Monday, August 16th, 2010

LibraryThing for Publishers: 21 new publishers

LibraryThing for Publishers, our new program to bring publishers into LibraryThing—and link out to them—has been growing rapidly, and we’ve added a number of new features for both publishers and members.

New Publishers. Since Monday we’ve added 21 new publishers, amounting to an 800% increase in books covered.

The largest new publisher is Penguin Australia, covering 650,000 member books. Their titles include books from Penguin USA, UK, India, New Zealand and DK (Dorling Kindersley) available through the Penguin Australia website. (Their wonderful profile image—an unofficial logo?—appear to the right.)

Others include (in copies order):

And eight more independents. A half-dozen substantial publishers are waiting in the wings, as we work out URLs and other details.

New Features. I introduced a new page for you to compare your books against LibraryThing Publishers.

Check out the blog post.

New ways to upload. Publishers have complained about the limitations of ISBN-based URLs, so we’re expanding the formats we accept, starting with a new “LibraryThing Simple Format.” Basically, we can now read any spreadsheet that contains both ISBNs and URLs. We’ll figure out the rest. This proved necessary in getting RAND’s titles into the system, and was helpful for Mercer UP as well.

I’ve written more about this format on Thingology.

Labels: LibraryThing for Publishers, new feature, new features

6 Comments:

  1. Fred Bacon says:

    I really like this feature, but I would rather see the number of titles rather than the number of copies. With luck more publishers will join. I see this as a great way to find new titles from publishers that I trust.

  2. Richard says:

    I love you. All of you. Your collective focus on creating and improving this site has made MY life a better place, among many others’s lives, and I sincerely hope those others include each of you.

  3. Richard says:

    Oh, and I forgot to say “What Fred said.” Titles AND copies would be nice.

  4. Jack says:

    I said, I love this feature friends.

  5. Tim Spalding says:

    Actually, there’s a link to see total titles instead of copies.

  6. Fred Bacon says:

    Ah, it fooled me because when you switch to Titles view, it still says something like xxxx copies under each entry. I didn’t notice that the numbers were changing.

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