Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006

Authors who LibraryThing (“It’s MySpace for authors!”)

I’ve introduced LibraryThing Authors, a list of members who are also authors. The new “LT Author” button now marks off the author and profile page of these individuals.

I’ve started the list with twenty users whose profiles speak about being authors. These include authors like saralaughs (Sara Donati), anndouglas (Ann Douglas) and misia (Hanne Blank). I’m sure there are many more already on LibraryThing, and I hope others will be drawn by the opportunity to connect with their readers through their libraries. (I’m gunning for Neil Gaiman. He blogged about LibraryThing—won’t he join?)

Although I had mulled the idea for some time, the impetus for implementing it came at Book Expo America in Washington, DC. Abby and I spent a lot of time walking the floor, introducing ourselves to publishers. Having to explain LibraryThing so many times really focues ones thinking. We needed to simultaneously explain it and convince publishers that they should care. We found the best simple hook was to compare it to MySpace.*

“You know how MySpace helps bands promote themselves and stay in touch with their fans? Well, LibraryThing does that with authors.”

How to become a LibraryThing Author. To become a LibraryThing author, you must be a member of LibraryThing who is also a published (or about-to-be-published**) author, having at least one book listed on Amazon or in the Library of Congress. You must also have cataloged at least 50 books. (I’ve waived this requirement for some early entrants.) You don’t need to be a paid member; a free membership will do just fine.

LibraryThing authors do NOT need to allow comments on their profiles. (Go to “edit profile” to change that.) But they do need to let others browse their collection.

Email me for more information or to get that yellow button.

*This tended to work best on people under 35. Over that, it was often necessary to mention Friendster as well, and to watch their eyes for recognition. If recognition wasn’t forthcoming, things could get difficult…
**One of the most receptive publishers was Prometheus Books (Pyr). Prometheus was, among other things, promoting the upcoming novel Infoquake, described as a “science fiction business thriller.” Coming back, I found the author, David Louis Edelman, had signed up with LibraryThing the day before. Edelman is also a web programmer, so he gets my plug; let’s hope LibraryThing helps his book out!

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Tuesday, May 16th, 2006

LibraryThing and Abebooks… The Deal

The short version
LibraryThing is getting a partner. The partner is Abebooks.com, the Canadian company that matches booksellers with booklovers. Abe has taken a minority (40%) share of the company; I retain 60% and majority control. With the financial security and resources Abe brings to the table, LibraryThing’s future looks very bright—increased membership, decent servers and two-three employees working on exciting new features.

There is no down side. LibraryThing’s stringent Privacy Policy remains intact and in effect. The contract forbids LibraryThing from giving Abe ANY user data—not one user name, real name or email. Reviews will not leave the site without explicit permission (ie., not some buried legal clause). LibraryThing will not suddenly sprout Abe ads all over the place or prevent you from buying from other booksellers. Rather, LibraryThing will provide Abe with certain anonymous and aggregate data, like book recommendations or tag clouds, to help Abe users find books they want. Abe and I think we’ll be able to make both our websites better.

I want to make it clear I did not just get rich. (I’m walking away with just enough to cover my legal fees and some new shirts for Book Expo America, where we’re announcing this.) I did this to grow the site, and to have some security that I could keep doing what I love for years to come. Before Abe a few bad weeks would have ended development and sent me scrambling for web design work for maple syrup companies. Now I’ll have a stable job and a smart, dedicated team helping me make great things.

LibraryThing remains a community of booklovers. I’m grateful for all the help people have given the site, but you’re not off the hook. You control the catalog data, not me, and I’m not going to stop asking for your thoughts and ideas—they drive the site forward in a way employees can’t. For starters, I want to know how you want LibraryThing to spend its new resources. And just because they’ll be three developers doesn’t mean there won’t be bugs to catch. (There will be three times as many!)

Post about it here. If you want to ask questions, come over to the Google Group.


The back story
Since LibraryThing took off I’ve been wooed by various entities and characters. Early on I made the decision not to look for venture capital money.* I didn’t want to end up owning 5% of an over-funded behemoth, with the 95% owned by people who don’t care about books and want to see profits next week or they’ll turn the servers off. I also rejected every offer to swallow, popularize and commercialize LibraryThing—the idea being that if LibraryThing were less about book lovers and what they wanted, and more about video games and “special deals,” it would somehow be more appealing to “regular” people. R-r-right.

Abe was the first potential acquirer to spot LibraryThing—way back in November. They invited me up to Victoria—Seattle-ish—gave me a tour of their offices—literary quotes painted on the walls—and initiated open-ended conversations about the future of LibraryThing and what Abe and LibraryThing could do together. Hannes (CEO) and Boris (COO) worked hard to find a deal that would be good for both of us.** We eventually found a structure we both liked and wrote a deal around it.

