Archive for the ‘1’ Category

Tuesday, October 10th, 2006

YouTube and LibraryThing: Doing the math

If YouTube is worth $1.65 billion, and has 34 million visitors per month, is LibraryThing, with 1.29 million visitors per month, worth $62 million?

No. Anyway, how a “visitor” got to be worth $50 is beyond me. I’m a big YouTube visitor, and all I’ve done is suck down free bandwidth watching funtwo play the Pachelbel Canon and that George Washington rap, not to mention watching John Stewart clips that are probably not authorized and therefore part of YouTube’s enormous legal downside.

See the Message from Chad and Steve. I can’t decide how I feel about that message—amused or icky.

UPDATE: The only video tagged “LibraryThing” on YouTube is Richard Wallis of Talis demonstrating the LibraryThingThing. Pretty nice explanation, actually.

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Monday, October 9th, 2006

Super-sprøde!

I’m under the impression that the Danish sprøde, crispy, also means cool, or maybe cute. I know this–if I know this–from the song Super-sprøde, which (my beloved) Boston band Freezepop wrote for their Danish fans.* It is therefore my only word of Danish.

So, let me use this word to praise Ottox, who almost single-handedly translated LibraryThing into Danish, tranlating over 1,000 words, phrases and paragraphs, making him also the top translator overall. Thank you Ottox; you’re super-sprøde. I, and all future Danish LibraryThingers, thank you. You’re crispy as they come.

In other news, I’m back from the Frankfurt Book Fair, and working on the site again. I added host of languages—Bulgarian, Basque! (complete list)—and will be fleshing out some of the translation and “internationalization” features and, together with Abby, getting the word out to all the non-English language bloggers who’ve covered LibraryThing in the past.** With luck, LibraryThing can be as big a success in other languages as it’s been in English, and the “collective intelligence” of Bretons and Frisians will end up making the site better for Beantowners and Fogtowners as well.

UPDATE: I should similarly congratulate bookerij, who, while not SINGLEHANDEDLY translating Dutch, has done the lion’s share, as well as that of some other languages. Indeed, this morning, I awoke to discover Bookerij had 1081 edits, to Ottox’s 1080. That CAN’T be a coincidence!

UPDATE 2: The co-director of their recent video Parlez-vous Freezepop is a long-time, loyal LibraryThinger. Wow! Small world.

*Not a great song. I recommend “Duct Tape My Heart,” “Bike Thief,” “Science Genius Girl.” They combine an extremely cold form–not one I otherwise listen to–with warm, humane lyrics. Abby does not, I think, agree.
**Yes, author improvements are next.

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Thursday, October 5th, 2006

LibraryThing in your language

Update 1: LibraryThing.de is launched. No more subdomains for the Germans!

Update 2: Abby added Czech, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Finnish. Except for Czech–where we now tie into the Czech national library–the others lack their own library. Of course, major academic collections and the Library of Congress have considerable holdings in these languages.

Less than a week ago, I let a new feature sneak in. Members were invited to help translate LibraryThing into half-a-dozen languages (German, French, Dutch, Norwegian, Welsh, Catalan and Turkish)*. URLs for each of the language-sites were posted. Untranslated parts appeared in light yellow, with a link on each page to a simple translation form.

The whole thing has taken off beyond our wildest dreams. LibraryThing has a LOT of text. Even so, German reached 75% in a single day. To our surprise, even big paragraph-sized hunks went quickly. It probably didn’t hurt that we posted “top translator” statistics for each language; Thingamabrarians unite altruism and competitiveness to an astouding degree. It proves what I’ve come to believe. “Social software” is 50% social, and you people are simply amazing.

Since then we’ve been making more pages translateable**. There’s been a lot of vigorous discussion on the general translation group, and on each language’s group. We introduced some new languages–Spanish, Italian, Portuguese (Brazilian now, Portuguese soon), Swedish, Danish, Irish). When I get back from tonight–I’m at the Frankfurt Book Fair–I’ll bring a dozen or so more live (Czech, Latvian, Lithuanian, etc.).

Go ahead and see the current list, with percentages.

