I love the way the blogosphere goes in strange directions. So, the LibraryThing book pile contest ended. The top-winner (there were six in all), lucytartan, won two lifetime memberships. As she just posted, she’s decided she’s going to hold her own contest to give them away, one at each one of the group-blogs she writes for. Quoting her:

At The Valve the contest is “tell us your best library anecdote.”
At Larvatus Prodeo, the contest is “tell us about your favourite book.”

So there’s a plug for her blogs. I swear, I didn’t know any of this until she told me.

Lucytartan got hers for artful photography, but I’m open to giving free memberships if other popular blogs want to run contests. Send me an email with your idea. I could use the exposure and the site gets more valuable with every book added. (No it’s not going to become completely free; I got needs, needs!)

The LibraryThing book pile contest is now officially over. Users submitted a lot of great photos—128 in all. You can see them all at the Flickr tag “librarything” (http://flickr.com/photos/tags/librarything/).

It was very hard to choose, or even to figure out how to choose. So I decided to double the number of winners. I’m sorry I can’t double it again; there were so many good shots.

I favored head-on photos of discrete piles, as I said I would. This excluded some great photos of books on shelves, books in nightmarish piles (Constance Wiebrands) and of LibraryThing members’ libraries (Geoff Coupe), however much I want those built-in bookcases. Partial photos (Chamisa Flower) and photos from strange angles were discriminated against; books with clear, legible titles were favored.

Babies and animals were in woefully short supply. I love Dovegreyreader’s cat-and-pile shot. But the image doesn’t fit in the frame and its hard to see the books. Also, I’m a dog person. CrazyMaisy gets credit for her cat bookend, looking back on Sibley’s Birds and The Art of Raising a Puppy. Intentional?

The original deal was one winner who gets two free memberships, and two runners-up who get one each. That was back when all memberships were lifetime ones. I decided to keep to that, and add three one-year memberships for “honorable mention.”

The winner: lucytartan
Lucy did an eye-popping pile, arranged by color and helpfully snipped out of its background. This idea is not new—a crazy bookstore tried organizing their whole collection that way—but it was nicely done. Extra points for Nabokov, Orwell and Aristotle.

Runner-up: Micketymoc
Micketymoc did a number of cool shots, all in focus and very helpfully snipped from their background. This fish-eye one hit the sweet spot. Indeed, if I have a complaint, it’s that it’s too professional. If I used it, people might think LibraryThing was a serious business, one that hired photographers. I’d lose my indy cred!

Runner-up: kencf
Kenneth’s ordinary book piles violate my aspect-ratio preferences. I can forgive that. But pull back a bit and you can see what the piles are sitting on. Was the the bathroom really the only white space in Kenneth’s place? Ought one to put The Origin of Christology on top of a toilet? (Kenneth replied that books in the bathroom worked for Luther; the Catholic in me has a rejoinder to that!)

Honorable mention: AuntDodi
Here’s a good, sharp mish-mash. Tales from the Clit and Yertle the Turtle? If you didn’t know what a clit was, they could be the same genre!

Honorable mention: Hanz
Capping a pile of Christian books with a Bible manages to inject a message into the very order of the pile, and the angle reinforces the message. One of the cool things about LibraryThing is how different political and religious groups use it without “bumping into each other” too much. Tales from Clit does not often meet Calvin’s Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life. This is probably for the best. But what would Calvin have thought of Yertle?

Honorable mention: Rachael (Chamisa Flower)
There were two excellent gastronomic piles. Chamisa flower won over Selkie30 for being easier to see the titles and without the shadow. But I was please to hear of the existence of the Star Trek Cookbook. I also like Chamisa Flower’s writing-themed pile.

LibraryThing now offers gift memberships!

Lifetime memberships ($25)
Yearly memberships ($10)

Gift memberships make excellent stocking-stuffers, “top presents” and “balancers.” (I always have a few gifts I can shift between family members when I weigh the piles on Christmas Eve.) Wouldn’t they make a nice present for everyone in your office, library or academic department? Yes, they would, and prisons too!

I particularly recommend them for friends and family with so many books you can’t risk getting them something they already have. Once they catalog their collection, you’ll never have that problem again. When does a present give so much back? Never, I tell you.

Gift memberships means I can finally close the “book pile contest.” Drumroll please…

Well, I’m back from traveling. For most of it my wife and I were vacationing in Ireland. Then I did some business traveling. Our plan in Ireland was to take it easy. In the afternoons, my wife would would write and I would work on LibraryThing by wifi. Riiiight. In Dublin, that sometimes worked—I treaded water on emails. But in Connemara? See photo below for my startling discovery: the density of wifi and of rocks and sheep are inversely related.

Well, I’m back, rested and ready. Things are gonna speed up again. Thanks for keeping the faith while I was gone.

