Archive for March, 2009

Monday, March 30th, 2009

LibraryThing at Computers In Libraries 2009

LibraryThing, your favorite makers of libraries in computers, will be at Computers in Libraries this week. We’ll be passing out free stuff and showing off our new LibraryThing for Libraries feature so if you’re at CIL, stop by booth 214 and say hi. Unfortunately, we’re rhino-less this time, but we do have T-shirts and laptop stickers (and Tim.)

Our new feature allows our catalog enhancements to run even on items that don’t have an ISBN. Check it out in action on this 1948 edition of Tom Jones, or this 1937 edition of David Copperfield

There’s no ISBN on those items, but our code is still smart enough to load the right tags and recommendations info. It uses a combination of our new What Work API and the LibraryThing Connector (the JavaScript that powers LTFL) to pull title and author information out of the catalog’s HTML and then match it against our system. This new feature should help our academic libraries in particular, since they tend to have a lot of older pre-ISBN books.

Labels: apis, CIL, CIL2009, conference, librarything for libraries, rhinos

posted by Casey @1:15 pm 0 Comments »
  • Tweet about LibraryThing at Computers In Libraries 2009

    • Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

    March Bonus Batch of Early Reviewer Books

    This month we have a bonus batch of Early Reviewer books—13 different books and a grand total of 405 copies to give out.

    Make sure to sign up for Early Reviewers. If you’ve already signed up, *please* check your mailing address and make sure it’s correct.

    Then request away! The list of available books is here:
    http://www.librarything.com/er/list

    The deadline to request a copy is Friday, April 3rd at 6PM EST.

    Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to the US, Canada, the UK, Israel, Australia, France, Germany, Argentina, Brazil and Spain. Make sure to check the flags by each book to see if it can be sent to your country. Oh, and check out the Spanish language book!

    Thanks to all the publishers participating this month!

    Faber and Faber St. Martin’s Griffin Broadway Books
    MSI Press HarperCollins The Permanent Press
    Hachette Book Group Ballantine Books Spiegel & Grau
    Random House

    Labels: early reviewers, LTER

    posted by Abby @6:24 pm 0 Comments »
  • Tweet about March Bonus Batch of Early Reviewer Books

    • Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

    Review integrity, reviewer freedom and pay-for-review marketing

    The rise of book-based social networking has spawned some bottom feeders. Top of my list are companies that charge hopeful authors for positive reviews, which are then owned by the company, edited by them and posted mechanically on multiple social networks and commercial sites over the web, on Twitter and so forth.

    LibraryThing was hit by one such outfit, who charge $425 for reviews posted to us, as well as Google Books, Fetchbook and WorldCat.org. (A lower payment gets you on Amazon and some of our competitors.) This organization has posted 94 reviews—$39,950 in theory—and wouldn’t you know, all of them were five-star reviews!*

    At the same time, we have nothing against publishers and authors getting their books out there. LibraryThing does that, and although we don’t change anyone anything, we don’t even have a problem with that. Nor we we have a problem with requiring people to review a book—it’s requiring or otherwise producing only favorable reviews that bothers us. We want members and visitors to feel confident that reviews on LibraryThing aren’t manipulation and spam. We want to be a community for readers, not a dumping ground for spam.

    Fortunately, this is still a small problem. But it’s not one we’re going to allow. And I’d like to see if I can get other sites to agree.

    So I’ve added the following to our Privacy Policy/Terms of Use:

    Review integrity

    LibraryThing allows members to participate in “book give-away” programs designed to give readers books and foster reviews. But we forbid reviews by or in the service of “pay-for-review” schemes.

    The difference is a tricky one, so we have a number of requirements:

    • Reviewers must be free to write what they think. They may not be required or rewarded to write positive reviews—or punished for writing bad ones.
    • Reviewers must own and control their reviews, granting other parties only a non-exclusive license.
    • Reviewers must act on their own volition, cross-posting their review when and where they want. Companies that sell services based on how many sites get reviews are explicitly forbidden from using LibraryThing.
    • Reviewers must not be paid for their reviews, except in free books and similar non-monetary perks.

    We are going to be writing to other sites in our space, seeing if we can get anyone else to sign on with these rules, or ones like them.

    Come discuss it on Talk.

    *I’m going to avoid giving them publicity—all of which is “good.” They have been removed; they were already in violation of our personal and organizational-use rules.

    Labels: review integrity, terms of service

    posted by Tim @5:00 pm 0 Comments »
  • Tweet about Review integrity, reviewer freedom and pay-for-review marketing

    • Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

    Polaris support for LibraryThing for Libraries

    Following on yesterday’s announcement of Koha support, we’re happy to announce that LibraryThing for Libraries catalog enhancements are now available for Polaris OPACs.