Translating is the first step in a more comprehensive “internationaliation” of the site. We’ve also made progress on this, including fixing many (but not all) character set problems for newly-retrieved books, and adding new libraries, including a number in Germany itself. Note that previously-entered books still mostly use HTML entities for character, not UTF8. This will be changed soon.

It’s been remarkable seeing it develop. Cheers to all who’ve been helping out!

That’s all I can write now. My German hotel is rooking me something terrible on the internet service, and I need to get down to the Fair. I’ll update this message later, with more details.

*The list was deliberately mixed. Welsh in particular was a nod to LibraryThing’s unexpectedly strong Welsh continent—including three Welsh blog profiles. I feel that small, threatened languages like Welsh can get a lot out of LibraryThing, insofar as social networking helps unite scattered speakers, and
**Including the list of 500 MARC-specification languages. The system considers all “snippets” equally important, so that hit the percentages hard.

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Monday, October 2nd, 2006

A plug for Squirl

Portland, Maine is small and not very tech-focused. There are few web companies, but no “Web 2.0” ones I was aware of of. So it came as something of a surprise to discover a VERY Web 2.0 company that even does cataloging, just like LibraryThing. What are the odds?

Squirl.info helps you keep track of your “collections.” Got a trove of female action figures, PEZ dispensers, panda bear stamps, 45s, Star Wars-enalia, hobo nickels**, ticket stubs, or dead bugs? Put them up on Squirl and show the world. There’s even some social networking built in, and the developers are adding features daily. Now, if you want, you can put your books on Squirl. But this isn’t its strongest suit, and it’s certainly not the focus.

Last week co-founder John McGrath and I met for coffee and hit it off. He’s one talented guy. I really hope Squirl takes off. Alternately, I hope it tanks, he loses his job and he comes to work for LibraryThing. The two ideas are bickering on my shoulders. Anyway, John and I agreed to meet regularly and talk about and critique each others’ sites. I’m expecting a lot of good to come from that.

So, check it out and let us know what you think of it. I admire its aesthetic. LibraryThing could learn from, even if I wouldn’t want to go all-the-way Basecamp like they have. And we should add the ability to take pictures of your books separate from the cover shot. Book collectors would like that, I think.***

Squirl has been added to the “also on” list in your profile, if you want to link accounts, and John has gone ahead and enabled a similar feature over there. Maybe in the future we’re have enough overlap that we can say “People who collect Perrier bottles enjoy reading Proust.” Well, they do.

*It’s even built in Rails!
**Issued during Hobo Joe Junk Pan’s tenure as Secretary of the Treasury. (I don’t get this!)
***Actually, Squirl only allows one picture per item now. I’m betting they allow more soon. It was the main complaint in an otherwise very positive review. That guy also reviews LibraryThing (but did he see all the fields?). Anyway, doing “collectible” books better is a priority for us, and one that our partner, Abebooks.com, can help us with a lot.

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Sunday, October 1st, 2006

One toe in translation

We’re not “announcing” internationalization yet, but you can hear about and start playing with the translation feature here.

Here are some URLs—THEY WILL CHANGE!

http://de.librarything.com (German)
http://fr.librarything.com (French)
http://nl.librarything.com (Dutch)
http://cat.librarything.com (Catalan)
http://no.librarything.com (Norwegian)
http://tr.librarything.com (Turkish)
http://cym.librarything.com (Welsh)

This is obviously not the final list. At this point we’re testing it out, not officially rolling out langauges. For one thing, we have some functionality issues to work out.

PS: As expected, Welsh is actually going somewhere!

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Friday, September 29th, 2006

Six Million Books / Meet Lindsay Lohan in DC?

Six million books. If we weren’t flat-out coding, I’d tell you who put in the six-millionth book and give them a free membership like before. Or maybe a pound of marzipan from Germany.

Going to the National Book Fair tomorrow in Washington, DC? A bunch of Thingamabrarians have organized a meet-up at the Natural History Museum at 2pm. Sounds like great fun. Check out the planning/discussion on Talk.

Abby, Chris and I are sorry we can’t be there. Speaking of meet-ups, is anyone going to be at the Frankfurt Book Fair next week? Abby and I are also in Boston presenting at an academic conference on Tuesday; see Thingology.

