Archive for the ‘1’ Category

Monday, January 8th, 2007

Nine million books / hiring reminder

Yesterday we hit nine million books cataloged. We’re plan to make a HUGE deal out of ten million—a super-duper book pile contest, games, prizes, hay rides, a moon walk—but I’ll let nine million slide with the following:

  • Going from eight million to nine million took less than a month. We’re speeding up!
  • The book nine million was the espionage thriller Triple by Ken Follett. It was added by long-time foxsilver, who gets a free gift account for his luck.
  • If LibraryThing were a “real” library, we’d now be the 10th largest in the country (ALA fact sheet)

Reminder: We’re looking for a database and systems administrator. If you are one, or know of one, let us know. We’d love to get someone local, but telecommuting is also a possiblity. LibraryThing runs on Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. We offer health, dental and boredom insurance.

My apologies on some projects (author disambiguation, search) taking too long. We’re pretty consumed with the job hunt right now. We did just hire a new developer so once we can get back to developing, we’re going to gallop.

Labels: 1

Monday, January 8th, 2007

Books with similar library subjects and classifications

I’ve added a new and often powerful recommendation engine. It has a long and awkward name: Books with similar library subjects and classifications.* So far, I’ve only got it on Suggester pages.

It feeds off three pieces of “traditonal” library data:

  • Subjects (mostly Library of Congress Subject Headings),
  • Library of Congress Classifications (LCC), and
  • Dewey Decimal Classifications (DDC)

The recommendations are special in a few ways:

  • They can be very “targeted”
  • There is no “popularity” threshhold; books with just one copy in the system often have recommendations**, and it will recommend obscure stuff too
  • It works better for non-fiction than for fiction
  • It fails in interesting ways

At its core, the system looks for shared library data. So if book B has subject S, all the other books with subject S get a “vote”; the winners are the books that share the most subjects with the suggesting book. The algorithm goes beyond this by leveraging the inherent hierarchy of the three systems, apportioning successively “smaller” votes to ascending levels of the hierarchy. Popularity is also taken into consideration, but as little more than a tie-breaker.

At it’s best, the system is spooky. So Into Thin Air‘s other recommendations are spread over Everest, general mountaineering and adventure books. But the “Similar subjects and classifications” recommendations leads with Kenneth Kamler‘s Doctor on Everest : emergency medicine at the top of the world : a personal account including the 1996 disaster, a reasonably obscure (5 members) personal account of the same 1996 expedition. Other times the results are mixed or even odd. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason pulls up commentaries on itself, but also the acclaimed but seemingly unrelated seminal work on the anthopology of magic, E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, oracles, and magic among the Azande. Why? Because both receive the Library of Congress Subject Headings:

Strange bedfellows, perhaps.

*Got a better name? Let us know, seriously.
**Ironically, twice as many works have recommendations (219,000 vs. 120,000 for “people who have X also have Y”), but because they are more evenly distributed by work popularity, half as many books have recommendations (2.6 million vs. 5.9 million).

Labels: 1

Saturday, January 6th, 2007

We’re hiring a sysadmin/DBA

We just added a web developer—anouncement coming*—and we’re hiring again. This time we’re looking for a crackerjack systems and database administrator, ideally one based near Portland, Maine. (We can hope, can’t we?)

  • LibraryThing runs on Linux, PHP and MySQL 5 over a small cluster of servers located in Portland, ME.
  • You must have extensive experience in MySQL database administration.
  • You must be able to step into a high-volume site in transition and experiencing rapid growth.
  • You must be comfortable with rigorous demands of a startup and of sysadmin work.
  • Web development chops, love of books and knowledge of library systems valued.

We’re looking to fill a full-time position, but will also consider contractors, particularly if they’re in the area.

Salary and benefits negotiable. But I’ll tell you, you can see the sea from the LibraryThing headquarters and we’ve got gold-plated health and dental!

We’re looking to fill this soon, so act now. Contact tim[at]librarything.com or call 207 899-4108.

*Hint: He’s been mentiond on the blog before…

Labels: 1

Sunday, December 31st, 2006

New Year’s Greetings from LibraryThing

Happy New Year to all!