PS: 81 comments on the last post?!

I’m not making major changes this week, but just planning them. (I’m traveling on business.) But I thought I’d respond to some comments.

OCLC. I’ll look into “find in a library” functionality. I see the attraction.

Tags. I don’t think I’ll split different sorts of tags. Tags should be absurdly easy to enter.

Peter. Shoot me your email again. I try to respond to everything, but some emails slip by. I am interested in your UI ideas.

Covers. Covers are determined by ISBN. What LibraryThing should do—I think—is list all the ISBNs and covers for a given “book.” I’ll add that when I add edition disambiguation.

Christian Science. Google it. It’s a church—The Church of Christ, Scientist—started in Boston by Mary Baker Eddy. Among other things (and at the risk of speaking for another’s religion) Eddy believed in faith healing—that illness was really spiritual. The newspaper is connected to the church, but the only concrete result from that is a daily column on Christian Science themes.

Thanks for all the positive comments. I’ll be back making daily changes soon.

If you’re wondering why LibraryThing is a little slow, it’s because traffic has surged. LibraryThing was picked as the Kool Site on the Kim Komando radio show. I regret to say that I’d never heard of Ms. Komando or the show, but apparently she’s huge.

Anyway, more than 1,000 users signed up in the past three hours (a 10% increase!). Most are just checking it out, but the traffic is still pretty staggering. I suspect it will pass in a few hours, leaving a few hundred dedicated new-comers. To them: Welcome!

Bibliophile web geek Peter Harkins (LibraryThing: Malaprop) has created a sweet Firefox extension called SelectThing. SelectThing allows you to search LibraryThing from any web page. Peter writes:

“I’m a big fan of cataloging books I want to read on LibraryThing and often run across mentions of interesting books while browing the web. But it always distracted me to copy the book’s name, open a new tab, pull up LT, go to the add page, paste in the text, hit search… So, like a good geek, I wrote a Firefox extension to simplify it.”

Here’s how it goes: You’re reading a book review on the New York Times or your favorite blog and you want to add the book to your LibraryThing catalog (soon wish list too). You just select some text—maybe the title of the book, the author or an ISBN—right click and choose “Search on LibraryThing.” It opens a new tab with LibraryThing’s “Add Books” screen, and does the search too. It’s super quick and easy.

The extension is online at http://selectthing.mozdev.org (see more screenshots). The install process is standard (and easy). There’s a mailing list there, but Peter will also be monitoring this blog for feedback.

Let me be the first to offer mine: what a cool idea, and nicely done!

Some recent fixes and improvements:

• I finally fixed the author cloud, both individual and the all-users cloud.
• Authors (eg., J.R.R. Tolkien) now include a “commonly tagged” section.
• Recommendations have been improved, incorporating a progressively severe bias against books by the same author. Recommendations remain randomly excellent and occasionally crazy (see *).
• Author links now work; some were “redirecting” in circles.

Own, read, want?

UPDATE: People are clearly confused by my categories. For the record, they were “(1) books you own, (2) books you’ve read but don’t own, (3) books you want.” I condensed that verbally to “own,” “read,” “want.” “Read” is causing people to think I’m trying to capture to distinguish how many books you’ve read (including in your catalog). I’m trying to allow people to feel comfortable cataloging books that aren’t currently in their library. Clearly this terminology isn’t going to work. Any suggestions?

I’m working on adding a “collections” feature (name in flux and up for suggestions). At present LibraryThing presumes you own your books, although users have added tags for books they’ve read but don’t own and for books they want. With the holidays approaching, I’d like to add the latter, at least. But I haven’t decided on the approach. Here is my plan. Executing it require bringing lots of features online at once, not making incremental changes and seeing what you people think as I add each one. So here’s a sneak peak. Comments would be appreciated.

I want to have a small number of fixed, non-overlapping categories. If users can define their own categories people will use “collections” instead of tags—for “at the beach house,” “read but hated,” etc. This will satisfy power users, but reduce universal value. Keeping the collection “buckets” limited will make it easier for people to view and understand other’s collections. For example, the default view will include everything a user owns or has read, but profiles will have a link to users’ “wish list.” Predefined terms are also better for library-wide statistics—whose wishes are like mine, what users are wishing for generally, etc. This won’t work if some people call it “wish list,” others “want” or “christmas,” etc. I don’t want to get into users picking their own name and then giving the collection a “type.” The system must be transparently simple.

I propose three collections: (1) books you own, (2) books you’ve read but don’t own, (3) books you want. I’d like to use the short names “own,” “read,” “want.” But people may misunderstand “read.” “Want” is my attempt to avoid the Amazon-y “wish list.” “Own,” “read,” “want” is also gramatically parallel. But can I escape this well-known name? Jacob Nielsen talks about a company replacing the standard “shopping cart” with a “shopping sled”—purchases plummeted!

