Archive for March, 2011

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011

March State of the Thing

This month’s State of the Thing, LibraryThing’s monthly newsletter of features, author interviews and various forms of bookish delight, is on its way to your inbox, if it hasn’t arrived already. You can also read it online.

For our author interviews this month, I talked to much-acclaimed debut novelist Téa Obreht about The Tiger’s Wife, recently published by Random House. Find out what inspired this haunting tale, learn about Obreht’s writing practices, and find out where she picked up some Hemingway first editions! Read the full interview.

I also had the chance to interview Charles Cumming, whose fourth spy novel The Trinity Six is just out from St. Martin’s Press. I asked how he got interested in the Cambridge Spy Ring, which spy he liked best, and what books on Cold War espionage he recommends. Read the full interview.

Read previous State of the Thing newsletters:

http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/State_of_the_Thing

If you don’t get State of the Thing, you can add it in your email preferences. You also have to have an email address listed.

Labels: state of the thing

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

New Legacy Libraries!

I’m happy to announce the completion of a Legacy Library quartet: Herman Melville, Jeff Buckley, Gustave Flaubert, and Daniel Webster!

The four share just one work in common: Homer’s Odyssey.*

Thanks to LTers thornton37814, benjclark, cbl_tn (Melville), claudiadias, Kuiperdolin (Flaubert), Sammiwithani (Buckley), and Christa_Josh (Webster) for their work on these collections!

*At present. With work combinations, &c., this could change, of course.

Labels: legacy libraries

Wednesday, March 16th, 2011

LibraryThing is hiring (non-technical)


2007 Halloween book pile winner by member Bluesky1963

LibraryThing is hiring again—a relatively junior position, with room to advance and grow. We’re looking for someone smart and organized to help out with the customer support side of the quickly growing LibraryThing for Libraries.

You must be:

  • Able to write quickly and well
  • Organized as all get-out
  • Able to juggle multiple tasks efficiently and with humor
  • Extremely comfortable with computers
  • Able to work independently and communicate effectively

We’d appreciate:

  • A Library or Information Sciences Degree
  • Experience in libraries or library “industry”
  • Technical skills (HTML, CSS, MySQL, etc.)
  • Customer-service or sales experience
  • Mac lover
  • Love of cheese

Duties:

  • Assist Abby with LibraryThing for Libraries
  • Provide customer support to libraries
  • Attend trade shows
  • Learn whatever we need you to learn
  • Think creatively and suggest improvements
  • Whatever else is needed. We are still a startup so “duties” are fluid.

Location:

Boston, MA or Portland, ME area strongly preferred. If we get enough applications we will probably not look at others–no offense.

Compensation:

Salary plus gold-plated health and dental insurance. We require hard work, but we are flexible about hours.

How to apply:

Email and resume is good. Don’t send a separate cover letter. In your email, please go through the bullets above, explaining briefly how they do or don’t fit you.

Send emails to abby@librarything.com.

[Update, 4/21/11: We’re reviewing applications now; further submissions are not being considered at this time. Thanks for your interest!]
[Update, 5/12/11: We’ve made our hire, look for an announcement soon!]

Labels: employees, employment, jobs

Thursday, March 10th, 2011

Books in Space!

A small band of intrepid catalogers (benjclark, JBD1, 2wonderY, staffordcastle, and katya0133) did a mini-flash-mob catalog project this week that was out of this world … literally!*

Working from a list of books aboard the International Space Station in 2008, we were able to create a LibraryThing catalog for the space station’s leisure library (and since then we’ve been able to add some additional books from articles which mention books brought by visitors to the station). We’re definitely on the lookout for other books aboard the ISS (I even tweeted the station commander), so if you know of any, please let us know!

I have to say my favorite among the titles is Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days

* Sorry, I couldn’t help it.

Labels: flash mob, flash-mob cataloging

Monday, March 7th, 2011

March Early Reviewers Batch is up!

The March 2011 batch of Early Reviewer books is up! We’ve got 110 books this month, and a grand total of 2,914 copies to give out. It’s our largest ER batch ever!
First, make sure to sign up for Early Reviewers. If you’ve already signed up, please check your mailing address and make sure it’s correct.
Then request away! The list of available books is here:
http://www.librarything.com/er/list
The deadline to request a copy is Monday, March 28th at 6 p.m. EST.
Eligibility: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to the US, Canada, the UK, and many other countries. Make sure to check the flags by each book to see if it can be sent to your country.
Thanks to all the publishers participating this month!

HarperCollins Childrens Books WaterBrook Press W.W. Norton
Hyperion and Voice University of Iowa Press Taylor Trade Publishing
Del Rey Mulholland Books Goose Lane
St. Martin’s Press McFarland Doubleday Books
McBooks Press Tradewind Books Langdon Street Press
The Permanent Press Red Telephone Books Skyhorse Publishing
Aro Books worldwide DK Publishing Sterling Publishing
Human Kinetics Harper Paperbacks Nolo
Random House The Dial Press Zed Books
MSI Press Spiegel & Grau South Dakota State Historical Society Press
Ballantine Books Plume Rovira i Virgili University Press
Bell Bridge Books Bloomsbury Orca Book Publishers
BookViewCafe Bethany House Putnam Books
Chosen Books St. Martin’s Minotaur Riverhead Books
Bantam Dell Unbridled Books Penguin Young Readers Group
Cascada Productions Sole Books Blackbird Ventures
A & N Publishing St. Martin’s Griffin Crown Publishing
Saqi Books Kube Publishing HighBridge
Demos Health Souper Publishing Sovereign
Nimbus Publishing Seriously Good Books

Labels: early reviewers, publishers

Friday, March 4th, 2011

“Tag Mirror” is back!

The much-loved, long-suspended “Tag Mirror” feature is back!

Your tag mirror is like your tag clouds, except that instead of seeing what you’ve tagged your books it shows what other members have tagged them. Sidelined because of speed problem, a series of database changes have made it viable again, without without extra caching. It’s not instant, but few users will find the speed insupportable.

Check it out:

And here’s the original blog post from back in 2007.

Labels: tag mirror, tagging, tags