Archive for May, 2009

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

May Bonus batch of Early Reviewer books

This month we have a special bonus batch of Early Reviewer books! The May Bonus batch includes 7 books and a grand total of 185 copies to give out.

For a special treat, Random House is giving away books from two recent Pulitzer Prize winners. Jon Meacham for American Lion and Elizabeth Strout for Olive Kitteridge.

First, 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, June 5th at 6PM EST.

Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country. This batch of books can be sentonly to members in the US. Make sure to check the flags by each book to see if it can be sent to your country.

Thanks to all the publishers participating this month!

Random House Open Letter
Ballantine Books Graphic Arts Center Publishing Company

Labels: bonus batch, early reviewers, LTER, random house

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

Flash-mob in South Carolina

This Saturday, May 30th, the Clemson Montessori School in Clemson, SC will host a flash-mob to catalog their library.

It will start at 9am and go until it ends (probably not later than 3pm). Arrive anytime before lunch and stay an hour or all day! The school will provide morning snacks, coffee, etc. and lunch for helpers.

204 Pendleton Road. Clemson, SC 29631 (just off of US 76).

The catalogers will be behind the white fence in the building nearest the soccer field.

There are lots of books to catalog and the library building has wireless internet so bring your laptops and join us. (We should also have limited access to a couple of desktop computers).

Please let Tricia know if you plan to come (or need more info) via a comment on her profile (hailelib or cmslib29631) or email at pwh@macatea.com

Labels: flash-mob cataloging

Monday, May 25th, 2009

Better statistics, other improvements

I spent the weekend cooking up code, not sausages:

1. Series statistics. By popular demand, the member Series Statistics page can now show your series books you have in context of the complete series. (See talk post.)

2. Awards, characters and places. I’ve added similar statistics pages for three other “Common Knowledge” categories—Awards, Characters, Places. (See talk post.)

I also added series, awards, characters and places stats in your profile* and the “Your Zeitgeist” box on your home page (see talk post.)

3. More Green Checkmarks. Green check-marks, the mark that shows when you have a work, have spread further. They are now appearing on work-page recommendations, recommendation pages and in other members’ catalogs. (See talk post.)

4. Power Edit gets better Previously, you could only Power Edit a page at a time (ie., no more than 100 books at a time). I added a feature to allow you to power-edit all the books in a given result set. So, you can do all your books, all the books that match a particular search, etc.

See the talk post.

5. Message Flagging. I’ve improved message-flagging in Talk, so that members can reverse their flagging, as well as counter-flag a message, if they think it was wrongly flagged. (See talk post.)

I also proposed making the Wikipedia policy “Assume good faith?” an official LibraryThing policy, triggering a lively debate about community norms, just what spam is and so forth. See the talk post.


*Originally high, but I moved it down when members hollered.

Labels: common knowledge, new features, statistics

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

Author interviews posted

Our first two author interviews, first seen in the revamped State of the Thing newsletter, are live on the site itself. The interviews are:

Abby and I enjoyed reading the books—we both read from Bad Mother (thumbs up, but it will tweak you), and Abby read The Song is You (thumbs up)*. Philips’ interview convinced me I should check him out. “A child actor, a jazz musician, a speechwriter, a dismally failed entrepreneur, and a five-time Jeopardy champion” and a huge fan of Pale Fire? Will he come to our next party?

Want to do an author interview? Know someone who might? We’re looking for authors, and we’d rather get great ideas from members than declare open-season on our inboxes from publisher PR types. Email abby@librarything.com about it.

We have a number of other things authors and publishers can “do” with LibraryThing on the about page. We’ll be sprucing it up in time for Book Expo America in New York.


*I think we have to stop saying if we liked a book, as we’ll eventually read one we positively hate and “Check out this interview with Mr-Can’t-Write” probably won’t win us any friends.

Labels: authors, librarything authors, new features

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

New Kindle model released

Labels: humor