I plan to implement it so that you choose what collection you’re adding to on the “add books” page. (I’ll have to think about how it works when you add a book another way; I don’t want to make things too complex.) There will be an easy way to “power edit” books into one collection or another. The catalog view will show “own” and “read” together by default, but allow you to choose to see any combination of the three. Profiles will break it down three ways.

That’s my plan. As they say, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. In this case, the enemy is the PHP programming language, not you, so help me out!

* I was shocked to discover that the 1969 parody of Tolkien, Bored of the Rings, has as its top recommendation Marcel Proust‘s In Search of Lost Time. Laugh all you want, but eight of thirty-two copies of In Search of Lost Time are owned by people who also own (the obscure) Bored of the Rings. You cannot argue with statistics! But why? I would also like to note that Amazon doesn’t present a single suggestion for Bored of the Rings, and that most of LibraryThing’s suggestions—Proust aside—are fantasy novels. LibraryThing beats Amazon again!

UPDATE: See the author page for National Lampoon. Bored of the Rings is split between three editions that LibraryThing isn’t “combining.” (User-contributed combination is on the way, I promise!) The main one has a review by wenestvedt, and picks out one really good suggestion—William Goldman’s The Princess Bride, a fantasy/Medieval romp rather than a parody.

Various places (Slashdot, Techcrunch, News.com) have reported that Amazon is now experimenting with tagging. Only some customers see the option, and I’m not among the chosen ones. I’m dying to know how Amazon tags are comparing against LibraryThing ones!

I’m not worring too much about this. I don’t think people choose to use LibraryThing just to tag books. To the extent that tagging is the attraction, it’s about tagging your own books. In less than three months LibraryThing users have applied more than 1,150,000 tags to their books. People will do amazing things with their own collection.

Will Amazon get the same kind of buy in? I’m a big-time Amazon customer, but tagging books on Amazon seems to me like volunteering to fluff pillows at the local Sheraton. I suppose if someone has an enormous number of items on their wishlist they will want some memory aid—the most important thing about tags. Absent that, I just don’t see what Amazon customers will get out of it. On the other hand, Amazon has so much traffic that maybe the altruistic, leisured 1% will quickly fill Amazon up with tags.

Another worry. Until now, tags have not had much commercial value. I doubt that the Paris Tourism Board is spamming 43Places. But Amazon has seen review abuse before—not a few authors are livid at the practice. Will Amazon tagging lead to the introduction of the spag (spam tag*)?

Of course, at LibraryThing, despite enormous financial incentive to promote my wife’s novels, I have yet to engage in any unfair tagging of her absolutely terrific works, The Mermaids Singing, In the Country of the Young (described by the New York Times as “exquisitely doomy“) or the recently-released Love in the Asylum, for which I designed the hardback cover. No, we will never do that here.

*Go, my pretty new word. Go go! Settle the world with your beauty.

Here are some responses to the responses to the last post, with some dreaming at the end.

1. Fixes. I fixed the author numbering problem, the author link problem, the apostrophe problem, and some others. There can still be a difference between copy numbers because the author page doesn’t count duplicates.

2. New feature. I added an author rating feature, based on book ratings.

3. Secondary authors. Yes, it’s too bad that secondary authors are not in the current system. It’s a little wiggly, starting with the programming standpoint. There’s also some issues between “second authors” and “included authors.” I’m going to let this run for a while before thinking about it. More generally, I want LibraryThing to handle “contents” in a rich way—to allow it to see the stories within the story collections. Authors are part of that, but not the largest part.

4. Non-suggested authors. Yes, I’m going to add something for the Ratzinger/Benedict or Clement/Twain problem. I think I’m going to restrict it to paid users, in case someone decides to run through the system combining popes with humorists. I’d also like the UI to use an auto-complete, which will take a little work.

5. Author cloud. This was the necessary first step to a fixed author cloud. The author cloud was shut down for a reason—lots of complaints. Chief among these was that the cloud included “the same author twice.” Opening up author names in this way make it possible to fix that.

6. Book-combination. Clearly this is a trial-run for other user-driven features. There is a method to my madness!

In case you read this far, I will tip my hand a little—and dream a little. Some day soon I’ll post more on this topic, but here’s some initial thoughts.

In general, the more open the system the better it will satisfy users. At the same time openness can create real value. That irritated person who clicks a button to make their German and English Harry Potters show up under the same author is forging a piece of information that Amazon doesn’t know. (Actually, they may know THAT one, but you see my point.)

The potential is huge: LibraryThing could be for library catalogs what Wikipedia is for encyclopedias. That’s a little imprecise. By and large, LibraryThing users don’t enter their own data, but take it from Amazon and libraries. But the connections between the data—author aliases, book aliases, contents, subjects/tags, etc.—can all be user-driven. Even now, recommendations, related tags and so forth are user driven—they’re driven by user statistics.

