Archive for the ‘members’ Category

Monday, April 1st, 2013

Extended: Free accounts for new members

Since the Amazon news broke, we’ve been seeing an influx of Goodreads members checking out the site and adding their books—more than 500,000 so far. So we’ve extended our free accounts offer through Friday midnight. Sign up for a new account and we’ll give you a year’s free membership.

Here’s from the original blog post, describing why—in this “free” world—LibraryThing asks for money, even as little as $1/year.


In the wake of Amazon’s acquisition of Goodreads, we’ve had some blow-back on the fact that LibraryThing charges for a membership to add more than 200 books. In fact, when you go to pay, it’s pay-what-you-want. The money helps pay for the site, and keeps us advertisement-free for members. Also, we believe customers should be customers, with the loyalty and rights of customers, not the thing we sell to our real customers.

However, some people don’t like it. And we want everyone. So, as a test and a welcome, we’re giving out free year’s accounts to everyone who signs up through the end of Sunday Now Friday midnight Eastern. We’ve also upgraded everyone who signed up since 4pm yesterday.

Here’s what the profile comment looks like. You should get it pretty quickly:


Photo by flickr member chamisa flower.

Labels: amazon, members

Friday, October 21st, 2011

LibraryThing Meetup in Boston!

Are you up for a day of bookish enjoyment, food, and LibraryThing socializing? Join us on Saturday, November 12 for a series of meetups in Boston, centered around the Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair, one of the best book fairs in the country!

We’ll begin the day by meeting for brunch at 10 a.m. at Trident Booksellers and Cafe on Newbury Street and stop in at Raven Used Books’ Newbury Street location before the book fair opens at noon (at the Hynes Convention Center).

Commonwealth Books is providing free passes for the book fair, and offering at 15%-off discount to LTers for Saturday, so after we’ve seen the fair we can head downtown during the afternoon for visits there and to the Brattle Book Shop. In the evening, we’ll go out to Cambridge for dinner and visits to Harvard Bookstore and the Raven location on JFK Street.

Help us plan in the Talk thread, and sign up on the wiki page to let us know what meetups you might attend (feel free to come to as many or as few as you like!). We hope to see you in Boston!

Labels: bookstores, boston, meet up, members

Monday, May 16th, 2011

LTers meet, eat, buy books!

On Saturday some members of the 75 Books Challenge for 2011 group met up in Washington, D.C. for a day of book-shopping, refreshments, and conviviality. The day was organized by drneutron, and attended by mrsdrneutron, SqueakyChu, qeboAnneDC, _Zoe_, and norabelle414.

After lunch at BGR Dupont Circle (which looks scrumptious, by the way), they visited Kramer Books & Afterwords for some new-book shopping, before crossing Dupont Circle for used and rare books at Second Story Books (which looks even more scrumptious!). Post-shopping refreshments were enjoyed at Soho Tea and Coffee, where the group documented their “demands” and took a poll:

(Click the images to read the signs).
From left (top picture): norabelle414, qebo, drneutron, SqueakyChu, and _Zoe_

Thanks to drneutron for organizing, and to SqueakyChu, _Zoe_, and qebo for the photos, more of which can be found here and here. And if you’re interested in the 75 Books Challenge for 2011, check out the group page!

Labels: meet up, members

Wednesday, October 13th, 2010

National Book Festival wrap-up

National Book Festival goersBy all accounts the 2010 National Book Festival went of without a hitch or typo. There was good weather, ample food options and the LibraryThing members managed to find each other!

Here are the LTers who got together to hang out IRL*. You can read about their experiences meeting up and seeing authors here.

Thanks to squeakychu (in her awesome custom LibraryThing teeshirt) for organizing!

Back row: gilroy, Tanneitha (peeking over gilroy’s shoulder), drneutron, VoraciousReader, carlym

Front row: SqueakyChu, jmaloney17, veborder

*IRL =  in real life

Labels: meet up, members, National Book Festival

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

Four times as many event listings

Overnight I added 3,364 bookish events to LibraryThing Local.

That more-than quadruples the number of events in LibraryThing Local!