Who are Abebooks
Abebooks (www.abebooks.com) calls itself a “dating site for booksellers and bookbuyers.” They list books from over 13,000 independent booksellers around the world, helping you find what you want at a good price. Once just for used, rare and collectible books, they now do new ones as well. They run British, French, German and Spanish sites.

From previous conversations***, I get the impression that many LibraryThing users are suspicious of commercial entities, particularly ones that destroy small businesses. Within this context, Abe is the good guy. Check out this Guardian article about Abe and its competitors—how they’ve refuted the idea that the internet would destroy small, independent booksellers; instead the booksellers kept their homey stores and found new markets on Abe.

What will change
As of ten minutes ago, LibraryThing finally hired Abby full-time as its “Head Librarian.” Later this month I’ll be hiring two more developers, including a librarian-developer. I’m assembling my dream team, and together we’re going to kick this site into the stratosphere. For now, LibraryThing’s headquarters are going to be in the apartment above mine, in Portland, ME (so I’ll be able to sneak down and give my wife a break with Liam). If you’re in the area, stay tuned for the “startup barbeque announcement.” At LibraryThing we not only catalog your books, we flip your burgers.

What won’t change
LibraryThing’s Privacy Policy remains in effect. The crucial part reads:

“LibraryThing will not sell any personally-identifiable information to any third party. This would be evil, and we are not evil. We reserve the right to sell or give away anonymous or aggregate information.”

I’ve been so insistent about this our contract PROHIBITS me from giving them anything with a username, let alone user emails and the like.

Other protections:

  • You will not be receiving any emails from Abe unless you consent to it, and we’re not asking.
  • You will still be able to buy your books from other booksellers.
  • LibraryThing will not be plastered with Abe ads.
  • We may feature some Abe content–like links to their author interviews–but nothing too intrusive or annoying.
  • LibraryThing will never make you “friends” with a softdrink, or even a book.

The deal moves LibraryThing closer to booksellers, so I’m compensating by hiring two librarians and redoubling our efforts to provide library-quality data. Abby and I are already signed up to speak at two library conferences, and LibraryThing remains very interested in seeing LibraryThing content in library catalogs.

Lastly, LibraryThing will not be ending its membership fee for libraries over 200 books. I feel $10/year or $25/life is a good price for the service, and users seem to agree. And LibraryThing needs it; Abe gave LibraryThing some expansion capital, not a blank check. Lastly and importantly, paying for something makes you a customer and a member, not a “user.” It turns preference into loyalty. You get a stake and a say.

Thanks to all
LibraryThing has grown because users pushed it on their blogs and on their friends. I have a lot of people to thank, starting with OakesSpalding—its first paid user—and effulgent—its first paid user not related to me. The list of long-time supporters is very long. I’ll mention LanguageHat, saralaughs, wyvernfriend, stevenmcohen, jkcohen, lilithcat, sunny, MMcM, hippietrail, rjohara, ryn_books, nperrin, btripp, wombat, bluetyson, BoPeep, debra_hamel—the longer I make this the more hurt people will be if they’re not on it! My friend ben_a was instrumental in helping me think through business issues and weigh the various “deals.” I’m supposed to buy Ben an elaborate gold sculpture. All other LibraryThing supporters should come up to Portland this summer and drop by the office for a beer. We’ll call it “customer relations,” and expense it.

Lastly, I need to thank my wife Lisa. Without her believing in me, we would have never moved up to Portland for me to work on ideas like LibraryThing. That I managed to develop the site AND arrange the deal owes a lot to her support. Oh, and she managed to have a baby in the middle of it too!

* Particularly after Paul Graham’s Startup School, with Olin Shivers’s wonderful slide: “Venture Capitalists: soulless agents of Satan or just clumsy rapists?” For a great piece on the growing irrelevance of VC, see Graham’s The Venture Capital Squeeze. The irrelevance of VC is very much the LibraryThing story, but whereas Graham presumes hot web ap. startups will get eaten by big corporations for big money—and, one assumes, swiftly lose their cool—Abe provided a better road.
** I also had good conversations with the founders of
BookFinder.com, an innovative book-search company (PERL hackers!) Abe recently bought it, and even though they have it all, kept it independent.
*** The response to my
April Fool’s post about being acquired by Walmart springs to mind…

UPDATE: Abe’s press release in Spanish! (Wish LT had more Spanish library coverage…)

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Monday, May 15th, 2006

Voice of America does the LibraryThing

VOA makes LibraryThing its Website of the Week, interviews fool. I love how the reporter can’t quite explain it, and sort of throws his hands up: “This is actually a site that’s easier to understand if you take a look.”