In MSM news, we were in OK magazine on the same page as Lindsay Lohan*, the Wall Street Journal mentioned us in an article on “lists”** and the Channel 5 News in Boston—Chet and Nat!—did a story on LibraryThing.

*Our Lohan number is now zero. Our Erdos number remains very high. But what of Kevin Bacon? (Should be low. Bacon was in a Muppets movie, and Lohan did a lot of Disney.)
**It was a good but not spotlighted mention. Alas, we didn’t get the top box spotlight. Also, I was the source for three of the sites they spotlighted—TrixieTracker, RecipeThing and Squirl. Envious? Me?

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Thursday, September 28th, 2006

Import via paste

I’ve added a third way to import data into LibraryThing: a simple paste box. This makes it a lot easier to import from “protected” pages–pages LibraryThing would need your password to “see.” (These include purchases, library checkout summaries and so forth). Just get the “source” for the page (a menu option on all browsers) and cut and paste it into the import page.

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Friday, September 22nd, 2006

Banned bookpile contest

Today marks the beginning of Banned Books Week, and with it, LibraryThing’s latest bookpile contest. Here’s a selection of books from my library that have been banned/censored/challenged at one time or another – let’s see what you all have.

Banned Books Week, according to the American Library Association, has been observed since 1982, and “reminds Americans not to take this precious democratic freedom for granted.” Check out their website for more details. Wikipedia also maintains a list of banned books, and Google even has a page up.

Banned Books Week runs from today (September 23rd) through next Saturday, September 30th, and so does our bookpile contest. So, the rules are the same as usual:

1. Take a photo of your bookpile
2. Upload it to Flickr, tag it with “LTBannedContest”
3. Email me (abbylibrarything.com). Include the URL to the photo(s) on Flickr, and your user name on LT.
4. Do it all by September 30th. We’ll announce the winner on the blog the following day.

One winner gets a free year’s membership to LibraryThing.*

*No hats this time, but here’s proof of the first official LibraryThing Pirate Hat before it was sent all the way to Topper in Nashville.

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Tuesday, September 19th, 2006

Arrr… the pirate bookpile winner

Aye, ’tis late in the day here, so aye, me hope e’eryone has been talkin’ like a pirate today. Aye. (Look, a pirate-speak translator! If only I had seen this earlier today…)

Ahoy, now, the contest winner be announced. Only se’en people entard, but they war steller representati’es. (Me parrot concurs).

So we thank all of you – the pile held together by a bottle of rum, Donogh, (bookpile); the extensive photoshoot on the beach (one of my personal favorites) by Opinicus, (bookpiles); a pirate clock? who has a pirate clock? Argyriou, (bookpile); classic sea travel by brandonw, (bookpile); FTPLYA, (bookpiles) – the end result of looting a ship?; and of course, the clean nautical pile by debra_hamel, (bookpile).

It was indeed a close contest, but we’ve (ok, me, but with input from Tim) decided that the winner is… (drum roll…)

Topper, with an excellent mix of pirate books and pirate background (plus, the Sea Dogs is Portland Maine’s baseball team). So, congrats to Topper, who gets a year’s membership. (And a newspaper pirate hat, if he lives close enough to me – do you?)

Thank you everyone who entered, and be watching for the announcement our next bookpile contest, which will be sooner than you might expect (hint: start gathering your banned books).

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Tuesday, September 19th, 2006

Arrr! Bookins joins the crew

BookinsSwapSimpleBookmoochWhatsOnMyBookshelf

Swap site Bookins has joined our piratical crew—swap sites listing their inventories on LibraryThing, and enabling users to move books back and forth with ease. (See original post.)

Although I am not releasing inventory numbers—I don’t think the sites would want me announcing them—Bookins’ stock and wishlist is a major addition. It’s getting easier and easier to swap your books with LibraryThing and its swap partners. And it’s great to see websites confident enough in their services that they’re willing to be listed alongside their competitors. (Besides LibraryThing users are such book-freaks, they’ll probably end up with accounts on all of them.)

Bookins bills itself as “easy, automated and fair.” Its unique features include an algorithm for assigning points to books, so a new hardcover of Freakonomics is worth more than an old paperback Tom Clancy novel, and a $3.99 flat shipping rate, with package tracking right on the site. Again, it’s nice to see that the dozen or so swap sites aren’t just copying each other, but trying out different ideas.