I’m back from a week of vacation. My apologies for recent feature-and-bug turgidity. Abby, Chris and I are tanned, rested and ready.*

December was a banner month. PC Magazine named us one of the web’s top five web services.** Members added over 1,175,000 books—the most ever! We also recorded our highest number of paid memberships, even excluding gift memberships, which were very sought after in the days before Christmas. And we sent out a record number of CueCat barcode scanners. (Although, we don’t make much money off them, they seem to have sped book entry.) With new features on the cusp of release, a major expansion planned, an employee-hunt is in the works, and continued, accelerating growth, 2007 is looking very bright indeed!

The New Year seems like good occassion to plug the recently-released New-Year-related comic novel The End as I Know It: A Novel of Millennial Anxiety by Kevin Shay. Shay (website), a high-school friend of mine***, has the distinction of writing for both Tim O’Reilly and Dave Eggers, appearing in Google Hacks and in various McSweeney’s collections including, as an editor, Created in darkness by troubled Americans. Here a review by the L.A. Times, and here’s the flap copy:

It’s 1998. Or, as Randall Knight sees it, Y2K minus two. Randall, a twenty-five-year-old children’s singer and puppeteer, has discovered the clock is ticking toward a worldwide technological cataclysm. But he may still be able to save his loved ones—if he can convince them to prepare for the looming catastrophe. That’s why he’s quit his job, moved into his car, and set out to sound the alarm.

The End as I Know It follows Randall on his coast-to-coast Cassandra tour. His itinerary includes the elementary schools that have booked him as a guest performer and the friends and relatives he must awaken to the crisis. When nobody will heed his warning, Randall spirals into despair and self-destruction as he races from one futile visit to the next. At the end of his rope, he lands with a family of newly minted survivalists in rural Texas. There, he meets a woman who might help him transcend his millennial fears and build a new life out of the shards of his old one.

So, cheers and thanks to all. I am excited to be part of what you are creating, and looking foward to doing what I can to make it better for you.

* … and tipsy, but I digress.
**And then turned around and asked $750 for the right to show the award logo. $750? That’s 75 year’s memberships! We turned them down. I suspect our fellow best-of-year services, iTunes and Skype did not.
***I programmed my first large-scale project with Kevin, a Zork-ish text-adventure set in a museum that has come alive.****
****Now made into a major motion picture starring Ben Stiller. As we never released the program, and I’ve never spoken of it, Kevin must have blabbed.

Labels: 1

Sunday, December 24th, 2006

Graphical Widgets for LJ and etc. (first look)

As promised, for Chris Santa has come up with a new, “graphical” widget–a widget usable in LiveJournal, MySpace and other environments that won’t permit JavaScript or frames. Unfortunately, Tim Santa didn’t finish the user-interface, with all its handy drop-downs, color selectors and so forth. So, for now, it’s up to you to customize the right URL. If this seems complicated, you might want to wait for the graphical interface. For the rest, here are your directions.

The graphical widget is an image with a highly-specific URL. You can build your URL piece by piece, checking the image in your browser. When you’ve got what you want, you will need to insert the image into your blog template. Usually, you will do this by adding <img src=”XXX” >, with XXX being the URL of the image, where appropriate.

The base URL is http://www.librarything.com/gwidget/widget.php?

To this base URL, you add parameters. You can add from one (just the user name) to fifteen, to control everything from what books are shown the colors they appear in. Each parameter must be separated by an & sign.

  • view= your user name (default timspalding, but you don’t want that)
  • type= what books to display; two options are “recent” and “random”
  • tag= which tag to display (default: none)
  • width= image width, in pixels (default: 200)
  • fsize= font size, in points (default: 9)
  • font= name of font to use (default: verdana). At present you can use “arial,” “arialuni” (if you have a lot of “special characters”), teletype, palatino, verdana
  • num= number of books to display (default: 10)
  • hbold=1 use bold text for the header (default: 0 off)
  • tbold=1 use bold text for book titles (default: 0 off)
  • top= text to display at the top of the widget (default: “Random Books From My Library” or “Random Books From My Library Tagged XYZ)
  • ac= author text color (default: 000000 – black)
  • bc= background color (default: ffffff – white)
  • tc= title text color (default: 0000ff – blue)
  • hc= header text color (default: 000000 – black)
  • x= number of pixels from top and bottom to pad the text (default: 5 pixels)
  • y= number of pixels from the left and right edges to pad the text (default: 5 pixels)

Notes:

  • The widget doesn’t link anywhere. We suggest you link it to your profile or catalog (see your profile for the URL). You will need to an an HTML link around the image.
  • The widget can’t have cover images. To display cover images, Amazon requires links to their service. A graphical widget can’t do that.