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Sunday, May 14th, 2006

Tags and taxonomy: Together at last!

There’s two parts to this story, a new feature and an intellectual level having to do with one of the burning questions of library and information science. I’ve introduced the intellectual question below, and Abby is going to look at it from her perspective over on LibraryThing’s new “ideas” blog Thing-ology.

The Feature. I’ve reintroduced LC Subject Headings*, those things in library catalogs that look like

Great Britain–History–Stuarts–1603-1714–Fiction

Except on LibraryThing, they get webbed into

This feature shows up in your catalog, but also in a new subject section (eg., subject: Aesthetics), on tag pages (eg., tag: aesthetics) and elsewhere. Note that the subjects are read-only. It might be interesting in the future to allow users to add their own subjects, so long as the difference is tracked.

The intellectual element. Second and more importantly, LibraryThing now provides something that has long been the Holy Grail of certain librarians and information people: a direct, statistically significant comparison between user-created tags and formal, professional classificiations—between “folksonomies” and taxonomies—and in the book space to boot. Every tag now shows related subjects, and every subject shows related tags—all with statistical data shown or a click away.

The issue is a hot one, with a large amount of debate on the relative merits of tags and professional classifications, like the LC subject headings. Are tags better than subjects? Are subjects better than tags? Are tags just a fad? Will tags replace subjects? Are tags evil? Are subjects evil? (Believe me, the idea is out there.) Librarians have become deeply emeshed in the debate, with partisans on both sides. Until now, there hasn’t been much in the way of hard data, at least for books. LibraryThing provides that.**

Let the analysis begin! Over the next few weeks, I want to explore the issue. I hope other library and information bloggers will also take it up. If you ask me, the answer is what many of us long suspected—tags can be useful, but they’re different. Tags are here to stay, but they’re not going to kill professional classification either. In my mind the interesting questions are: When do tags work better? When do they fail? Why? Can tags and subjects work together somehow, or are they eternal enemies?

* In fact, all “Subject Access” (600s) fields, so there will also be National Agricultural Library subjects, Canadian Subject Headings, etc. There is an issue with foreign-language headings which will be fixed together with other LT character set issues.
** I don’t want to get bogged down with shortcomings and contemplated impovements here. (Go to the Google Group for that.) Here’s a short initial list: (1) There are language issues (above), (2) There are some character-set issues, (3) Because of how LT gets its information, not every work has subjects that could.

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Sunday, May 14th, 2006

Thing-ology: Our new “ideas” blog

Announcing a new LibraryThing blog, Thing-ology.

For a while now, Abby and I have been itching to do more “ideas” posts, a place to work through what we’re thinking and learning every day. We want to talk directly about Web 2.0, Library 2.0, tags, social networking, user-driven cataloging, suggestion algorithms, web application development and all the other meaty stuff that LibraryThing raises. We also want a more blog-to-blog interaction, where we can notice interesting posts by John Blyberg, Steve Cohen or David Weinberger. Something like that would be out of place on the LibraryThing blog, where people expect the blog to notice what’s happening with the site, not wax philosophical about FRBR.

Now we can wax. We’re splitting the blog into two parts: the LibraryThing Blog (this) and Thing-ology. I’m going to have the lead on this one, Abby on the other.

In a few hours I’lll be going live with a big new feature with some consequences for information-theory debates. I’ll talk about the feature here, and Abby will talk about some of the implications over there.

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Sunday, May 14th, 2006

A Mothers’ Day tag cloud for Lisa and Mom

(we have a two two-month old; can you tell?)

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Saturday, May 13th, 2006

LibraryThing for organizations

Until now LibraryThing’s terms of use prohibited non-personal accounts without permission. Individuals, couples, families and so forth were okay. Churches, schools, law firms and such were not, unless I okayed it. In truth, I granted almost all requests, so LibraryThing has quite a few of these—particularly churches and some nifty museums.

Starting today I have a two stage policy: a slightly different price structure now, followed by a move to a more thorough-going “pro” version in the future. The pro version will be better in the ways organizations care about, such as distinguishing between catalog users and people who can add to the catalog. It will also remove some of the social features, so regular users’ book soulmate doesn’t turn out to be an H&R Block office.

I floated a new price structure on the blog for a few days. The final price structure’s quite modest, I think.

  • Book clubs, knitting clubs, blog rings, etc. Use a personal account. In the future, there will some “group” features so members can have separate accounts but one joined library.
  • Non-profit and not-for-profit organizations (churches, schools, clubs, classrooms). Free to 200 books. $15/year for up to 5,000 books.
  • For-profit (companies, organized crime). Free to 100 books. $25/year to 500 books. $50/year to 5,000 books.

