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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