The new events were from Barnes and Noble, Borders, Waterstones UK and Indigo/Chapters stores. Together with IndieBound—already in the system—this covers the largest English-language bookstore chains that also have event listings.

We are, of course, looking for new event sources. Publishers are probably our next stop. But members have been the largest single source of events, and will always be critical, especially for libraries and independent bookstores that don’t use IndieBound event listings.

It should also be said that none of this would be possible if members hadn’t helped us to add LibraryThing venues for all the stores in question, and hook their numbers up to ours. This was critical for our innovative Local Book Search, and we plan to do even more with these linkages in the future.

To add a new event go to LibraryThing Local, or just start here.


PS: This isn’t a coincidence. We’re going to be releasing something related—and big—tomorrow! 🙂

Labels: events, librarything local, local book search, members

Friday, September 18th, 2009

Arr! How LibraryThing went pirate

Talk Like A Pirate Day is over for us now. You can visit the translation at pir.librarything.com.

Chris and I decided to take pirate photos for our author pages. He’s pretty convincing, apart from the inflatable parrot.*

At 5 pm on Friday we jumped the gun on International Talk Like a Pirate Day, sending the whole site into Pirate-talk. (We’ll turn back off tomorrow evening, but click “Turn OFF pirate-speak” to turn it off sooner.)

“LibraryThing in Pirate” was a secret project of the Arr, me hearties! group. Members came up with all the translations. Some of my favorites are the little ones, like “enlarge” translated as “use yer spyglass”, the month January being translated as “January (me britches be cold)” and “Terms of Use” changed to “Rules o’ engagement.” Some like “Finger to the Wind” (for Zeitgeist) take some thought, but it would take a genius to discern that “Wi’ naw halp fram ‘ny matey”—is that Glaswegian?—means “Automatic.”

Arr, me hearties! was composed of volunteers from the Beta Group who spent the last week going string by string through LibraryThing’s interface, using the same code we use for our non-English sites. We ended up translating some 2,400 bits and pieces, about 44.2% of the site, making it only the 19th most-translated language, just above Albanian. (That sheds some light on how much effort has gone into the near-complete Portuguese, Dutch, French, Catalan and other translations!)

Top translators included readafew, rastaphrog, lorax, Carnophile, sqdancer, <ahttps://blog.librarything.com/wp-content/uploads/pirate/ href=”http://www.librarything.com/profile/conceptDawg”>conceptDawg and me.


For posterity’s sake, I took some screenshots:


*All LibraryThing employees were originally going to take photos of ourselves eating cake, in honor of LibraryThing’s fourth anniversary. (We’re in eight different cities, so we can’t just all eat cake together.) Anyway, Sonya had to miss the meeting where we cancelled this plan, and we forgot to tell her, so she dutifully sent her cake photo. Well, I hope she enjoyed the cake!

Labels: arr, chris, members, Sonya, talk like a pirate day

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

LibraryThing Local explodes

This morning, three days after its official launch, LibraryThing Local passed 9,000 venues. (UPDATE: 10,000 13,000 15,000 16,000.)

In this time some 700 members have entered more libraries, bookstores, fairs and other venues than our closest competitor in this space assembled in ten months of work, drawing mostly on chain bookstores and publicists.

Much remains to be done. New York City looks like it’s been attacked by a swarm of smurf bees, but Athens, Greece is still pretty empty. And events—while over 1,100 now—aren’t growing as fast as we’d like. (I blame a joyless, balky interface, which will soon be fixed.)

LibraryThing Local’s success follows on LibraryThing’s series project which, in two weeks assembled more book series data than the largest commercial supplier of this data.

Together, I think these suggest something important: The most powerful agents in the book world today are regular people.

LibraryThing is blessed with the most extraordinary members I have ever heard of. They’ll hunker down for hours adding information for fun and to help out their fellow members. They’ll engage in two- and even three-hundred message discussions over features. They make Facebook aps and browser enhancements on their own. They send us new logo designs. They send Abby postcards. They send us cookies.

They—and given the readership of this blog, probably YOU—are something else. It is a real surprise and honor to find myself developing software under these conditions. It’s up to us to keep you interested and happy, and think of new things to do with what you create. It’s up to you to tell us when we’re falling short of that.

Labels: librarything local, members