See more at Can organizations join LibraryThing?

Existing non-personal accounts fall into two categories: those who asked for and received permission and those who didn’t. Those who asked permission keep the rate I gave them (usually a $25 lifetime account).

Those who didn’t ask get to keep it for now. I admit not everyone noticed the terms of use link—and who reads that stuff anyway?—so I’m going to let organzations of both types stay at the $10/year personal rate until their year ends. Organizations without permission that took out a lifetime account will see $15 refunded, and reversion to a $10 rate. It’s going to take a while for me to straighten this out, so bear with me.

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Thursday, May 11th, 2006

LibraryThing now the 100th largest library

See end for updates.

LibraryThing has reached its 2,634,375th book! While 2,634,375 doesn’t look special, it is in fact one more than the American Library Associations’s 100th largest library. In dethroning the Kent State system, LibraryThing steps into place as the new 100th largest library in the United States.

Okay, the ALA probably won’t add us to their list. And, okay, LibraryThing isn’t really a library in that sense. (It’s more like the library consortium OCLC—if OCLC were in Lilliput.) But the milestone is pretty cool nevertheless. In nine months, LibraryThing has gone from zero to 2.6 million books. At this rate, we’ll hit the top 30 by the end of the year, and there’s no reason to believe LibraryThing won’t top the Library of Congress’ 29 million volumes some day.

Of course, everyone knows that private collections must dwarf library ones, but it’s cool to see that demonstrated. Regular people have a lot of books. First-time visitors often fixate on the number of Harry Potters in LibraryThing (almost 20,000). But the “long tail” goes very far out. I once regarded Engel’s Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army as a sort of private possession—I only ever met a handful of people who’d read it, and I studied Greek history. Now I have 10 other people to talk to. (Trust me: the title’s boring, but it’s groundbreaking stuff.)

Incidentally, the 2,634,375th book was Gaugin’s Noa Noa: The Tahitian Journal (Dover, 1985), added by the Boston-based sionnac, a hard-core (1,165-volume) bibliophile in Boston. Whoever the heck you are, LibraryThing owes you a beer! I’m down to Boston all the time, and Abby even lives there. Take a picture of yourself with the book. I’ll post it up here.

Now does anyone know somebody at the ALA?

BTW: Steady yourself. The next week or so is going to be a merciless barrage of announcements and analysis of announcements. I have blog entries stacked up like cordwood here, just waiting to go. Some of you may have seen LC subjects tiptoe back in unannounced. There’s a lot more there.

Update: Please note, talk of “dethroning” Kent State is tongue-in-cheek. I am not asserting that LibraryThing is better than Kent State’s library. I’m not even asserting LibraryThing really is a library—you can’t visit, after all, and you certainly can’t take out books! (As Google would say “yet.”) But I draw the line at the idea that LibraryThing and its libraries are all “arbitrary” and inferior to “actual” libraries. On the contrary, many LibraryThing libraries are assembled deliberately and with the sort of domain knowledge institutional libraries cannot match. For a rather heated discussion of this, check out LibraryTavern’s comments.

Update to update: I was WONDERING why nobody left comments, and now I know. Blogger was throwing the comments elsewhere on my server. So you could see them if you clicked “comments,” but they didn’t show up on the main page. (My mistake, ultimately.) So, apologies to the commenters—you must have thought I was dissing you. The conversation is now a bit involuted, as Lycanthropist and I mostly debated over on LibraryTavern.

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Monday, April 24th, 2006

LibraryThing adds language support

LibraryThing now allows you to keep track of the languages in your collection. If you don’t want to do that, you don’t have to. If you do, the changes are far-reaching.

  • Every book has three fields: primary language, secondary language and original language.
  • Languages are drawn from Amazon, your library record or the whole LibraryThing collection (see below).
  • The catalog shows “language” and “original language” fields. Go to “change fields” to see them.
  • Language can be edited within your catalog, much as tags are.
  • Power edit has a versatile “set language” feature.
  • Each language has its own dedicated page (eg., French). At present, these only show the most popular works originally in that language.
  • Your “Fun statistics” page crunches the numbers on the languages in your collection.
  • I’ve adopted the full MARC specification for languages, so you can catalog your Arawak and Elamite holdings. In most circumstances, however, you’re given a shorter list, with the option to see the full one

Not right? Don’t blame LibraryThing!

LibraryThing does its best, but it won’t always get the language right without some help. The reason has to do with the source of the data:

If you find your books through libraries, the languages are picked up from their catalog’s MARC record. That’s the theory. In fact, as we’ve discussed on the Google Group, library records are surprisingly sloppy with languages. (If you doubt that, click the “card” icon and look at the MARC 008 and 041 fields.) Polyglot libraries will cleanup. Of course, if you don’t care about the language field, you don’t need to look at it.