Although fourth to get their data up for LibraryThing’s use, the founder, Mitchell Silverman, expressed interest very early. The little matter of getting married and going on honeymoon got in the way.

So, congratulations to him, and to LibraryThing/Bookins users!

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Saturday, September 16th, 2006

How libraries are using LibraryThing

I mentioned last week that Karen Burns had made a LibraryThing account for the Shenandoa Public Library, so they could use the blog widget to display new books on their website.

Since then, Karen has set up a bunch of other libraries in her area with LT accounts and widgets for their websites, including: The Atlantic Public Library, The Gibson Memorial Library/Creston Public Library, Southwestern Community College LRC, Anita Public Library, and SWILSA’s own site.

Today, Karen posted a podcast about how she’s been using LibraryThing widgets on library webpages.

Another librarian doing some similar cool stuff with LT is John Klima, who created a LibraryThing account which he uses to recommend books on the teen page of his library’s website (the header of his widget reads “Recommended Books from the YA Librarian”).

In short, we love it. Using the LT widgets like this is clever. It’s eye-catching (who doesn’t like a book cover?) and current (if you choose 5 most recent books added to your LT catalog, for example, it will automatically update on your widget when you add a new book to LT) – all in all, a good way for libraries to show off their new books.

What else? Do you know of any other libraries using LT? I’d love to hear about it.

We think LibraryThing can do even more for libraries. Tim’s been begging libraries to let show you LT data (tags, rating, covers, reviews, etc.) in an OPAC. (WITHOUT fooling around with the OPAC, and without any “technical” help at all. It would all be a short-term “enhanced” mirror on LibraryThing’s servers.) He’s looking in particular to play around with Innovative Interfaces Millennium OPACs, so shoot him an email if you want to join in the fun.

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Monday, September 11th, 2006

Ahoy! Pile the books, matey

Ok, this one’s on short notice, but International Talk Like A Pirate Day always seems to sneak up on you, doesn’t it? So, our newest bookpile contest is, of course, pirate themed.

Pile your books as a pirate would? Pile only pirate books? Books every pirate should read? Books that should walk the plank? That’s all for you to figure out. The possibilites are endless. I just wasted a considerable amount of time digging through the books tagged “pirates” – you can too!

The rules are:
1. Take a photo of your bookpile
2. Upload it to Flickr, tag it with “LTPirateContest”
3. Email me (abbylibrarything.com). Include the URL to the photo(s) on Flickr, and your user name on LT.
4. Do it all by September 18th. We’ll announce the winner on the blog on the day of the festive occasion, September 19th.

One winner gets a free year’s membership to LibraryThing. And a newspaper folded pirate’s hat.*

*Prize hat only offered to winners located within a 5 minute walk of downtown Boston.** All others must fold their own hat. Newspaper not provided.
**Walking time and distance to be judged by Abby. No logic will be used.

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Sunday, September 10th, 2006

Swap info in your library

Following the recent integration between LibraryThing and swap sites, I’ve added an optional “swap” column to your library. It shows the combined available/wanted numbers for the three swap sites that share their information with LibraryThing.

By default, the column is hidden. The checkbox to turn it on is also available from the “edit” control in your catalog, and on all swap pages.

Or just go ahead and click here to turn it on.

Improvements: In the future it might make sense to allow you to show totals from only the sites you belong to. And we plan to integrate swapping deeply into the upcoming “collection” feature, so you can see what you’re swapped, what’s on it’s way, etc.

PS: Clicking on the swap column toggles it between sorting by top available and top wanted.

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Saturday, September 9th, 2006

Arrr! Another swap site

SwapSimpleBookmoochWhatsOnMyBookshelf

SwapSimple joins BookMooch and WhatsOnMyBookshelf as preferred swapping sites. The totals—available and wanted—now include all three, to give you more information and choice.

SwapSimple is a general swap site, with books just a part. Their pitch is as a “secure trading” site. As their president, Elliot Hirsch, expressed it to me:

“[W]e designed our trading platform with security as the highest priority—so that our community members would safely and reliably be able to trade everything from paperbacks to $200 textbooks.”