    First off, we probably owe the Polaris people a public apology for this being such a long time coming. They first contacted me about integrating LTFL in their systems a year and a half ago, when we only had 5 or 6 customers. One of their libraries had asked about it, and as a company, they’ve decided to be incredibly responsive to the cutting edge things their libraries want to do. They’ve kept pushing us (on behalf of their customers), even as technical and non-technical obstacles (mostly non-technical) have prevented us from seeing it through.

    It’s a great corporate philosophy, and far too rare in the library world. Now that everybody takes our phone calls and wants to work with us, they deserve a lot of credit from being down from day one. It’s unsurprising to me that they scored among the highest customer satisfaction of any commercial ILS vendor in a recent poll; clearly service is a high priority for them.

    Want to see the catalog enhancements in action? Here are a couple of examples from our first Polaris customer to go live, Glendora Public Library: (dogs), (fantasy). Several more Polaris libraries are testng it.

    Because of the way Polaris’ system works, you currently have to press the LibraryThing button to get the content for a particular item. In the next version of Polaris, not only with LTFL be installable without editing any template files, but there will be no LibraryThing button; our content will load when somebody clicks on the “full display” button. So far, we haven’t added review support, but we’re happy to do it if there are interested customers.

    Currently we have two installation options: the first only requires a single line of code to be added to your templates, but it does the LibraryThing button instead of loading with the details. This is what Glendora is using. The other installation option (provided by an engineer at Polaris) requires more involved editing of their templates but makes the current version of Polaris work with LTFL like the forthcoming version will.

    Interested in getting LibraryThing for Libraries for your Polaris catalog? Contact us through the Interested? form.

    Labels: librarything for libraries, LTFL

    posted by Casey @11:01 pm 0 Comments »
  • Tweet about Polaris support for LibraryThing for Libraries

    • Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

    Authors: Free barcode scanner or tshirt for all!

    I love authors. I love them so much I married one! LibraryThing has a whole host of special features to encourage authors to join, and make the most of the site.

    So it comes as a surprise to hear LibraryThing called anti-author. (What we are, is against pay-for-review schemes, and authors who think LibraryThing is for posting advertisements and not engaging with anyone.)

    So, we’re going to prove it. Until May 1, authors willing to join up, become LibraryThing authors and add some books, get a free CueCat barcode scanner, shipped for free. If you’d rather get a t-shirt, we’ll send one of those instead.

    The rules:

    • This applies to new members, or members with less than fifty books added today.
    • Your LibraryThing author page has to show at least 10 members with one of your books.
    • You have to add fifty books to qualify for the scanner.
    • Or: If you have 100 members with one of your books or have had a book on LibraryThing Early Reviewers, we’ll send you the scanner before you catalog fifty books.

    How to do it:

    1. Sign up for an account.
    2. Send an email to Abby at info@librarything.com to become listed as an official LibraryThing author.
    3. When you meet the rules, send Abby your address and we’ll send you the CueCat and/or t-shirt.

    More for authors on LibraryThing. There are a number of other ways authors can use LibraryThing:

    • If you’re interested in providing copies of your new books for LibraryThing members to review, check out Member Giveaways or have your publisher participate in Early Reviewers.
    • If you’d like to give your fans a chance to chat with you, sign up for an Author Chat.
    • If you have upcoming readings or events, you can add them to LibraryThing Local.

    UPDATE: Let us catalog your library! If you are a really “big” author, a LibraryThing Flash Mob Cataloging mob will come to your house and catalog all your books for you! We won’t tell anyone where you live, bother the cat or steal the silverware. You get a high-quality catalog entered by librarians and book nerds. We get the fun of cataloging an interesting library. (Yes, we think this stuff is fun.)

    We tried to get this offer to Jon Updike, after doing his church, but he died soon after. (Jeremy and the Legacy Library crew REALLY hopes his library is not broken up and unrecorded, like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr’s!) We’ve also offered to do Neil Gaiman’s, so far without success. I now extend our invitation to Steven King, a fellow Mainer, and indeed close neighbor to Katya, librarian and flash-mob cataloging’s “original cataloging” maven. Anyone got King’s email? (Rhetorical question.)

    Labels: author chat, authors, cuecat, cuecats, early reviewers, LTER

    posted by Tim @4:10 pm 0 Comments »
  • Tweet about Authors: Free barcode scanner or tshirt for all!