Archive for the ‘statistics’ Category

Thursday, October 25th, 2012

New feature: your list statistics

LibraryThing Lists is still a “semi-released” feature, but we’ve added a simple statistics feature to show you where your books match up with lists created so far:

If you’re signed in, you can find List statistics here:
http://www.librarything.com/profile/MEMBERNAME/stats/lists

If you’re not signed in, here’s Tim’s:
http://www.librarything.com/profile/timspalding/stats/lists

You can find lists (and create your own!) here:
http://www.librarything.com/lists

Here’s a look at the by-list view:

And in the by-work view:

Come discuss the feature here.

Labels: new feature, new features, statistics

Thursday, April 21st, 2011

Physical description fields added

We’re currently rolling out to all members some brand-new fields for physical description:

  • pagination (both Roman- and Arabic-numeral)
  • height, length, and thickness*
  • weight
  • volumes

In addition to the six separate fields, available for display and sorting your books, there are also two summary fields. “Dimensions” summarizes height, length and thickness in a “8 x 10 x 1.5” format, and “physical summary” replicates the standard library-data format, displaying volume count, pagination, and the height of the book. The latter is also user editable.

The data comes comes either from the library or bookseller record you used to add your book, or, when data is missing, from the ISBN level. As elsewhere, data from your book is shown in black text, and data from another level is shown in green. The green text will turn black if you edit it or tab through the fields to confirm it.

You can edit all these new fields on either the book edit page or by adding them to “List” view on the “Your books” tab. To do that, click the little “gear” symbol on the top bar.**

Once added, double-clicking on any of these fields will bring up an “Edit Physical Properties” lightbox and allow you to make changes. There’s also an option there to convert the data for that record between pounds/inches and centimeters/kilograms, if you’re so inclined.

Naturally all these neat goodies lend themselves very well to cool statistics and charts, so we’ve also added a statistics/memes page. You can find yours here. If you’re not signed in, check out Tim’s here.

Find our how your books stack up (literally) against a hobbit, a giraffe, Michelangelo’s David, the Statue of Liberty, Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, the Great Pyramid of Giza and so forth. Discover how many U-Haul book boxes it would take to pack your collection, or the value of your books’ weight in gold. If all the pages in all your books were laid out end-to-end, how far would they stretch? All that and more on the new stats page.

We’ve also included a handy chart showing how many of your books don’t contain data in these fields, in case you want to run off to grab the ruler and scale.

If these fields aren’t yet showing for you, they will be soon; you’ll receive a profile comment when the fields are available. Many thanks to the members of the Board for Extreme Thing Advances for their assistance with getting this feature ready!

Come discuss the new fields and the stats page in Talk.


* height = head to foot of spine; length = spine to fore-edge; thickness = “width” of the book on the shelf

** There’s also an option here to “Show volumes, pagination, dimensions and weight fields.” If you choose to hide them, they simply won’t display anywhere.

Labels: features, new features, statistics

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

Your statistics: Ebooks and audiobooks

Our recent ebook push had one major flaw—something was up with the profile statistics page.

That’s been fixed, and the result is stunning. Instead of a few dozen ebooks, most users should see hundreds. My stats, for example, include fifteen LibriVox ebook editions, 45 Project Gutenberg editions and fully 99 Open Library editions—all free.

Check it out:

Labels: audiobooks, ebooks, kindle, open library, statistics

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

Sunday, March 23rd, 2008

New Member Stats


I’ve add two new sub-pages available from your Profile Stats page. They are “Overlap with Legacy Libraries” and “Talk and Group Statistics.”

Overlap with Legacy Libraries is split from the main stats page. We’re up to 13 complete “Legacy Libraries” now—W. H. Auden, Eza Pound and Walker Percy* were just addded. I can’t link to yours directly, but here’s mine.

“Talk and Group Statistics” provides way too much information about how you’ve used the Talk feature, including statistics like total messages, total messages by group and month and even a word count of all messages. (I have apparently written 336,449 words in Talk, which comes to some 1,121 typewritten pages!)

“Talk and Group Statistics” are private—other members can’t see your stats. Privacy aside, we didn’t want the stats to become, um, boasts. For demonstration purposes, however, all LibraryThing employees, however, are wide-open. Check out mine, Chris‘ and John‘s.

By popular demand, I have also included a nostalgia link to “Your first message.” Let me know what other stats you want on Talk.


*I was pleasantly surprised to find Walker Percy also read Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of scientific revolutions and Malinowski’s Magic, science and religion.

Labels: new feature, new features, statistics

Wednesday, July 25th, 2007

Harry Potter and the Period of Quiet

The LibraryThing groups feature turns one tomorrow, followed shortly by Talk. I thought it would be fun to share the news-messages statistics for the Harry Potter Group, Hogwarts Express.

Check out the little boom for the movie (released July 11) and the crazy boom-bust-boom around when the book itself was released. For 24 hours, LibraryThing Harry Potter fans were reading, dammit.

I can report from experience that the rest of the world is still reading it. I went down to New York on business yesterday (and got caught in LaGuardia overnight, but that’s another story). The plane was like Harry Potter study hall.

REMINDER: We’re giving away prizes to 50 Harry Potter reviewers.

Labels: groups, harry potter, statistics