If you find a book on Amazon, LibraryThing guesses based upon which Amazon you used. That’s the best I can do, unfortunately. Amazon doesn’t tell me the language.

Because of the way “works” operate, if you leave the “original language” blank, LibraryThing will make a guess based upon the other copies of the work in the system. As elsewhere, these guesses appear in green. Green guesses are updated daily.

Let’s talk!

This is one of the more extensive changes I’ve made, with tentacles all over the functionality and code. Sometimes the “why” of a feature is complex, but I had to do it that way. Other times, I may have taken the wrong route. I’m guessing people come up with some great suggestions for changes or new, derived features. (And, as someone will surely point out, the system still has problems searching and sorting diacriticals. I’m working on it.)

I’ve set up two discussion threads in the Google Group, one for philosophy/functionality discussion, and one for bugs. I’m looking forward to what people have to say. Gratias tibi ago, Thingamabrarii.

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Tuesday, April 18th, 2006

But why?

I’ve added “why” links to the new “Pssst!” book recommendation feature. It’ll give you an idea where your recommendations are coming from.

I’m nearly finished with yet another recommendation algorithm. Then I’ll let them duke it out and users can decide which are the best. Or maybe I should have an algorithm to recommend an algorithm for you.

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Friday, April 14th, 2006

Pssst! Book recommendations from LibraryThing

I just launched the new “Pssst!” feature, which examines your catalog against patterns in the catalogs of LibraryThing’s other 30,000 users to produce book recommendations just for you. LibraryThing already suggested books on a book-by-book basis, and matched you up with users who had similar libraries. This completes the circle.

To use the feature you need to have cataloged ten books. If you have, check our your recommendations. If you haven’t, check out my recommendations—ancient civilization and web design, it got me. (Incidentally, yes I have read Thucydides. I just have another 2,000 books to catalog!)

Recommendations are available in three types:

  • People with your books also have…
  • Similarly-tagged books
  • Most popular books you don’t have

In each case, I’ve divided the recommendations into “fiction” and “non-fiction” (a rough, algorithmically-determined label). You can click a link to exclude books by authors already in your collection, so a mystery buff doesn’t get showered with minor Agatha Christie novels.

Needless to say, the point is not commercial. Although you can find commercial links, I didn’t add any to the recommendations page. I hope you’ll agree that LibraryThing—with no funding and building on a real community—produces recommendations as good or better than the ones you’re getting from Amazon, and ones not tilted toward current offerings or what you bought last week.* Community beats commerce, even in commerce.

Let me know what you think here, or discuss it at length on the Google Group.

The back story:

Long-time users may remember a previous feature that also produced book recommendations. I took it down because the math was so complex that it was slowing the site down, even when I required people to wait 20 minutes for the results. This new algorithm is much faster, relying on the existing book-by-book recommendations. (Book recommendations are regenerated on a sliding schedule, at night.) The old feature was also made before the “works system,” so it threw up a lot of books already in your catalog. Even so, I want to bring back suggestions focused on most-similar users, if I can do it in a way that doesn’t kill the server.

I agonized over the name—Recommendations? Suggestions? I even contemplated “Pimp a Book” (I own the domain). “Pssst!” sounds a little gimmicky, a little “marketing-ish,” too “Pssst!®.” The deciding factor was length. I wanted to give it its own tab—it’s a major feature already, and I have plans to expand it. The other options were just too long.

Lastly, I want or plan to extend the feature in the following ways:

  • A way to mark what you think of the recommendation—good, bad, totally off-the-wall.
  • A way to add a book to your wish list.
  • Tracking the list over time, so you could find out the “new” recommendations.
  • A “why” button. (For example: “Suggested because you own The Hobbit and Sexing the Cherry.”) That’s very expensive to do for all books at a time. One-by-one, I could “Ajax” the answer in, but so much Ajaxing—people will click “why,” “why,” “why” like mad—makes me nervous.

Oh, I renamed “extras” to “Tools and Toys.” I’ll be adding to that tab quite a bit in the coming weeks. Have the cool toys—chicklets, Thingamabrarians, that nifty LibraryThing-Outlook-PDA conversions, etc.—never made it off the blog or Google Group.

*I mourn the fact that my Amazon recommendations have flipped, from obscure Throwing Muses albums (of course, I have all of them, but Amazon don’t know that), to baby-care books. O for lost youth!

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Thursday, April 13th, 2006

The New York Times Covers Zunafish?!?