That’s what I have for now. Feel free to post questions, examples you’re proud of and so forth.

Labels: 1

Friday, December 22nd, 2006

It’s so close!


We have no shame.

Labels: 1

Friday, December 22nd, 2006

Vote for LibraryThing

Vote for LibraryThing in Mashable’s Social Networking Awards. (You vote by leaving a comment.) We’re in the “niche” category—I lobbied unsuccessfully for a social cataloging section—together with sites like CafeMom (“a place for moms”)*, SneakerPlay (MySpace for people who care about sneakers), Share Your Look (MySpace for fashionistas), AdFemme (MySpace for women in the advertising industry), NextCat (MySpace for actors, makeup artists and other Hollywood types), MyChurch (Facebook for congregations), Dianovo (MySpace for environmentists)**, our good friends Wordie, LibraryThing for words, and our favorite site, LibraryThing (SneakerPlay for booklovers).

*It’s depressing how much most “niche” sites ape MySpace.
**And people who enjoy splash screens. There’s also BeGreen, which is focused on global warming, but sports a front-page photo of two hot women standing in stylish red 60s or 70s convertible which is surely not a hybrid.

Labels: 1

Thursday, December 21st, 2006

The Areas of my Expertise—free!

The audiobook of John Hodgman‘s The Area of My Expertise* is available for free on iTunes.

* Full title: An Almanac of Complete World Knowledge Compiled with Instructive Annotation and Arranged in Useful Order by Me, John Hodgman, a Professional Writer, in the Areas of My Expertise, which Include: Matters Historical; Matters Literary; Matters Cryptozoological**; Hobo Matters; Food, Drink, & Cheese (a Kind of Food); Squirrels & Lobsters & Eels; Haircuts; Utopia; What Will Happen in the Future; and Most Other Subjects; Illustrated with a Reasonable Number of Tables and Figures, and Featuring the Best of “Were You Aware of It?”, John Hodgman’s Long-Running Newspaper Novelty Column of Strange Facts and Oddities of the Bizarre
** Two people have tagged it cryptozoology, seven hoboes.

Hat tip: Neil Gaiman

Labels: 1

Wednesday, December 20th, 2006

Hanukkah Harry wants your photos

Quick reminder: Post your Hanukkah book-pile photos to Flickr, tagged LibraryThingHanukkah. Winner gets a gift account. So far, we have only one book pile, with dreidels, and two not-very-booky entries (some very nice sufganyot and a family video from Steve Cohen at LibraryStuff). Deadline is 3pm Thursday, Dec. 21.

Feature teaser: It won’t make the end of Hanukkah, but LiveJournal and MySpace users should get a nifty, widgety Christmas present. Send encouragement to Chris (chrisgann).

Feature teaser 2: LC Authority Records, babee. Send fried donuts.

Labels: 1

Tuesday, December 19th, 2006

Neil Gaiman explains the Unsuggester

Neil Gaiman (American Gods, Neverwhere, etc.) has mentioned LibraryThing on his blog before, but today’s entry really caught our eye. It wasn’t just that he might join up, but he wrote a dead-on explanation of Unsuggester and what statistics mean and what they don’t. Here’s his reader’s email and his response:

Neil, I think the unsuggester might be broken. I’ve tried multiple titles, including yours, and there is always at least one or two items from my library on the list…

It’s not broken, it’s simply pointing out statistical anomalies—it’s not even talking about whether or not you’d like something (as some people have written to me, complaining they like books from both lists). It’s simply saying that it ought to be able to find a certain number of copies of book Y for people who own Book X, and it can’t. Statistically, people who have a copy of Mein Kampf on their shelves, for whatever reason, have fewer copies of Terry Pratchett books than might be expected. It may be that all the people with both Mein Kampf and Guards! Guards! just aren’t on LibraryThing yet, and once they join the anomaly will vanish. Or it may be that there’s something to be learned from that.

Would that he had been on Slashdot when that cry arose! Actually, part of the problem may be that people put their books in and try the Unsuggester the same day. But the calculations are pretty hairy, so I have to cache them for a while.

Labels: 1

Monday, December 18th, 2006

CueCats by Christmas? Last chance!

I don’t to “push” CueCats (cheap barcode scanners) too much, but when I dropped off the latest batch at the post office, I was told that Christmas delivery was getting dicey, even for Priority Mail*.

