We’re thrilled to announce the public launch of BookPsychic, a new way to get your library’s books into the hands of eager readers.

BookPsychic is an easy and fun personal recommender system for library patrons—like Netflix or Amazon, but all about what’s in and what’s popular at your library.

BookPsychic is simple to use. You can get to it from within your library catalog or at BookPsychic.com. As you rate books and DVDs there, BookPsychic learns more and more about your tastes, and comes up with recommendation lists. And everything shown or recommended is available at your library. Simple “bookstore” genres, like “Recent fiction” and “History,” help you zero in on the books you want.

We’ve partnered with Portland Public Library, in Portland, Maine, as the first library to go with BookPsychic. You can read their blog post or go straight to their BookPsychic. Please note that the recommendations you get will come from Portland Public Library’s holdings.

BookPsychic works without any sign-up process at all. To save your ratings and recommendations, however, we’ve made it easy to sign up or sign in through Facebook, Twitter and LibraryThing. If you’ve rated books elsewhere, you can import them from Facebook, LibraryThing or Goodreads. For more details about how BookPsychic works, see the About BookPsychic page.

BookPsychic works with all libraries and all library systems, and is easy to set up and cheaper than you’d think! If you’re interested in getting BookPsychic for your library, drop Abby a line at abby@librarything.com. We can set you up on the double.

Here’s a nifty logo. Chris (ConceptDawg) was aiming for a certain “Bewitched” flavor:

We’d like to thank our Board for Extreme Thing Advances for smoke-testing the service in the last few days. While BookPsychic was designed for libraries, LibraryThing members will quickly realize that it presents some interesting possibilities for LibraryThing itself. Come over to Talk and let’s discuss them.

Labels: BookPsychic, libraries, recommendations