I believe that over time LibraryThing users will generate significant cataloging value. Some of the value will be user-generated. Some of it will be statistical. Most of it will be probabilistic rather than binary. And in the end, LibraryThing will never be the best catalog in the world. But I think it can produce data and will make even THAT catalog better.

All that from the “competitive bastard child of bibliomaniacs and pro wrestlers“!

Sharp-eyed users will notice a new feature—author pages. Author pages, linked to from within your catalog and elsewhere, list an author’s books, who owns them and so forth. This is a toe-in-the-water announcement. Coming days will see more features, including “similar authors” and a Wiki-like ability to add author home pages. Suggestions are, as always, encouraged.

There’s something daring in how the feature is implemented: users control the catalog. Some of you have noticed problems with two editions of the same book not always being counted as the same. Well, the problem is even worse with authors. Not only does LibraryThing draw on five Amazons and 30+ libraries around the world, but as anyone familiar with Library of Congress searching will tell you, author names often vary within a single catalog. Is Joanne K. Rowling the author of Harry Potter und der Orden des Phönix the same as J. K. Rowling the author of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix? A computer can’t tell, but I’ll bet you can.

In fact, the computer guesses pretty well, presenting a list of likely aliases for in the “Also known as…” section. You can check these authors out by clicking on their names. If they’re really the same, and you’re feeling generous, go ahead and click “combine.” The authors will be smoothed together, with the more common name winning. I’ve gone through some of the better-known authors—the rest are up to you.

Be bold! The system is self-correcting. If you screw up and combine two authors who aren’t really the same—eg., Thomas Wolfe and Tom Wolfe—someone will notice. Clicking “separate” will break them apart again.

Finally, although combined on a global, statistical level, user data is NEVER changed. Call her Jenny Rowling for all I care. Nothing’s going to change that data.

Again, they’ll be some improvements, but the core functionality is there. I’m eager to see how it gets used.

LibraryThing user Sluggo had the great idea of setting up a LibraryThing Frappr map. Frappr is a fun, light-weight tool for putting things on Google maps, in this case LibraryThing users. If people use it, it’ll give a clearer picture of where users are, and give people more reasons to connect with each other.

It’s totally optional—you put yourself there, not the LibraryThing system, nor does LibraryThing control the data. It’s all by zip code, not actual address.

Check it out at http://www.frappr.com/librarythingusers . I propose your “shout out” contain your profile URL, at least.

It took a while, but I finally solved the issue with using ISBNs on non-US Amazon. Sorry it took so long.

I’ve added a user rating section to a book’s “social data.” Here’s the DaVinci Code‘s:

More fun data coming up!

Tomorrow’s edition of The Christian Science Monitor includes the article “Do Your Own LibraryThing” by Jim Regan, already available online. It’s a sunny, detailed look at LibraryThing, “poised to turn the cataloging of books into a form of communal recreation.”

With luck some the article will spawn others, but I’m particularly happy they got to it first. The Monitor‘s a great newspaper—international, in-depth and analytical. It’s been knocked about a bit recently, but it has made great strides on the web. The LibraryThing article shows CM‘s strengths: instead of a glib focus on library-size competition or the seeming dominance of J. K. Rowling (see below), Regan describes the site in detail, like someone who’s actually used it. The reader can make up their own mind.

So, hats off to Regan and welcome to Monitor readers—send me an email and tell me what you think of it!

J. K. Rowling and the popularity myth

I’m going to set it to show more of the top authors for context. People do have a lot of Harry Potter books but people have a lot of books generally—Rowling is only 1/3 of a percent of the total. In fact, LibraryThing exposes the popularity myth. For example, while Dan Brown seems so popular right now, his 379 books are beaten by Umberto Eco’s 476 and trounced by Jane Austen’s 736. C. S. Lewis flings him down and dances on him—1,706!

When’s the last time you read a newspaper article entitled “Dan Brown is selling well this year, but it’s not that big a deal in context”?

Cole Consulting recently posted a request on GetAFreelancer.com for an engineer to produce “an exact clone” of LibraryThing, giving $100-300 as its desired price. An Indian engineer won the bid at $260. (The engineer gave his hourly as $10, which makes for 26 hours of programming. I wish him good luck with that!)

Some things for Mr. Cole to consider:

• People can of course makes sites like LibraryThing in many ways, but an “exact clone” would certainly infringe on my intellectual property.
• I have added a strong anti-reverse engineering clause to the terms of service. These terms are enforceable in New York and Texas (Cole’s whereabouts are variously given). I’m not sure about Amritsar.
• LibraryThing is social software. You’d need to clone a lot more than the code…

UPDATE: I also added a section for the “most recent books tagged xyz.” RSS feed to come.