So, if you want to get your CueCats by Christmas, you’d better order them as soon as possible. Obviously, you can get a gift membership anytime.

*We don’t do Fedex. CueCats are a side-line for us; we intend to spend Dec. 24 shopping!

Labels: 1

Monday, December 18th, 2006

PC Magazine bests

An early Christmas present for us—we made PC Magazine’s five best services of 2006. They say:

“Heavens! Another tag-happy social-networking site that’s actually worth using!”

Well, I’m not going to argue with that!

We’re pretty honored, particularly since one of the other winners was Skype. Not such bad company to find ourselves in.

Labels: 1

Monday, December 18th, 2006

Happy Hanukkah


We don’t have a picture, so we grabbed this one from Flickr (mamamusings/Liz Lawley***)

Happy Hanukkah from LibraryThing!*

Help! LibraryThing doesn’t have a Hanukkah picture! We’ve got 6 days left. Pile up your Hannukah books? Go with silver and blue? Add a dreidel? Latkes? It’s up to you.

Post it to Flickr** with the tag “LibraryThingHanukkah,” and we’ll feature our favorite on the blog (and on the home page if we can get our act together). We’ll give you a free gift subscription, for you or someone else.

Deadline: Since Flickr can take a while to post pictures the official deadline is 3pm Thursday, Dec. 21.

*Linkfest! Tags: Hanukkah, latkes, menorah (one book!?), Wikipedia: Hanukkah, Judas Maccabeus on the Web (Isidiore-of-Seville.com), and Judah Maccabee the Huggable Hanukkah Hero.
**If you really need to email it to tim[at]librarything.com. But Flickr is bett(e)r.
***In a TRULY freakish coincidence, Ms. Lawley is the RIT prof./Microsoft consultant working on a behind-the-firewall “enterprise” Del.icio.us/LibraryThing-ish thing (see her blog post on the topic, and see Stowe Boyd too, with some comments by me from when I thought she was “just” a Microsoft developer). I didn’t realize where I’d heard the name until I after I posted this, but I guess it makes sense. Social-software people use Flickr a lot, get rated highly. It seems like a big world, but really it’s small!

Labels: 1

Thursday, December 14th, 2006

The gift of LibraryThing

LibraryThing memberships make great gifts!

Lifetime memberships ($25)
Yearly memberships ($10)

Or what about CueCats as stocking stuffers? Nothing says holiday joy like a barcode scanner shaped like a cat, I say. Functional and decorative!

And don’t forget our store at CafePress, ThingStore. Everything at ThingStore is offered at the CafePress base price—we’re not marking it up, and not making any money on it—so buy it simply for the joy of wearing it.

I’ve been using LT as a “what not to buy” tool lately (no, I’m not just Unsuggesting). It’s good for seeing what books my niece already owns, so I don’t end up buying duplicates (plus, it’s slightly more discreet than driving to her house and bookshelf snooping). In short, proof that you should give memberships to your friends and family—it benefits you both!

Update: I’ve been informed that PopMatters included LibraryThing as part of their 2006 Holiday Gift Guide (“shopping for the best pop culture stuff”)!

Labels: 1

Wednesday, December 13th, 2006

Porter Square Books!


Porter Square Books in Cambridge, MA has become the second bookstore to integrate with LibraryThing.

As with the first bookstore, Shaman Drum of Ann Arbor, MI, we’re doing this to please local members, not to make a buck. There were no string attached, and LibraryThing does not make any money from it.

If they’re your local bookstore, just edit your profile to note that and you’ll get availability and pricing information on all work pages. If they’re not your bookstore, go ahead and find out if your bookstore can integrate. To work with Porter Square Books, we set up a simple upload form, instead of requiring an XML feed. If they’re right, there are about 30 bookstores around the country that generate similar feeds for Booksense. I’ll post about that in more detail later over on Thingology.

I grew up in Cambridge and spent most of my life there. But I moved to Maine three years ago, and I haven’t set foot in Porter Square Books, and I haven’t met the people who work there. I hear it’s great, and Dale, the director, was a pleasure to work with. Are any other Thingamabrarians Cantabrigians* or Somerville-ers**? Anyone go there?

*Hey! That’s what we’re called.
**Note that Cambridge has a nifty Latin form. Somerville does not.

Labels: 1

Tuesday, December 12th, 2006

Eight million books

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

Monday, December 11th, 2006

The New York Times Magazine!