They also tout “integrated shipping, which enables the RECEIVER of a package to pay for shipping, not the sender.” LibraryThing doesn’t favor sites, except for openness and reciprocality, but it’s good to see that the swap sites aren’t all clones—there are some innovative ideas out there.

Arrr! Be open or walk the plank!

SwapSimple’s entry brings collaborating, open sites to three. Three more have expressed interest—including a site I had never known about—and one has commited to it. (The developer is on his honeymoon. Yeah, some excuse!) LibraryThing’s goal is to force openness and give users a wide selection of swap choices. We think it’s working! Those that refuse to allow links will be increasingly alone.

To be fair, I should mention a little about BookMooch and WhatsOnMyBookshelf. Although they went live when the feature went live—and that post was picked up all over the place—I never described the sites specifically:

BookMooch is the newest entry to the fray, and has been garnering a lot of recent attention and traffic. It was started by John Buckman, who also runs the MP3 label Magnatune. Although, again, I’m not going to play favorites with sites, John and I share a lot in terms of development philosophically and I admire his engagement with users. He can be thanked for fine-tuning my original swap-site integration proposal to make it much more useful for everyone involved.

WhatsOnMyBookShelf is the creation of Daniel Ostermayer. WOMB was the first swap site to link to LibraryThing, and has been quick to implement integration. Even cooler, LibraryThing’s use of swap-site wish lists prompted them to create a wish list feature of their own. See? Openness sparks innovation! Lastly, WOMB is the only swap site that goes beyond Amazon; you can search the Library of Congress instead!

Feature update. We’re not pushing swap totals to the catalog pages yet, because I want to make it optional and haven’t designed where you’d choose. Maybe there should be a “show swap data in catalog” checkbox on the swap pages.

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Saturday, September 9th, 2006

Faster work pages

Thanks to Chris, LibraryThing is slowly identifying and overcoming its database problems. A recent change gave us greater stability and reduced “skews” between servers–a source of much hair-pulling.

Although faster overall, some pages got dramatically slower, including the “works” pages. Commonly held works, like the Da Vinci Code, could take 15 or even 30 seconds to load. I solved that problem so that even the “worse” pages now load in 2-4 seconds, given a fast connection.

I imagine some of you just stopped clicking on works pages. It’s safe now!

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Friday, September 8th, 2006

Work multiples

I’ve implemented a long-time request, providing a page that shows you what “works” you have more than one of. For a long time, your fun statistics (yours|someone else’s) page has provided both “Number of books” and “Number of distinct works. In fact, the calculation was subtly wrong. In the process of fixing it, I went ahead and make a work multiples page (yours/someone else’s).

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Tuesday, September 5th, 2006

Anonymous monkey kisses / innovative use by libraries

Wired’s Monkey Bites blog posted a list of Web 2.0 Champions and Stinkers: The People’s Choice. Wired News readers voted on the sites they couldn’t live without, and those that should die. (YouTube and del.ic.ious made both lists.)

We didn’t know about the vote, and didn’t ask people to help us. But we ended up among the winners anyway, alongside titans like Flikr, GMail, Digg and Writerly. In fact, except for Dimewise—which appears to have almost no traffic—we have the lowest traffic of the list, so presumably the fewest users. That we MADE the list is testimony to Thingamabrarian passion.

So, whoever voted for us, thanks!

Meanwhile, library blogs have been talking about how the Shenandoa Public Library is using LibraryThing and Feedroll to display recent acquisitions on their website. (Why not just use a blog widget?) It’s an easy, innovative way to use LT. But it’s sad that these hyper-expensive ILS/OPAC systems can’t handle stuff like this. Hold me back before I rant about the library that wanted to use LibraryThing but couldn’t get access to their ISBNs—their own ISBNs on their own records on their own books—without buying an “XML server.”

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Sunday, September 3rd, 2006

Arrr… Swap books!

The story behind this here.

(Stop blabbing and show me the feature!)

We’ve done something piratical, and we’re giving you the loot.

As you may know, there are sites out there that let users swap books. In fact, there are more than a dozen of them. LibraryThing members are using most of them.

We don’t want to swap books on LibraryThing, but we thought it would be a great idea if LibraryThing integrated with a swap site, letting you know when books were available or wanted, and letting you move books back and forth.

