Archive for June, 2011

Tuesday, June 28th, 2011

June 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, should have made its way to your inbox by now. You can also read it online.

This month I talked to award-winning author Bharati Mukherjee about her latest novel, Miss New India. Find how about her research visits to call centers in Bangalore, whose plays she memorized as a child, and what she’s reading now. Read the full interview.

I also talked to Kate Parkin of Hodder & Stoughton about the new flipback book format being released in the UK later this week. I started a Talk thread to discuss flipbacks as well, so feel free to join the conversation!

Read previous State of the Thing newsletters.

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: authors, state of the thing

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011

New recommendations: What should you borrow?

Member sturlington recently proposed the following:

“You know what would be a neat feature? If I could get a list of books from a friend’s library that are recommended for me based on my library. For borrowing/mooching purposes. For instance, my husband is putting in his books right now, and it would be cool to quickly get a list of his books that I might enjoy.”

I thought this an excellent idea, and easy to implement, so I did it. It’s a great way to scout out your friends’ libraries.

If you’re signed in, you can see the feature on every other (public) member’s profile page. Or you can check out what books I should borrow from Jeremy (a lot), and vice versa (a few).


Come talk about it on Talk.

Labels: recommendations

Tuesday, June 14th, 2011

Meet up in New Orleans / Get in free to ALA exhibits

Photo by chuckyeager, released under
CC-Attribution 2.0 Generic (see on Flickr).

Cafe Du Monde meet up
We’re having a LibraryThing meet up in New Orleans! Tim and I will be around for the ALA Annual Conference, and LT member benitastrnad is coordinating a meet up.*

So, anyone who will be in New Orleans, LA for the ALA Conference, or who live in the area, can meet-up at the Cafe Du Monde on Jackson Square from 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. on Saturday morning, June 25, 2011. This is a buy your own beignets and coffee event where we can gather to meet and talk about books, reading, and LibraryThing.

The Cafe Du Monde is a short distance from the New Orleans convention center by trolley or a short walk to Jackson Square from most of the main convention hotels. The Cafe Du Monde is a NOLA French Market tradition since 1862, famous for it’s chicory laced coffee and a Cajun pastry called beignets. Come join us!

Free “exhibits-only” pass to ALA
Since we’re exhibiting at ALA this year, we also have some free badges to give out. They’re exhibit-only, so you can’t get into the sessions, but it’ll let you in to walk around the exhibits, snag some free ARCs, and, of course, stop by the LibraryThing booth (booth 827) to meet Tim and Abby.

Just click here and it’ll walk you through the registration process.


*many thanks to her, since not only do I not know the area at all, I’m a little crazy getting prepared for ALA!

Labels: ALA, librarything for libraries, meet up, new orleans

Sunday, June 12th, 2011

Recommended for you

Borrowing a feature from Netflix, I’ve introduced a “Recommended for you” section on work page. It appears whenever a book appears on the “LibraryThing Recommendations” list of any of your books.

As with other such lists, it uses the standard collection colors. It only lists books which you have marked to “include in recommendations.”

Come talk about it here.

Labels: recommendations

Monday, June 6th, 2011

June Early Reviewers batch up!

The June 2011 batch of Early Reviewer books is up! We’ve got 103 books this month, and a grand total of 2,942 copies to give out.
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 Thursday, June 30th at 6 p.m. EDT.

Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to the US, Canada, the UK, Israel, Australia, and a whole bunch more. 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!

Gefen Publishing House Open Books HighBridge
Hunter House Penguin Young Readers Group Bloomsbury
Crossway Del Rey Spectra
Doubleday Books Blacksmith Books Orbit Books
Kregel Publications Seven Stories Press Little, Brown and Company
The Permanent Press Tupelo Press Spirit Scope Publishing
WaterBrook Press BookViewCafe William Morrow
John Wiley & Sons Tundra Books Putnam Books
Riverhead Books Plume Wigton Publishing
Red Clover Press Bantam Dell Harper Paperbacks
Nolo Oceanview Publishing Gotham Books
Kane Miller Books The Writer’s Coffee Shop Modern History Press
Loving Healing Press Hampton House Publishing, LLC JournalStone
Rovira i Virgili University Press St. Martin’s Griffin Lucky Bat Books
MMIP Human Kinetics Cascada Productions
Wilderness Press Menasha Ridge Press Zed Books
Orca Book Publishers Saint Columba Press Ballantine Books

Labels: early reviewers, LTER