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):

• The substantial Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, producer of “intellectual and literary books on ethics, theology, biblical studies, and social issues, as well as Bible commentaries and dictionaries” and their children’s imprint, Eerdmans Books for Young Readers.
• Candlewick Press, an innovative children’s publisher. My son is exceedingly fond of their Owl Babies.
• Beacon Press, publisher of serious fiction and non-fiction, such as Cornel West’s Race Matters.
• Bethany House, a popular publisher of christian fiction, by authors such as Beverly Lewis.
• Chosen Books, who publish non-fiction for evangelical and charismatic readers.
• Canongate Books, an independent publisher based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Canongate’s titles include Pullman’s new The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.
• Gefen Publishing House, based in Jerusalem and frequent Early Reviewers participant.
• The Rand Corporation, the publishing arm of the influential think tank
• Mercer University Press, our first UP, and dear to my heart for offering to send me a Coptic Grammar.
• Belle Books, a Memphis, TN small press and LibraryThing Early Reviewers favorite.
• Belial’ Editions, our first French publisher, who release science fiction and fantasy.

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.

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.

• Orbit Books and Soulless
• Zondervan and The Case for Faith
• Taylor Trade Publishing and That’s Not in My American History Book.
• Tundra Books and Word Nerd. Tundra also operates Livres Toundra.
• Osprey Publishing and The Vikings. Osprey also operates Shire Publications, with books like Discovering Book Collecting, and Angry Robot, with books like Sixty-One Nails.

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.