Unfortunately, most swap sites want to be the ONLY one. They want LibraryThing to favor them, in exchange for this or that incentive, and leave their competitors marooned on a desert island.

We think LibraryThing members deserve more respect than that. After weeks of repetitious conversations, we were sick of the regular navy—it was time to turn pirate!

So, we just did it, without asking permission, without deals—and without revenue sharing. We’ve set up the infrastructure to work with all sites and send them all details (I’ve put them up on the Thingology blog.) If swap sites tell us what they have available, and make the links work, they get to join our crew.

Although all swap sites get to participate, we’re putting them in two categories. Sites that let give as well as get—integrating with LibraryThing as we integrate with them—get top billing, with a logo and everything. The others get 9 point text. We hope they’ll be more generous once we start promoting their rivals, and when users who use them as well as LibraryThing demand the same flexibility other swap sites provide.

So far, four sites have said they’ll join our pirate vessel, and two have done the necessary work: BookMooch and WhatsOnMyBookshelf. (Update: In the comments, Read It Swap It says it’s on their list too.) Welcome to these great sites. We applaud your sense of openness and eagerness to serve your customers!

To the rest we’ve sent a cannonball across your bow. Prepare to be
boarded–by your customers.

What’s live now: Book pages show how many books are available and wanted (available/wanted) on participating swap sites.

Click on that and you’ll come to the swap page, showing what’s available site by site. Here’s the page for A Wrinkle in Time (9 available, 1 wanted), Giver (8/4), Hannibal (29/0) or Freakonomics (1/49).**

In the future, we hope to add:

  • True synching. We’ll publish a simple spec, and ask swap sites to help us make it a reality.
  • Wish list integration. We’re going to have wish lists within ten days (dammit!)
  • Summary pages. See at a glance what books on your wish list are available at swap sites, and what books in your library are wanted by others
  • Catalog integration. Whether we put it on the catalog by default depends on how many users end up using the swap services.

*The story: The cognoscenti will recognize Nancy Pearl‘s Book Lust. Book Lust and the other books come with the Librarian Action Figure, of which Ms. Pearl was the model. The same company produces a Blackbeard action figure. So, I did an action-figure mash-up. (It’s unclear what business expense category action figures fall under—office supplies?) Actually, this is the second Nancy Pearl figure I’ve bought. I lost the first figure, but I still have the stack of books. They’re different books than the new ones. I have no idea why, except the first stack seemed to trivialize reading somewhat—Bulgarian Flax was one of the books.
**Lopsided numbers are common. Books seem to be either wanted (Freakonomics) or unwanted (Hannibal). Some swap sites have experimented with basing point values around Amazon prices (which would encourage people to put some real high-value books on, but is otherwise not useful). Others have gone with allowing users to set point values. This seems like it would work, but at the expense of a certain amount of bother. It might also possible to have the system adjust values automatically, either moving them until the market clears (every day Hannibal goes down) or basing them on historical ratio data. Again, people might end up feeling cheated. “What do you mean The Great Gatsby is worth 1/10 point and Madonna’s Sex is worth 1,000? That’s not FAIR!”

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Saturday, September 2nd, 2006

The Hardest Working Man in Publishing

Check out the tag signed on LibraryThing, and look at the top books. Those are weighted by book popularity. Here’s the raw (unweighted) numbers.

The data are clear: Neil Gaiman is a machine! Both lists start with his American Gods and from the full list six of the top seven are by him. From Gaiman’s author page you can tell he’s signed 193 books on LibraryThing. Of all signed books on LibraryThing, 1% were signed by Gaiman. (Compared with only two books signed by J. K. Rowling.) Calculating that maybe a quarter of users employ tags, it stands to reason that his pen has passed over something like 800 books on LibraryThing—and LibraryThing is a speck in the ocean of books. What’s up with this guy?

In related news, I spent Thursday and Friday touring with my wife, in support of her new book Every Visible Thing, doing Toad Hall Books in Rockport, MA and Brookline Booksmith in Brookline, MA.* Touring with a six-month old baby is pretty hard. I spent most of it, including all of the readings, walking around with Liam in a sling. Between the car seat and unfamiliar places, he slept terribly. After two days, all three of us were wrecks. We’ve been recovering since.