I think I’m going to tear my hair out with jealousy. Today’s New York Times has a gushy article about the media trading site Zunafish.com. Kindly look at the chart below, LibraryThing vs. Zunafish according to Alexa.


Update: WOW. That’s a big bounce! Let’s see if they hold on to much of it. Nobody ever holds the first-day bounce.

Zunafish is the long red line at the bottom. There are at least a dozen trading sites doing better. Heck, my ancient history hobby site is crushing them! Or check the blogs. Google Blog Search lists 2,235 blog posts about LibraryThing. Zunafish? Seven, five posted today! (They’ll no doubt be more soon.)

Nor is Zunafish a totally new deal. They opened in January. As the NYT writes, “Mr. Bloom and Mr. Elias said that the circle of traders had been limited so far — they did not disclose figures.” You’re not kidding. According to Alexa, 4,570,852 web sites have more traffic. Four-million.

But, as the article states, they’ve raised $485,000. I guess that buys them a PR campaign. No doubt their numbers will spike now that they’ve landed the NYT article.

It seems so terribly unfair. Press should follow success, not create it. LibraryThing’s traffic currently outranks booksellers Biblio and Booksense, all trading sites except Peerflix (eg., PaperbackSwap, Lendmonkey, FrugalReader, Bookins, SwapandSave, etc.), Amazon’s AllConsuming, the much-heralded Basecamp.com, and on and on. And yet LibraryThing’s press coverage has been largely restricted to The Christian Science Monitor‘s electronic edition and a piece in my home-town paper. Instead, LibraryThing’s grown on word of mouth.

I know. The answer is to get funding and to hire a PR firm. Forgive me for being idealistic, but it shouldn’t have to be that way.

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Thursday, April 13th, 2006

Tab-delimited export

I’ve added a tab-delimited export, for use in Microsoft Excel and elsewhere. Go to the Extras tab to download the file to your desktop.

Tab-delimited supplants the former CSV export, which had some drawbacks. (I’ll be working to get it up to snuff in the near future.) Among other things, it handles special characters better, and includes all your fields. Problems remain with non-Latin characters, such as Chinese and Georgian.

So far, testers on the Google Group have reported no problems. If you find one, go ahead and post it there, or here.

In other news, also check out the Google Group for a cool new beta feature I’m developing, and asking for comments on. It’s not ready for blogging yet.

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Tuesday, April 11th, 2006

Power Edit powers up

The Power Edit feature, which allows you to change books in batches, has been improved. I added:

  • Alphabetize tags. A few people have been hounding me for this. The idea is to turn “dogs, zebras, apes” into “apes, dogs, zebras.” If you want it, you want it.
  • Delete books. Want to delete a whole bunch of books? Your whole catalog. Here you go.
  • Find ISBN duplicates (under “Miscellaneous powers” or click here to do it). This is another long-running desideratum—to know your duplicates (and get rid of them). You’ll see how it works if you use it.

In addition to the new features, Power Edit no longer shows 100 books at a time. What seemed a feature—showing all books—turns into a monster when you have thousands of them. As a side bonus, the regular “list view” now allows 100 books too; go to “change fields” to select it.

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Sunday, April 9th, 2006

LibraryHypnotismThing

I made a page that shows books as they enter the system, in real time. I did it as a test of some new code, not because I thought it would be a cool feature.

I find it hypnotic, both fascinating and will-depleting at the same time. I hope you do too.

http://www.librarything.com/test_recentbooks.php

It does put the lie to the notion that LibraryThing is all about J. K. Rowling and Terry Pratchett. In fact, the most popular stuff is a tiny fraction of the whole. People are putting some very interesting collections up!

Update: This week I will (briefly) emerge from my post-baby hole and get a whole bunch of work done, so thank you for your patience and stay tuned.

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Sunday, April 2nd, 2006

Five new features and a fix

1. Recent “users with your books. People tell me that “Users with your books,” available from any profile page (example), is one of the most fun things about LibraryThing. But it can be hard to keep up with changes. To alleviate that problem, I’ve added a “recent” option, which restricts itself to books added in the last two weeks—both new users and old ones adding books. Click on the number and you’ll see those books in their catalog.

2. Permanent catalog links. Many users have expressed frustration at not being able to send people to a particular page, sort, tag, author or view of their catalog. As I revealed on the Google Group, most of these can be forced by skillful URL manipulation, but the rules are somewhat complex. To cut the Gordian Knot I’ve added a “permanent link” link at the bottom of the catalog view. Just copy that (a “right click,” or whatever) and you’re set.

3. Entry and review date charts. The “fun statistics” page, available from any profile (example), now shows charts for when books were entered and when they were reviewed.

