Saturday, May 13th, 2006

LibraryThing for organizations

Until now LibraryThing’s terms of use prohibited non-personal accounts without permission. Individuals, couples, families and so forth were okay. Churches, schools, law firms and such were not, unless I okayed it. In truth, I granted almost all requests, so LibraryThing has quite a few of these—particularly churches and some nifty museums.

Starting today I have a two stage policy: a slightly different price structure now, followed by a move to a more thorough-going “pro” version in the future. The pro version will be better in the ways organizations care about, such as distinguishing between catalog users and people who can add to the catalog. It will also remove some of the social features, so regular users’ book soulmate doesn’t turn out to be an H&R Block office.

I floated a new price structure on the blog for a few days. The final price structure’s quite modest, I think.

  • Book clubs, knitting clubs, blog rings, etc. Use a personal account. In the future, there will some “group” features so members can have separate accounts but one joined library.
  • Non-profit and not-for-profit organizations (churches, schools, clubs, classrooms). Free to 200 books. $15/year for up to 5,000 books.
  • For-profit (companies, organized crime). Free to 100 books. $25/year to 500 books. $50/year to 5,000 books.

See more at Can organizations join LibraryThing?

Existing non-personal accounts fall into two categories: those who asked for and received permission and those who didn’t. Those who asked permission keep the rate I gave them (usually a $25 lifetime account).

Those who didn’t ask get to keep it for now. I admit not everyone noticed the terms of use link—and who reads that stuff anyway?—so I’m going to let organzations of both types stay at the $10/year personal rate until their year ends. Organizations without permission that took out a lifetime account will see $15 refunded, and reversion to a $10 rate. It’s going to take a while for me to straighten this out, so bear with me.

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