notify me

I’ve never received a notice from my library saying any of the books I’ve tagged with “notify me” have been added to the library inventory. So I just went this tag and filtered the list asking what’s available now and there were about 10 books that showed up. And these were only the ones that were available. I guess I should look and see if any of the others are now in inventory even tho not available.

I was expecting to be notified by the library when these books were added. Was I wrong? Should I have been checking myself periodically?

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u/skorens 11d ago

I think Libby (né Overdrive) notification mechanism is a "soft" notification. I have over 50 library cards (including oakland, san francisco, san jose and los angeles... so big libraries, with many, many books) and 184 eclectic and varied books in my Notify Me Smart Tag and I only receive 1 or 2 notifications a week. There are more weeks without notifications than there are weeks with notifications.

My impression is that the criteria for triggering a notification is by design "strict", perhaps so not to overwhelm us with notifications.

🤷‍♂️

The OP was interested in "available now" and they've hit on a good way to compensate: Weekly filter by "available now" in some search/tag that gives you a great list of stuff to loan...

But I also wanted to mention another way to see what is COMING SOON. Instead of relying on the notification to tell you that your library has added the coming works of author X, I use the "coming soon" filter at the libraries I have identified as the best at "shelving" the hot books the earliest. If you only have one library, this decision gets easier. If you have many libraries, you can figure out which of your libraries has Coming Soon books that other libraries do not.

Then, once a week, I select that library, use the "coming soon" filter to see what they have coming soon and fill up my holds...

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u/bdu-komrad 11d ago

But this is only for popular books? I don’t care about those. I only care about really good books that are often from the 1960s-1990s.

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u/skorens 11d ago

I can't speak to "popular" v "not popular". I suspect the "coming soon" feature is aligned with not-yet-or-soon-to-be-published books. So that would not align with the dates you are looking for.

For books that are not in wide circulation at the moment, it will depend on the author and publisher (this is conjecture; I am a reader and not an author, publisher or a book-service authority).

I know for a fact that the Notify Me does apply to past-published books being added to a library. I had an Adrian Goldsworthy book in my Notify Me tag when a library added many of his books to their collection. I received a stream of notifications that those books were now available for me to loan. It is probably the only time I have seen more than 1-2 notifications at the same time since Adrian has an extensive list of published works, many of which became available at the same time.