Archive for the ‘LibraryThing for Publishers’ Category

Monday, May 2nd, 2011

LibraryThing for Publishers adds ONIX and FTP

We’ve added the capability for publishers participating in our LibraryThing for Publishers program to transfer their data to LT using the ONIX metadata format, a bibliographic format virtually all publishers produce, and using FTP, the industry standard for ONIX transfer.

For existing LTFP publishers, you can add ONIX feeds to your publisher profile via the “Set up FTP Transfer” option on the Edit profile and settings page. We’ll grab the ONIX file on the schedule you set via FTP and process it.

New publishers, you can set up your LibraryThing for Publishers page by following the instructions here. Any questions, or if you’d like to submit your data by another method, email me (jeremy@librarything.com)

We’ve also added a whole bunch of great publishers since our last blog-update. These include:

See the full list of publishers participating in LibraryThing for Publishers.

Labels: LibraryThing for Publishers

Thursday, February 3rd, 2011

How can Publishers use LibraryThing?

We’ve done some more sprucing up, and are happy to announce a new How Publishers Can Use LibraryThing page. Mainly this is to simplify signup for the Early Reviewers and LibraryThing for Publishers programs (illustrated here), but it’s also designed to provide a single page to highlight all the various ways publishers can become a part of the LibraryThing community.

We continue to add publishers to LibraryThing for Publishers, and are very happy to announce that the University of California Press has joined the program.

If you’re a publisher and want to get started, just head on over to the new page for all the necessary information and instructions. We’ll be happy to help get you set up with your profile page.

Labels: LibraryThing for Publishers, publishers

Monday, August 16th, 2010

LibraryThing for Publishers: 21 new publishers

LibraryThing for Publishers, our new program to bring publishers into LibraryThing—and link out to them—has been growing rapidly, and we’ve added a number of new features for both publishers and members.

New Publishers. Since Monday we’ve added 21 new publishers, amounting to an 800% increase in books covered.

The largest new publisher is Penguin Australia, covering 650,000 member books. Their titles include books from Penguin USA, UK, India, New Zealand and DK (Dorling Kindersley) available through the Penguin Australia website. (Their wonderful profile image—an unofficial logo?—appear to the right.)

Others include (in copies order):

And eight more independents. A half-dozen substantial publishers are waiting in the wings, as we work out URLs and other details.

New Features. I introduced a new page for you to compare your books against LibraryThing Publishers.

Check out the blog post.

New ways to upload. Publishers have complained about the limitations of ISBN-based URLs, so we’re expanding the formats we accept, starting with a new “LibraryThing Simple Format.” Basically, we can now read any spreadsheet that contains both ISBNs and URLs. We’ll figure out the rest. This proved necessary in getting RAND’s titles into the system, and was helpful for Mercer UP as well.

I’ve written more about this format on Thingology.

Labels: LibraryThing for Publishers, new feature, new features

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

LibraryThing for Publishers!

We’ve just finished a new feature for publishers called “LibraryThing for Publishers. Like LibraryThing Local, Local Book Search, LibraryThing for Libraries and LibraryThing Authors, LibraryThing for Publishers is about linking arms with another important player in the book world, for everyone’s benefit.

Publishers: LibraryThing for Publishers is free and open to any legitimate publisher. It’s dead-simple to upload your titles.

UPDATE: Here’s the video about how to join.

What You Get. LibraryThing for Publishers gives publishers three key things:

  • A box on the work page of all their titles.
  • Publisher pages.
  • Hundreds of links from LibraryThing. LibraryThing has a high PageRank.*

Members get:

  • A new way to connect with the publishers they love
  • A way to browse publishers’ titles
  • As we move this forward publishers can help on the data end, with better, less restricted book data from the people who actually create the books.

Show me. We’ve launched with five publishers, covering eight imprints. We thank them for their willingness to try something new!

You can see the the new publisher pages, and publisher boxes on work pages in these examples.

Some details. LibraryThing for Publishers includes a few nifty features, including:

  • LibraryThing’s first “shelves” interface (see the earlier blog post). Shelves are doing a lot more on publisher pages than on tag pages.
  • Faceted tagging, where one set of books (a publishers’) is sliced and diced by a tag. For example, here are Orbit Books’ Urban Fantasy books, and here are Zondervan’s
    <href=”http://www.librarything.com/publisher/636/tag/youth+ministry”>Youth Ministry books.
  • Reviews by publisher (eg., Zondervan)
  • An enhanced members page, with mini-shelves for top members.

*LibraryThing has a Google PageRank of 8, on par with the Boston Globe, and higher than any of our competitors or any publisher we’ve found. Why publishers do so poorly in the link game is the topic for another post, but we aim to do what we can do help publishers out.

Labels: LibraryThing for Publishers, new feature, new features