At 10:42 Sunday evening, LibraryThing acquired its one millionth tag. (hapgood applied the tag writing to the book On Writer’s Block.) In celebration, I have added a new feature: tag info pages.

Tag info pages resemble the tag pages on Deli.cio.us (a new service people are calling “LibraryThing for websites”). A tag info page lays out who uses the tag, the books mostly frequently tagged with it and the tags “related” to the tag. I find tag info pages both vaguely pointless and wierdly fun.

Some examples: divination, short stories, glbt, humor (also humour, which is different*), chick lit, cthulhu, evolution, alexander the great, jesus, depression and slavery. Also check out some of the biggies, like fiction, science fiction, fantasy, history, religion and biography. Some of the personal tags are interesting too. Is it surprising that the Silmarillion is the top book in unread? What does it say that half the books in twaddle are about the French philosopher Derrida? (Okay okay, I’m the only one using that tag right now, I admit it.)**

As you can tell, it has a slightly different look than other LT pages. You’ll see this design spreading through LT gradually—less clutter, more info.

*Clay Shirky’s essay / talk “Ontology is Overated” has a section on why it doesn’t make sense to alias user metadata, taking LiveJournal’s movie and cinema groups as an example:

“The cataloguers first reaction to that is, ‘Oh my god, that means you won’t be introducing the movies people to the cinema people!’ To which the obvious answer is ‘Good! The movie people don’t want to hang out with the cinema people.'”

Humor vs. humor is another great example. America (the Book): A citizen’s guide to democracy inaction is “humor.” But How to be a Canadian, even if you already are one is definitely “humour.”

Incidentally, the cinema vs. movie thing holds up at LibraryThing. Cinema includes academic/critical works like There must be a Lone Ranger: The American West in film and in reality. Movies starts with The Princess Bride, presumably because it was made into a movie.

**Also see crap, junk, trash and even bullshit. Others are now jumping on the twaddle bandwagon. I need something new—piffle, balderdash, malarky?

Update: It’s working on everything now. No errors, I rpomise.

I liked the way I stars worked, but I was in the minority. You no longer need to click five times to give a book five stars. Little gray dots now show up showing you where to click.

In another change, the system now allows half stars. I’m still torn on this topic. (Somehow it feels more choice made the decisions harder, not easier!) But big-time book blogger (and Classicist!) Debra Hamel wanted it, as did some others.

It’s pointless to explain something like this. Just fiddle with it. You’ll find one click makes a star, another makes a half star, a third zeroes-out the stars. Incidentally, everyone said I should copy iTunes. I largely did, but it has no way to zero out the stars. Once you give a song a rating, you’re stuck giving it some rating or other. What the heck!

If you’re not viewing your own catalog, stars show up without the guide-dots, e.g.,

Comments encouraged. They don’t call it user-centered software design for nothing.

I’ve been thinking about a forum. In his comment on the last post, Felius raised some important issues. He asked for a forum that was…

“… integrated into LibraryThing and uses the same user profile. And maybe lets us discuss books as well (“See what are people are saying about Cryptonomicon” for example), and maybe doesn’t really distinguish between the two, but kind of integrates the general idea of “discussion” into the whole site.”

This is very much what I was thinking. The reason LibraryThing doesn’t have a forum yet is precicely because I don’t want to slap up a PhpBB board on with its different look and user system. (For the same reason, I have resisted using my own Mothboard site.)

I am also interested in how the forum can be integrated into the rest of the site so, for example, a forum conversation about The Lion the Witch and the Wardobe is somehow referenced on the book page. There are, after all, 145 LibraryThing users who have that book, but only a select few read the blog. At the same time, I don’t want to add a “mini forum” to every book. Most books just don’t have the necessary critical mass. Have you looked at the fora that are attached to every film on IMDB? Blech.

Felius’ closing comment also deserves quoting:

“Because, like it or not, LibraryThing is no longer just about cataloguing your books — it’s about mixing with the sort of people who think that’s a wonderful idea. ;)”

I’m torn on this. I do not want LibraryThing to devolve into a general book site. I do not want to scare away people who “just want to catalog their books.” There are a lot of such people—perhaps a majority on the site now. Whatever solution I choose must be and feel completely optional, and not change the main focus. Social features have surely become more important—and I am conscious that, to be a success, LibraryThing must keep at least some people around after they have entered their collection—but cataloging remains the core. It is what LibraryThing does best.