4. Searching for blank tags. By popular request, from now on, you can leave the search field empty when you search for tags, and it will give you all the books that have no tags.

5. You and no other. The “fun statistic” page also includes a new list of all the books you share with just one other person and who that person is. The feature, termed “You and no other” or, if you prefer Medieval French, “Vous et nul autre” is just “resting” on that page.

Even before the feature, people have been blogging about this particular oddity, and others, which springboard blog discussion about reading tastes. I hope to create a whole new page of such “meme lists.” My current ideas are:

  • Lonely books. Books only you own. (“Why do you own it? Should others read it?”)
  • Lonely authors. Authors only you domicile.
  • The top X books you share with other users (see The Little Professor for an example)
  • The top 100 books (or authors) and whether you own them. (“How does the great unwashed and I get along?”)

Any others? Add more here, or at the Google Group. Anyone want to help me translate them all into Medieval French?

6. Default library now sticks. Hey, it worked for me. What’s up with you people and your kooky browsers?

(Ring image taken from Heavenly Treasures. I hope they don’t mind. I AM giving them a valuable link.)

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Saturday, April 1st, 2006

Good news for the whole LibraryThing community

Update: THIS IS NOT TRUE! It is an April Fool’s joke. I tried to pick the most obnoxious acquisition possible and go over the top in the announcement, but I think I still caused a few heart attacks. Sorry!

We’re proud to announce that LibraryThing has joined the Wal-Mart family. Together we’ll continue to improve how people catalog and share their books over the internet. In joining with Wal-Mart, LibraryThing will be expanding its horizons, allowing cataloging of CDs, DVDs and as well as a wide variety of other consumer products and appliances.

We’d like to thank everyone who has helped us, our advisors, our formerly unionized employees, and particularly our 30,000 users. We still want your feedback, and we look forward to bringing you exciting new features with fewer bugs. One thing’s for sure, we won’t be worried about buying another server!

We understand that some LibraryThing users may have questions about this historic change. How can I know my data will be safe? Will LibraryThing lose its homey, altruistic feel? Will I be able to catalog my firearms? How much Ol’ Roy can Axel eat anyway? Will Liam’s first word be “rollback”? Those are all good questions.

Thank you for your support!

Tim Spalding
President, LibraryThing

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Thursday, March 30th, 2006

Zeitgeist gets weirder

I’ve added some more statistics to the Zeitgeist page. I describe them below, and my opinion comes free!

50 Top taggers. Time to get recognized for your tagging. Carminowe has 23,000 tags!

50 Top-rated authors. I find this a bit ho-hum. Who are these people? And as for Anna Akhmatova—I guess if you like her, you like her.

50 Lowest-rated author. Why do people own books they hate? One factor is clearly “assigned books”—Hegel, Kant and Heidegger; partisans love them, but there are a lot of copies out there that have been flung across the room the night before the final exam. I think August Derleth falls under the category “completist disappointment.” Lovecraft fans feel compelled to own him, but he just isn’t that good. I don’t understand Catherine Coulter and Candace Bushnell. As far as Claude Levi-Strauss goes, what’s wrong with you people! 😉

Top 25 long tags. The top tags seems very monosyllabic, but LibraryThing users are fond of longer, descriptive tags. This is a sampling of tags of at least 25 letters.

This was “interstice” programming—the stuff I can get done between diaper changes. I’m just mining the database in interesting ways, not doing fundamentally new work. But more major changes are on the way. Suggestions, comments, attempts to persuade me that Akhmatova is great and Levi-Strauss bad are all encouraged.

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Tuesday, March 28th, 2006

Miscellaneous

Elle. I mentioned that Abebooks interviewed me for their new “Avid Collector” newsletter (sign-up / newsletter). I thought I’d add that I was pleased and surprised to discover their Avid Reader Bookclub is doing Elle by Douglas Glover. Glover, a Canadian novelist who won the Governor-General’s Award for Fiction for Elle, was my wife’s favorite writing teacher at Vermont College, and she gives Elle a big thumbs-up.

LibraryThing, PaperbackSwap, loaning and swapping. There’s been a lot of buzz about swap sites recently. Surely not all LibraryThing users would want to swap or loan their books with others, but 30,000 users and 2 million books is a very respectable starting-point for such a community. I approached arguably the top swap site, PaperbackSwap, to see if we could work together somehow. I’m thinking of some easy way to move books between systems, with perhaps some cross-listing or cross functionality; actually getting LibraryThing directly into the business of swapping is a bit daunting. I am, however, somewhat interested to see if an “InterLibraryThingLoan” system could work. Okay, I admit it, I just want to get my hands on that translation of Palaephatus…

I started a discussion about swapping, loaning and PaperbackSwap over on the Google Group. I’d love to hear more opinions, either in comments here, or over there.

