We’ve launched the LibraryThing for Libraries demo site. After CIL we pushed everything back a week to work on speed, add fielded imports, and make some interface changes to the tag browser.*

Here’s the demo site: http://www.librarything.com/forlibraries/

So far we have about two dozen libraries and consortia interested enough to send us ISBNs. Over the next few days we’ll be getting back to people with directions on testing the service out.

Sad to say, but we’re still trying to figure out pricing. Here’s my thinking, which ends in aporia.

• It seems right to tie the price to the number of ISBNs that LibraryThing can potentially enhance. For public libraries, this is about 50-70% of ISBNs. For academic libraries it’s more like 25-50%. So, my thought was to make it $.02 for the first 25,000 ISBNs, and $.01 after that. (The two levels try to get at the shape of interest in a given ISBN; it’s more valuable to enhance Harry Potter than some obscure book.)
• So, a small city in New England (pop. 75,000), has 84,612 ISBNs. 57,312 (67%) are enhanceable by LibraryThing. That comes to $823/year. That seems like a very good deal.
• Clearly a consortium needs to pay more than a single library with the same number of ISBNs. After all, the consortium will have multiple copies of the item spread around the various consortium members. But a consortium of fifty libraries won’t actually have fifty copies over every ISBN, and there ought to be some “bulk” savings for them anyway.
• This lead me to charging consortia a multiple of the square root of the number of members. So, for example, a library with 284,742 enhanceable ISBNs would pay $3,097, and an identical consortium with 28 members would pay $3,097 x SQRT(28) = $16,390.
• Then you have the “branch” problem. A large city signed up for a beta test. They have 270,002 ISBNs—$2,950. But they have some 30 branches, a population of 600,000, and a library budget of $30 million dollars! This doesn’t work.

So, I think I need to get total collection or circulation figures, and multiply them by the percentage of ISBNs we can enhance.

I wish we could expand our pay what you want program…

(Money photo courtesy Jessica Shannon on Flickr, under Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0)

*Among other things, we normalized ISBNs, moving from storing a 13-character string in every table that needed them, to storing a four-byte integer tied to a table that mapped the integers to ISBN. Normalizing textual data happens all the time here, but normalizing something already so compacy and inherently unique was force on us by the dawning realization that we’re going to be handling dozens or hundreds of millions of bibliographic records. So now LTFL tosses around arbitrary ISBN keys like mad, without ever knowing what ISBN they represent. O brave new world…

Today was a full day—New York, radio, publishers and bug-fixing. In reverse order:

Bug fixing. I finally slew the bug that sent work copies off into la-la land. I also found why book-swap data was screwed up. It turns out Bookmooch’s data feed is now too large for PHP’s 40MB default memory space, and this was short-circuiting other feeds. Wow—way to go Bookmooch. I increased it to 80MB until I can rewrite it to load the data in pieces, and reloaded everything. I also fixed a matching algorithm, so that http://www.librarything.com/title/the_perfect_store goes to The Perfect Store, not The Great Gatsby. I’ll be working the rest of the night, except when I have to put my laptop through the x-ray.

Publishers. I gave a talk to the Association of American Publishers. Twenty minutes is too little time, starting from zero and trying to get to what’s “happening” with social software and books. But I think I got across the central message—(1) I’m crazy*, (2) LibraryThing is orders larger and more interesting than its competitors, (3) stop marketing at people and get in the conversation, (4) get involved with LibraryThing.

It certainly would be nice if the publishing world were as friendly to LibraryThing as the library world.

New York. I flew into JFK this morning (6am departure, ouch!). I was there on business, but, since I work all day long, I don’t feel guilty spending the afternoon at The Strand, diligently confirming they do, in fact, have eighteen miles of books. Today’s haul: Richard Westfall‘s The Life of Isaac Newton and Adam Cohen‘s The Perfect Store: Inside eBay.

Radio. I appeared on Public Radio International‘s Radio Open Source. They were doing a show on David Weinberger’s upcoming book Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. I’ve blogged about David and his book before. To repeat: It’s excellent. Weinberger, a true Miscellaneous Man**, explores how digitization and mass-collaboration, -filtering and -classification (eg., tagging) are changing knowledge, and its relation to authority. After an introduction with David, host Christopher Lydon brought in super-librarian Karen Schneider, then me, to chime in on the topic.

I pointed out how tagging worked for tags like chick lit, queer, glbt and lgbt. I also tried to get at a nagging issue for me—does “knowledge” change, or do we just get new perspectives and ways of getting at it? I’m happy to see the realm of debate, uncertainty, personal choice and personal understanding expand—for us to “swim in the complex,” as David writes. But I won’t give up on a small, hard (Pluto-like?) core of truth. More on that later.

OpenSource streams at 7pm tonight. After that, the audio—direct or podcast—will be available here.
*I love explaining to people that LibraryThing has no advertising or funded promotions, and doesn’t push affiliate links, but is profitable. On a more personal note, it was unreal being back among “publishing types.” I never mentioned it, but I used to work at Houghton Mifflin. I felt at home in uncomfortableness, as it were.
** Who else has a PhD in Philosophy and wrote jokes for Woody Allen? He’s more varied than my junk drawer!