Some random thoughts:

• A forum should allow users to embed links to users, tags, books and authors (a real author system is coming). Doing this so that it’s easy will be an interesting UI challenge. Perhaps each thread can be tagged, and anyone can add tags.
• The system should highlight conversations about books you own. This information should be available in the forum and via RSS.
• Perhaps a forum should display user names with the number of books they share with you after it, or a similarity percentage yet to be introduced. This will solve my main objection with an open book discussion:I don’t care what most people think; most people have different tastes than I do. Of course, I care what all of YOU think! 🙂
• The system should sharply distinguish between past and present conversations, at least on a book page. You don’t want to be breathlessly told that people are talking about a book and then discover the conversation is two years old.
• I am dead-set against multi-threaded discussion. I hate hate hate it. I expressed this view before and one user disagreed—former user, I should say, but I know nothing about his tragic, unusual and bitterly ironic death.

Comments welcome. Adding forums is an exciting change, but also a big one. Social software is tricky—I can write the software well and still produce a miserable failure. I’d rather do it right.

On the topic of ratings, I must pass on this link to Amazon one-star reviews of classic literature. My favorite is the review of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

“I bought these books to have something nice to read to my grandkids. I had to stop, however, because the books are nothing more than advertisements for ‘Turkish Delight,’ a candy popular in the U.K. The whole point of buying books for my grandkids was to give them a break from advertising, and here (throughout) are ads for this ‘Turkish Delight’! How much money is this Mr. Lewis getting from the Cadbury’s chocolate company anyway? This man must be laughing to the bank.”

This innaugurates a new tradition: a monthly “state of the state” for LibraryThing. I’ve added a checkbox in “edit profile” in case you want to get this by mail. The default is “off,” of course!

Massive growth. What launched two months ago as a folly has become something of a hit. With no advertising and no coverage in the offline press*, LibraryThing has shot to 9,000 users and 665,000 books. It will surely hit a million before Christmas. Today it even nosed into the Alexa top 10,000.

Whether by luck or tireless improvement, LibraryThing has largely bested a surge of recent launches, none of which exceeds 50,000 books. (Veteran Bibliophil, online since December 2001, has 306,000 books.) Particularly gratifying has been the lack of significant damage from “Bookshelf,” one of the two showcase aps launched with Ning, the hot, well-funded startup of Marc Andreesen, the founder of Netscape. Ning gave me sleepless nights, but now, as I joked to a friend, there are two people who’ve beat Andreesen—Bill Gates and me.**

In all, LibraryThing is now one of the top non-commercial book sites on the web. Here is Alexa’s ranking chart, comparing it with BookCrossing, a much-loved and world-spanning project where you “read and release” books.

I mention this not because BookCrossing is a competitor—not at all—but because BookCrossing has received a huge amount of press. Won’t someone write an article about LibraryThing? David Pogue, Xeni Jardin, Walter Mossberg, Hiyawatha Bray—where are you?*** There’s something really cool going on here!

New features. In the last month I have added the following major features, and some minor ones.

• Power editing, so you can tag a whole bunch of books at a time
• Book-by-book suggestions based on LibraryThing users data
• Detailed book suggestions based on your entire library’s contents
• Five-star book rating, with a nifty AJAX implementation
• RSS feeds, presently restricted to recent additions

Development priorities: I don’t want to telegraph too much, but this month’s development priorities include:

• Better search functionality
• “Groups” or “tribes,” so book clubs, offices, clubs and others can create “virtual libraries”
• A way to handle “wishlists” and other non-owned books
• Giving every book full cataloging data (LC subjects, Deweys, etc.), even if the initial data came from Amazon
• RSS feeds for every catalog page and for a number of other pages
• Improved “folksonomy” support, including pages for tags
• Author pages
• A user forum

Thank you. Thank you all for using the site, for blogging about it and telling your friends. Most of all please continue to send me your comments, criticisms and suggestions. Your thoughts have been critical to LibraryThing’s growth.

An aside: I used to work on software that users mostly hated. We didn’t solicit suggestions and a thick, outsourced layer of “tech support” kept complaints at bay. When we needed reactions we assembled paid focus groups and sat behind glass screens while some (outsourced) expert bumbled through our software. Developing LibraryThing has been a transformative experience. I will never EVER develop software like that again.

Conclusion. In conclusion, the state of the thing is strong! Thank for you using it, and happy cataloging.

*Excepting an article in Brazil and rumors of one in Italy, two countries for which LibraryThing has no library. I’m not sure if Andrew Brown’s excellent piece in the Guardian‘s email digest “The Wrap” counts as mainstream media, but it was online mainstream media.

**Speaking of Bill Gates, don’t imagine LibraryThing is making me rich. Far from it. The reward has been that, at least for now, I no longer feel guilty about working on it. That’s good, as I basically work on it every waking hour.

***Maybe I can call up Randall Schwartz again—he must know one of them. Randall Schwartz! Randall L. Schwartz! Learning Perl! From the dark aether I call you! Ia Ia Cthulhu fhtagn!