So, I’ve decided that—clearly—Gaiman has no children. Damn. I just checked. He has three. As far as I can tell from his blog, he isn’t neglecting them either. I think I’ll go back to bed now.

*Booksmith is an old favorite—Lisa and I used to live around the corner, and Lisa worked there—but Toad Hall was a new discovery for me. They’re tiny, but obviously beloved. And they really go for my wife’s books. In the last year they managed to sell 99 copies of her second book, In the Country of the Young—my favorite but probably her low-seller—apparently by just telling people to buy it. A chain bookstore can’t do that sort of thing.

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Wednesday, August 30th, 2006

Your author gallery

The new author image feature is going well, with 749 author images added so far. That’s enough to introduce your author gallery! (Or see mine.)

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Monday, August 28th, 2006

Happy Birthday LibraryThing!

Today, LibraryThing turns one. Last week we had cupcakes in honor of the five millionth book being added; today, we celebrate with book piles!

The moment you’ve been waiting for—if you check the homepage, you’ll see the regular bookpile has been replaced with ottox’s winning submission, which came complete with a story! It was witty, relevant and brillant. Congrats to him.

We got a really good response to the birthday book pile contest. (So much that we’re inspired to make holiday-book pile contests a regular thing.) It was hard to pick just one to feature on the homepage for today. They were festive, interpretive, celebrations of growing older, and of classic youth. A special mention goes to lilithcat, whose photo was pure genius (hint: read the lined up words in the titles in a line down), but a little too blurry.

The two runners up, who each take home a year’s gift membership, were staffordcastle (look at the first letters of the
book titles
) and, for the delectable combination of wit and photo retouching, Rachael (who also nailed us on a love of cupcakes)!

Thank you to everyone who entered—and to everyone on LibraryThing for reaching this milestone with us.

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Friday, August 25th, 2006

Author photos

Robyn has added a nifty author picture feature. As with many of LibraryThing’s cataloging features, users—that’s you—are encouraged to help.

Here are some of the recently uploaded pictures.

Anyone can add a picture, so long as you stay within the copyright guidelines. If problems arise, users can flag problemmatic pictures. There’s also an author pictures group for discussion.

As you might expect, finding a good, out-of-copyright image of, say, Charles Dickens is easy. Living authors are harder. Sometimes authors explicitly state that a set of pictures is released for promotional use. Flickr is a good source for author signing photos, although you have to be careful about the license. More often, the author (or photographer) needs to be asked. We’re coming up with an image-begging form letter thingamabrarians can send to their favorites.

Without clicking, how many of these can you name?

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Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006

Five million books!


Liam’s mom made the cupcakes.

LibraryThing has hit five million books. We hit four million on July 19. That’s one million books in just over a month!

The 5,000,000th book was Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family by Patricia Volk. It was entered at 4:02pm by cookingthebooks, “a theatre professional” and “Londoner by birth now living in rural Scotland.” Cookingthebooks already has a lifetime account, so we’ve sent a gift account.

More statistics:

  • The five million books fall under some 1,157,797 distinct “works.” (All editions of the Odyssey are counted as a “work.”) There are 1,282,535 distinct ISBNs.
  • LibraryThing users have added 6,930,554 tags to their books.
  • By coincidence, we also hit 70,000 users today. The 70,000th user, jean_luc_carpentier, only entered three books. We gave him a free account too. Why not?
  • If LibraryThing were compared to a traditional library–let the lovin’ begin!*–it would now be the 34th largest library in the United States, edging out the University of Virginia (source: ALA Fact Sheet 22).
  • Less than 1% of the books in LibraryThing are by J. K. Rowling.
  • More statistics here.

We’re having a party at headquarters tonight. We plan to have a go at some of the over-buy beer from the LibraryThing barbeque, plus cupcakes and pizza. We’ll post pictures when we’ve got them.

With apologies to all, we’re going to be insufferable from now until August 29th, when LibraryThing turns one year old. Although the blogosphere made LibraryThing–which has never advertised** or hired a PR firm–we’re still hoping for a New York Times article, or a mention on Slashdot or NPR. — Nancy Pearl! David Pogue! Where are you?! — We figure the confluence of five million books and our first anniversary might be the best shot we get.

