Find the book

There are two scenarios, one is the book is already added in the app and you have asked Qs before; the other scenario is you don't know if this book is in the app or you want to add a book you are reading. 

If you have already asked questions on a particular book, it will be straightforward to find it in your profile. Click “sign in” at the upper right of the home screen if you are not already signed in, or click the “Profile” tab at the bottom.

In your own profile page, you can find the questions you already asked, as well as book pages you uploaded, and your private notes (version 1.0.10 and beyond). You can further check the list of questions that were “answered” or “not answered”. For each question listed, can click the page number to navigate to the particular page of the book, or click the book title to navigate to the book page. If you are an expert, you will also have books listed under your profile.

On the book info page, on which you will find more details of the book like whether experts are available for this book. As shown in the screenshot below, for the book “Fundamentals of Recoupling and Decoupling Techniques in Solid State NMR,” Bo Chen, the author of the book, can answer questions. Anonymous users can view the questions and answers. But only signed-in users can add new pages and ask new questions. The process of adding a new page is shown in the popup window when click the information icon. You can email the admin if need help or have questions/suggestions.

If you are looking for a book not in your profile, you can click the middle “Search” tab at bottom, then enter the book’s ISBN number. The ISBN number can be also conveniently entered with the barcode scanner. It is possible that this book is already entered by others. If not then you can add it after you signed in. 

You can also click the information icon on this screen to view some tips. If use the barcode scanner, point the camera to the ISBN code of the book, slowly move up and down, then with auto focus the code should automatically be recognized. After the barcode is picked, click the button “correct ISBN scanned.” Sometimes if the environmental lighting is not good, the readout may have wrong digits. You can correct them in the text input box, or “scan again.” It also helps to move to a place with better lighting for the barcode scanner to work well.

After enter the ISBN number, click the “Search.” If the book was added before, it will show the book information and an alert, click OK, then click “confirm” to proceed to the book screen.

If the ISBN has not been added before, the app will try to retrieve the book info from google book api with the ISBN number. You can verify the book info and then confirm to add this book. (Version 1.0.11 and beyond) If you added this book, or you are assigned as experts for this book, then you can also edit and then update the book info.  

One can also find relevant books using tags and author name (version 1.0.11 and beyond) at the Home screen.  Enter a tag, e.g., “Biography,” in the search box, or click the “Biography” tag of one of the listed books. Then it will only show books with this tag. Tags are added by the user who adds the book to this app, or by experts assigned to this book (contact admin to recommend an expert or volunteer to be an expert). Similarly can enter one word from the user names. Below to the right is an example by entering "john" and the app will find books with john in the author names. The screenshot is made with Chrome as described in https://sites.google.com/view/letmeask-app-guide/share-w-others