I’ve added a five-star book rating system. The pro vote was overwhelming. If you don’t want it, don’t add the field to your catalog. I was against it, but once the feature was up I found myself obsessively rating my whole collection.

The system is technically cool. You can add stars to multiple books without leaving the catalog page. You do not need to use the “edit” pencil. There’s no “submitting,” “saving” or anything like that. Just click to add stars one by one; at five it cycles around to none again. (Loosely, the technique I’m using is called AJAX, and is very “hot.”) I’m going to be adding similar on-catalog editing soon for tags.

Your catalog may not be currently showing the ratings field. If not, go to change fields and add it.

As with tags and reviews, ratings are totally optional. If just here to catalog, more power to you.

I haven’t added stars to any statistics pages yet. I’ll do this as the data warrants it.

Noticed that clicking on a tag is suddenly quicker? That query alone was responsible for about half the server load. Clicking on a tag like “fiction” in a “global” context brought the machine to a standstill for everyone. It’s much better now. Fiction’s still takes a second, but that’s better than 30.

Feature 1: Ratings
Okay, I cave; you win. I’m going to add ratings. I propose they be 1-5 stars, with no stars being unrated. I’ve decided on stars—thumbs are too dorky—but I’m going to avoid the “Amazon” look. Nor will I be importing star data from them. LibraryThing is not Amazon!

The stars will be easily mass-editable, either in power edit or by a new “AJAX” way. However I do it, you’ll be able to rate a whole bunch of books at a time—zip zip zip.

Feature 2: Tag pages
I’m going to add a page for every tag, showing related tags, top books with that tag, etc. The only trick is how to get to it. I want the tag links to still function as a search, at least within a personal catalog. I may kill system-wide catalog tag searches, making them go to the “tag page” instead. (They still take up a lot of resources; there are almost a million tags now!) Your thoughts are welcome. What do you want to see? How do you want to get to it?

Comments, criticisms, anecdotes—go ahead.

A few weeks ago I started a book pile contest/meme: take a photo like the one on the LibraryThing homepage, show off and win a free membership or two. Quite a few people sent me files. Others posted the photos directly to Flickr. I just finished posting the files to Flickr. Since I’ve never had a Flickr account before*, they are awaiting some sort of review for pornography and other objectionable material. (The pile of books on top of the toilet, maybe?!) Pretty soon, however, you’ll be able to see every one of them at http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/librarything . If you get only three pages, the new ones aren’t there yet.

I’m going to give this a few more days. More than half of LibraryThing’s members joined after the contest! If you want to participate, do NOT send me files. Instead, post your photos to Flickr, tagging them “librarything.” Go ahead and leave comments over there too. Some users put literally hours into this exercise, and there are some really cool juxtapositions and effects.

For a few I didn’t have the LT username and I didn’t think it was right to post the users real name. If one is yours, add your LibraryThing name if you want.

*”He made a tag-based site without ever being a member of Flickr? Has he no shame?” Oh, I only just signed up for Del.icio.us too. I should be SHOT!

“Power Tagging” / “Power Editing” has finally arrived. Now you can select 20 books and add the same three tags to all of them, or take them away.

Instead of making it a “special feature” it is integral to how the catalog works. The feature is available on the gray and yellow control pad, as so:

When you click it, you enter a special mode, and get a special control panel for adding and removing tags. Below that can click on or off the books you want.

When you’re in “Power Edit” you get ALL the books that fit your current criteria, without “pages.” Generally this means it shows all your books. Sometimes it might mean all the books that have a certain tag or etc. If you have 1,000 books, it can be slow. If you have a lot of books, it’s also advisable to pick a layout without covers, so you don’t need to wait for them to load.

“With great power comes great responsibility.” I tested it thoroughly. But LibraryThing users continually surprise me. If you find a bug please give me as much detail as possible, including your username, what you were doing and what browser and OS you are using. “I tried to add a tag and it didn’t work” is pretty hard for me to act on.

Since it’s integral to the catalog, it’s also quite extensible. I plan to add a tab for deleting multiple books—useful for people who uploaded the same file twice. Other suggestions for power edit features are most welcome.

Email comments: You can now have LibraryThing email you when people leave comments on your profile. Go to your profile and choose “edit profile” to enable this feature.

The profile now also allows you to choose whether to make your email public or not. Whether you make it public or not, I recommend everyone add an email, in case you lose your password.

Show number of copies: When looking at your catalog in list view, select “more options.” Not only does this add some buttons, including the delete button, as before. It now also lists by every book how many other users have it, as so:

You can click on the row-title “shared” to sort by this.

Recommendations: Book-by-book recommendations have improved again, with a lot of the pointless stuff removed. I also added a number by each book, showing the ratio of owners of both books to the owners of just the recommended book.

For example, here are the recommendations for Learning Perl. The 16/32 by the Perl Cookbook means that out of 32 copies of the Perl Cookbook, 16 are owned by people who also own Learning Perl.

