Last last night LibraryThing hit eight million (now: 8,034,234). Some facts:

• The eight millionth book was H20: A Biography of Water by Philip Ball (2000), added by Kingfish.
• If LibraryThing were a library, it would be the 14th larget library in the United States (ALA factsheet). At the current rate, we should be in in fifth place (10,370,78 books) by March or April, and second place sometime in the summer. But at 30 million books, topping the Library of Congress will take a few years.
• If laid end-to-end, LibraryThing’s books would stretch 1,075 miles, from Boston to Milwaukee taking the route suggested by Google Maps. I’m not sure about the straight-line distance.
• LibraryThing has between eight and fifty times as many books as the World’s Biggest Bookstore, in Toronto, Ontario. (The web won’t say, so I called. The person I got paused a long time—was ths a crank call?—and then replied “I keep hearing different numbers. It’s like a million or a hundred and fifty thousand or something.”)
• LibraryThing hold 58,580 books by J. K. Rowling. If these were piled on top of one another, assuming three-inch high books, the stack would be eight times taller than the tallest skyscrapper in the world.
• LibraryThing has 80 times as many books as you have hairs on your head.
• If the books in LibraryThing were your intestine, and they were laid end-to-end, they would go all the way around the world one and a half times. Blech.

Labels: 1