I'll never understand what possesses people to go to

[conuly]

/r/whatsthatbook and title their post "I need to find this book!!!"

I mean, duh?

These posts get removed as soon as the moderator sees them, because there's only two rules in that sub and one of them is give your post a descriptive title. Descriptive means it describes the book, not you - many people seem to think that titles like "This book taught me to like reading!" or "I got this from a favorite aunt!" are descriptive. They are not, and nobody cares.

Honestly, it's enough to just post a genre. Many people seem to understand this but do not know what "genre" means. The following things are not a genre:

"Probably a kid's book or maybe a teen book"
"Written for fifth graders"
"Wattpad"
"Kindle"
"Kindle unlimited!!!"
"I read this a long time ago"
"I read this a SUPER long time ago, like, 2015 or something"
"Fiction"
"Non-fiction" (but then you check the post and the book turns out to be sci-fi)
"Had to read this for school"
"YA" (inevitably used for a young middle grade book)
"Early reader" (also inevitably used for a middle grade book)

I have no idea why people are like this. Why are they like this?

Comments

[melannen]

I have been dealing with this same thing on the namethatbook board on LibraryThing for years, and it's SO ANNOYING.

...and then I tried to post on the whatisthisthing sub on reddit and found myself doing the same thing.

I think it's because the people who do that are usually coming into the subforum from outside, and the instinct is to say "What would make people want to open this thread and help?" and on ANY OTHER FORUM, "Help me find this book" or "My aunt gave me this book and I loved it" or "This has been bugging me for years!" would actually be the right subject line to get people to open it, and "This is an SF book from 1975" would not only not work, it would come off as rude.

(This is made more obvious on Librarything, where 90% of the people who should post to NameThatBook actually post on the general Book Talk forum instead. On the Book Talk forum, "What is the title of this book?" is a better subject line than "SF book from 1975", because the second one could be all kinds of book discussion, but the first one makes it immediately obvious that someone needs to tell them to post on the other forum and also to use a different subject line there.)

It just takes that extra leap to get to "oh right this is a specialist forum, the namethatbook part can be assumed" and most people don't make it.

(Now, the part where they say "I read this in sixth grade" and then refuse to say how long ago that was, even when somebody asks them to clarify! - that one I don't get at all.)

[conuly]

(Now, the part where they say "I read this in sixth grade" and then refuse to say how long ago that was, even when somebody asks them to clarify! - that one I don't get at all.)

Or they go "Well, I'm 35 now". One, not everybody knows when "the sixth grade is" and secondly - do your own math, buddy! We're trying to help you out, and now you're making us do subtraction!?

[melannen]

Mind you every time I have wrestled a date out of someone like that, and then we've found the book, they've been at least two or three years too early, so maybe it's just as well.

[conuly]

2 or 3 years isn't a problem. 20 years, which I bumped into a few months ago, is. I'm still not sure how the poster got it so wrong, but at least they found their book.