ABBY SEZ: Remember the Birthday book pile contest!

*As has been pointed out, LibraryThing is not a “real” library. You can’t borrow books from it, for starters. We do, however, think LibraryThing has something to contribute to discussions going on in the library world. We’ll leave that for the Thingology blog, however, and to the handful of speaking events we’re scheduled at.***
**We did do Google Adsense for a few weeks. Meh.
***Check out where the Wisconsin Library Association is having it’s annual conference! Abby and I divvy up things so that she gets most of the library events, but nobody told me it was going to be at a water park!

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Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006

Add to LibraryThing from… anywhere

While we nervously await LibraryThing’s five-millionth book here’s another small but important feature.

Announcing a new way to get books into LibraryThing. Just use this URL, changing the ISBN to the one you want to add, or using a keyword search instead.*

http://www.librarything.com/addbooks.php?search=0066212898
http://www.librarything.com/addbooks.php?search=Every+Visible+Thing

That’s pretty pointless, right? Well, for YOU, yes. But OTHER websites can implement the URL, making it easy for their users to add a book to their LibraryThing account. We’re thinking particularly of swap sites*, book review sites, even–we hope–some forward-thinking libraries. Programmers can use it to make fascinating new bookmarklets and plugins.

It’s fairly straightforward. If you’re not signed in, or not a user, it will route you through the sign up/in screen. The URL can also specify one of LibraryThing’s 50+ sources, like so:

http://www.librarything.com/addbooks.php?search=0066212898&source=Amazon.ca
http://www.librarything.com/addbooks.php?search=0066212898&source=Library+of+Congress

If you don’t specify one, it will route you through a screen where you can set your default. If you’re signed in, have a default library and search for something unique–like an ISBN–it’s a one-step process***. If you search for something with multiple results, you’ll get a chance to pick one.

Now, as MMcM pointed out, this will be a much better feature once LibraryThing has explicit “wish lists.” That’s coming soon, and when it does, we’ll update this feature for it. But we’ve been sitting on this feature for a while, and we thought we’d put it out there to see what people would do with it.

If run a website and you end up implementing these URLs let us know and we’ll do what we can to help your users too.

*Those are for my wife’s new novel, which won the Elle Reader’s Prize this month. I’m very proud of her.
**More on this topic later.
***Someone tell Amazon’s patent lawyers!

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Monday, August 21st, 2006

Backup and import from Vox / Import synching

Backup/import from Vox. SixApart‘s LiveJournal is a favorite of LibraryThingers, who even formed their own LibraryThing community (338 members!).

SixApart’s new “personal blogging” platform, Vox, is also drawing some interest. Vox has a nice, but very rudimentary book tracking feature. We don’t think of Vox as a competitor. They’re more of a “gateway drug.” 🙂

To seed the addiction, I have created a Vox backup / import feature. LibraryThing/Vox users can keep their accounts better in synch. And non-LibraryThing users get a simple way to backup their Vox books. And, when you’ve done that, why not throw them into LibraryThing and see what happens? (LibraryThing will help you create an account in the process.)

The Vox import isn’t instant. Vox uses a proprietary number for each book, so LibraryThing needs to “go into” each book page, searching for the links to Amazon (which have ISBNs in them). To avoid annoying Vox’s servers, we fetch one page per second. So a Vox library of 60 books will take a minute to load. We have prepared suitable entertainment to hold you over.

From what we gather of Mena and her team, SixApart believes in openness and making their users happy. We hope they feel as we do: You own your data. Vox users should be able to make backups and cross-list their books. But if Vox shuts us off, we’re counting on the Vox/LibraryThing and LiveJournal/LibraryThing community to rise up and take to the barricades! Aux armes citoyens!

Synch your books. I’ve improved the import feature. You can now choose only to import NEW books. Thus, LibraryThing now “synchs” with offline cataloging applications. I only realized how useful this would be when I started scanning in books with Booxter.* I thought “Wow, I need a synch feature!” Hit me; this feature should have come months ago!

*Booxter is a nice ap. Not quite as beautiful as Delicious Library, but, like LibraryThing, Booxter cares about good data, for example mining some libraries for data. Raise your hand if you think LibraryThing and Booxter should be friends!

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