I love how the blogosphere picks things up and runs with them. I asked for some feedback on the suggestions feature, and it became this independent meme. I particularly enjoy this submeme—listing all the books with little icons next to them—have it, don’t have it, good idea, bad idea, etc.

• AMVHoward on LiveJournal
• Nicholas on LiveJournal
• New: Pralani

Are there any others to post here?

Book-by-book suggestions have improved.

Users with lots of duplicates—mostly from bad imports—were slanting things terribly. I knew this when my novelist wife’s books—hint! hint!—all came up with Spidering Hacks as the top suggestion. This came about because I have multiple copies of both her novels and Spidering Hacks, and do not represent their content. Screening out duplicates has also been applied to profiles. There are some other places where it needs to be applied. Duplicates will soon be a negligible issue. Hooray, I say.

Why are some rows yellow?

Users with duplicates will notice that some books show up with yellow rows. This is just temporary—in the future you will be able to either show the duplicates this way, show just the duplicates or ignore whether a book is a duplicate. It’s as far as I got: “Wallace and Gromit” trump feature addition, at least until later this evening!

I’ve added library suggestions for everyone as well as book recommendations for all books with three or more owners. Both are based on the same “people who own this also own that” algorithm. The library suggestion beta testers are split between those who thought it amazing and those who found it useless; it seems particularly good at guessing the second half of a partially-entered library. As for the book recommendations, I find them randomly either much better or much worse than Amazon’s.

Both features will get better as new books are added, but feedback is still much desired.

In other news, LibraryThing had graduated from the initial $10/lifetime plan. The new structure is $10 for a year’s membership and $25 for a lifetime membership. Those who have already paid their $10 were, of course, converted to “lifetime” status—my thanks for getting LibraryThing off the ground! This change will guarantee LibraryThing stays around for years to come.

PS: I made some final tweaks to the suggestion algorithm, and erased all the old reports. Incidentally, you may regenerate the report one per day. That gives me 24 hours to add that feature…

LibraryThing will go down for scheduled maintenance tonight at 1am Eastern time (6am GMT and, alas, 11pm in California). I expect it to be down for 2-3 hours.

Second, if you got this far, you’re in a very small minority of LibraryThing people—the cream of the cream, perhaps. So, here’s the scoop:

I’ve got an algorithm that tells you what books you “ought” to own. Basically, it looks at people who have similar books, and figures out what books they have that you don’t, adjusting for how close their library is to yours and for how common a given book is generally (the Harry Potter effect). If you want to look at your list, email me. NOTE: TELL ME YOUR USER NAME. I CAN’T READ MINDS!

The list is by email only for two reasons. First, it currently takes about five minutes to create, without breaking the server. (I’m taking the servers down tonight in part to speed such algorithms.) Second, I need feedback before I put the algorithm up.

It’s a lot harder to write a good library suggestion algorithm than I thought. If you like thinking about algorithms, this is an interesting one to think about.

The current algorithm has some flaws. First, it tells you about popular books you are actually avoiding. Thus, my brother isn’t a fan of Roger Zelaney, but his sci-fi heavy bookcase when matched to other sci-fi bookcases tells him he ought to own them. Second, it doesn’t think about different categories of books. Everyone’s library has more than one special section, but a “democratic” algorithm favors the largest section. So, I have a special interest in Greco-Roman divination, but it would never suggest books on that topic because my divination section is dwarfed by my other sections.

I have a number of other algorithms to look at. I’d like to test Dewey clusters (popular books in a Dewey-number range that you have a lot of books in), library suggestions that “bubble up” from book-by-book suggestions, and so forth. I’m not too interested in algorithms based on user ratings. My belief is that, in the aggregate, a library is a fair representation of a given person’s likes and dislikes. Even a “bad” book should inform the algorithm—people don’t buy books randomly.

The goal is to produce a better selection engine than Amazon has. Think big, I say.

So, I’ve added one RSS feed—recent books from your or someone else’s library. You’ll find the feed in users’ profile pages, marked with the familiar icon. The feed shows the last twenty books entered, linking to the book’s catalog page. The “description” field includes the user’s review (if there is one), their tags and the books publication data.

I made one feed to test the waters, and to provoke comment. So, what else do you want? I suggest:

• A feed of someone’s recent reviews
• A feed of someone’s recent books, but restricted to a given tag
• A feed of others’ review of books owned by someone (so you can track reviews of books in your library)

What else makes sense? Also let me know if you want the format changed, for example to include different data in the “description” or restrict it to ten books.

Another suggestion: I’d rather have a single page with feed buttons and maybe a way to create just the feed you want. I’d rather not be strewing orange buttons all over. Am I a fuddy-duddy?

PS: Forum is coming.