Somehow we managed a small mention in today’s New York Times Magazine’s article on new ideas (the 6th annual year in ideas, nonetheless). The piece, on “Homophily“, talks about how this love of the same has played into social software. It concludes:

“To counter the seemingly universal trend toward homophily, Torkington invited his readers to figure out how to create “serendipity.” One information-technology specialist described a feature he would add to Facebook called “the Stretch,” which would help students “find a group of people a little different” from themselves. Someone else brought up the online book cataloger LibraryThing’s UnSuggester, which identifies the book least likely to share a library with the book you mention.”

Fame! (David Pogue, do you read the magazine? Do you want me to send you a copy?)

The best part – usually, Tim and I come across LibraryThing mentions from advance warning, vanity searches online, or emails from readers quick on the uptake. This one was great because we both found it on our own, and independently!*

*I make do with the online version during the week, but reading the Sunday New York Times in print is luxury. Even if it takes the whole day to read – picking up and putting it down to run errands, answer emails, make dinner, sew Christmas stockings (I’m a holiday/domestic genius today) – and if that means I don’t make it to the Magazine until 10:30pm, it’s worth it. Particularly worth it when I happen across LibraryThing on the bottom of page 52. As Tim said, “I was just reading along, and thinking ‘this would be a good place to mention Libr—OH MY GOD!'”

Labels: 1

Thursday, December 7th, 2006

AbeBooks.com scores, LibraryThing assists

Congratulations to AbeBooks.com, named one of the fifty top ecommerce sites by Internet Retailer magazine. Their category included iTunes, Netflix and SimplyAudioBooks.

As many of you know, I sold AbeBooks a 40% stake in LibraryThing back in May—I retain the rest—and LibraryThing and Abe have been working together since. Apparently Abe was picked for its focus on uncluttered findability and… for the investment in LibraryThing!

From the article:

“LibraryThing is a fantastic tool for avid book readers and collectors and may be even more sophisticated than the community features of “the Big Kahuna” of online bookselling, Amazon.com, says Sucharita Mulpuru, senior retail analyst at Forrester Research Inc. ‘The tags seem more relevant,’ she adds, ‘and the lists seem more germane to book lovers than the random lists that often show up on other user-generated content sites.'”

Apologies for recent (relative) silence. Chris, Abby and I met for the first time in months, and we emerged reinvigorated, well-fed, and with some clear short-term objectives: author enhancement, wish lists (dammit), search bugs and a blog-o-licious surprise.

Labels: 1

Monday, December 4th, 2006

Slashdotted

Wondering why the site is crushingly slow? The UnSuggester was written up in Slashdot this morning, and the traffic is unbelievable.

So – go get a cup of coffee or hot chocolate (it snowed here in Boston last night, so that’s what I’m doing) and surf something else for a bit, read some of those books, or even ponder doing some work – and give us a chance to catch up!

Labels: 1

Monday, December 4th, 2006

Back from Victoria

Yesterday I completed a three-day odyssey to Victoria for the Abebooks.com Christmas Party. Although Abe owns 40% of LibraryThing, they were 100% hospitable. I could tell what a fun company it was, even before the liquor started flowing.

I also enjoyed the company of Anirvan, Charlie and Giovanni* of BookFinder, and even managed to listen in on a conversation with Google. (As someone remarked before the call, it was “like calling God.”)

I didn’t have much time to work on the site (but minor tweaks to widgets, catalog), except on planes, where I lacked wifi, but managed to rack up a few blog posts like this one, pushing for a fun library catalog. Thanks to Abby and Chris sending out CueCats and fixing bugs while I was gone.

*Later they played “guess who?” with BookFinder baby pictures. As a new dad—which makes me highly sensitive to baby pictures—I have to say: Giovanni was one cute baby! (Second to Liam, of course.)

Labels: 1

Wednesday, November 29th, 2006

A small plug for Wordie

Fellow Portland Mainer John McGrath, of Squirl, hacked together Wordie, social cataloging and social networking for words. Basically, you “catalog” words and arrange them in lists (eg., my products named after their place of origin). If two users share a word, that connects them. It’s a deeply silly idea, but I love that he did it.

PS: Wordie is now included among LibraryThing’s “also on” list, available from your profile.

Labels: 1

Monday, November 27th, 2006

Small features and bug-fixes

I hope everyone enjoyed their Thanksgiving as much as we did. With all the tryptophan in our systems, we didn’t make any major progress over the holiday. But we chipped away at some lesser features and bugs, in between courses:

  1. Groups now sport RSS feeds for recent messages. We plan to add feeds for your groups, your posts, etc.
  2. Tag pages now offer feeds for the most recent books tagged X in your library. They are also available when you look at a tag in your catalog too.
  3. LibraryThing widgets are now available in the Latin-1 character set (UTF-8 remains the default). If you have a blog in Latin-1, and a lot of non-English books, widgets now work.
  4. LibraryThing’s universal import feature now accepts raw, encrypted CueCat data, so you can scan your books away from an internet connection.
  5. The “all books” links on tag pages (eg., biography) is much faster now. (It’s not always fast, but it won’t take five minutes.)
  6. The same goes for “recently tagged X” RSS feed; it’s faster on high-frequency tags. I don’t think many of you were watching the most-recent “fiction” tags, but Google and Technorati were, and all the “database churning” was slowing the site down.
  7. Chris may have solved a major forum bug—the “Bermuda triangle” bug, where one message in 50 or 100 gets inexplicably lost. Cross your fingers and hope he’s right.

Labels: 1

Monday, November 20th, 2006

LibraryThing integrates with Shaman Drum

LibraryThing now integrates with Shaman Drum, the legendary independent bookshop in Ann Arbor, MI. Edit your profile, check a checkbox (down at the bottom) and your work page will sport availability and pricing information from Shaman Drum and a link to their site.

Right now, it’s just Shaman Drum. But the program is open to any bookstore. So long as you have a decent inventory system, it should be a snap. We’ve published participation details on our other blog. I’m going to approach a few, but feel free to let your local bookstore know about it.

If you’ve spent time in Ann Arbor, you know that Shaman Drum is the best bookstore in town, and one of the best independents in the country. It doesn’t exactly lack for competition, with the flagship Borders store across the street and the Dawn Treader one street farther. I went to grad school in Ann Arbor, and Shaman Drum was practically a second home. I’m so glad the fine folks who run the place were receptive to my idea.

Labels: 1

Saturday, November 18th, 2006

Germans: Swap English books

An eighth swap site has set themselves up to integrate with LibraryThing—this time with a twist: Bookswapper.de is for Germans—you need to have a German address—to swap books in English.

I think it’s a great idea. For someone like me, living near a good library and two or three good bookstores, swapping doesn’t necessarily make that much sense. When I weigh the mailing and bother costs against the costs of buying or borrowing a book, I usually choose the latter. But it would make a lot of sense for, say, French books, which can’t be found near me.* By catering to residents of Germany (Germans and a lot of expats) who read English, Bookswapper makes easy the satisfying of wants that otherwise would take a lot of effort to satisfy.

About the site, the creators, Kata and Resi write:

“The makers of bookswapper.de are two real people, not some corporation. And bookswapper.de wasn’t born in an office building but in our home, on a sofa, beneath overflowing bookshelves.”

Amen to that.

Note: The original rules didn’t anticipate a site like this, so I’ve decided to list Bookswapper.de second in LibraryThing.de and last in all other LibraryThings.

PS: I fixed a bug that was preventing LibraryThing from seeing everything our swap-site partners had. Numbers have jumped!

Labels: 1

Saturday, November 18th, 2006

8,388,608 books—sort of

Last night LibraryThing hit 8,388,608 books. That’s not books in LibraryThing—which stands at 7,268,540—but books ever in LibraryThing, including ones later deleted and some shadows. You might not think it, but 8,388,608 is a significant number. It’s half of 224, the largest number you can store in three bytes. It’s also the limit for MySQL’s “signed medium integer.” It’s 111111111111111111111111. The drawers are full of ones and there ain’t no twos.

Anyway, we hit the brick wall last night. I had previously expanded the book number field, but I forgot to change the databases that store some related metadata and reviews. So, last night, you couldn’t add a book, and this morning you couldn’t review one.

I’m really sorry about this. We’re good to go now. We won’t hit another wall until 8.4 billion books.

Interestingly, the same thing happend to Slashdot last week. Even Homer nods.

PS: I also fixed a bad problem with “search all fields.” Some queries ran quickly but some took ten or twenty minutes, by which time the user has generally gone on to better things (after re-running the query a dozen times which, let me tell you, doesn’t help much). It turns out MySQL was making periodic mis-guesses about which index to use. Somehow the index with eight million integers looked better than the one with a few hundred strings.

Labels: 1