Beta-licious. The blog MoMB, The Museum of Modern Betas, published a list of the most popular beta applications by the number of times they’ve been bookmarked on Del.icio.us. LibraryThing comes in number seventeen, in between Google Scholar and Blinklist, and above Frappr, Odeo, Rollyo and other beta royalty. This is particularly good in so far as I’ve never done one of those underhanded, unfair Post to Del.icio.us links. Er, scratch that.

That’s it for now. As many of you know, I’m still largely in crazy mode with my new child. I’ve managed to do some incremental things—eg., the new libraries—during interstices, but substantial work, particularly work requiring my full attention for more than ten minutes is on hold. I hope to get back in the saddle soon. They say the first month is the hardest…

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Sunday, March 26th, 2006

Twelve (was ten) more libraries

I added ten eleven twelve new searchable libraries, bringing LibraryThing up to 47 libraries, plus the Amazons.

  • MIT and Caltech. Technical and scientific heft.
  • NIH / National Library of Medicine. Medical heft.
  • National Art Library (UK). Art heft.
  • NEBIS (Switzerland). Swiss catalog gathers holdings of some 60 member libraries, with material in German, Italian, French and—one imagines—Romansch.
  • Bahria University, Pakistan. LibraryThing’s first Pakistani library.
  • National Library of Poland. First Polish library. Some character problems. Poles are invited to tell me about them.
  • Stockholm University. More Swedish books.
  • Tufts University. It’s not my fault that Boston has so many open library-data servers.
  • Boston Athenaeum. By popular request, I added one of my favorite libraries, Boston’s extraordinary private—yes, private—library, just steps from the State House.
  • UPDATE: ILSCO. I’ve added ILCSO, the Illinois Libary Computer Systems Organization, a consortium of some 65 libraries, holding 32 million records. The libraries include Wheaton, DePaul, Illinois State, the University of Illinois, The Catholic Theological Union, and The Newberry Library, another great private library. ILSCO is also pretty fast, which helps.
  • UPDATE: CISTI. Someone who works at the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI) suggested I add them—apparently they are “Canada’s National Science Lbrary”—and pointed me to connection info. Thanks! Others should feel free to do the same; the trick is: I need a z39.50 connection (I’ll consider SRU). Pointing me to the web catalog does no good.

Interesting trivia: The Athenaeum is one of those rare libraries that still uses the original “Cutter” classification, owing, I think, to the fact that its author, Charles Ammi Cutter, ran the place for almost three decades. I haven’t figured out how this is going to work in LibraryThing.

I was thinking of having a LibraryThing meetup at their weekly tea, to which members can invite non-members. Wouldn’t that be fun?

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Saturday, March 25th, 2006

Abebooks does the LibraryThing

Abebook’s new email newsletter The Avid Collector includes a “collector profile” interview with me (yay!) in its Spring 2006, issue. You can read it by clicking on the links I just gave, or sign up for the newsletter by clicking this graphic I stole from them.

Talking about one’s books is even more fun than talking about oneself, so I was glad for the opportunity. And, of course, I got to drop the name of certain book-cataloging website and show off another picture of my dog, Axel. The newsletter also includes a collecting Q&A and good piece by Allan Stypeck of NPR’s The Book Guys and owner of Second Story Books, in DC (a favorite haunt when I lived there).

Classical noodling: Abe hyperlinked some of my books to searches on their site, including Palaephatus’ “On Incredible Tales” (Peri Apiston). The search gives no results because, as often happens with Greek and Latin works, the English title is quicksand—the only available English-language edition being Bolchazy-Carducci’s text/translation titled “On Unbelievable Tales.” Try this Abebooks search for Palaephatus instead, which nets a couple copies of that edition, and also throws in Aldus Manutius’ 1505 first-ever printing of the text (together with Hyginus, Aratus, etc.) for a cool $2,750.

I found out it was the editio princeps from the Wikipedia article, lifted wholesale from my site, AncientLibrary.com, which reprints William Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1870). The Abebooks entry, from a bookstore in Culver City, CA, doesn’t mention that it’s the editio princeps, however, so maybe it’s more valuable than they realize. Which reminds me, I should have signed up to be an Abebooks associate when they asked me to do the interview. Generally I’ve been very lax about signing up for such programs—LibraryThing’s focus is not on “getting people out the door” to buy stuff. But that would be one sweet commission!

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Saturday, March 25th, 2006

Public Library Asssociation / 3 million tags

Three million tags. After getting the smack-down for daring to suggest (even in fun) that LibraryThing, with two million books, was now the 182th-largest library in the United States, I hesitate to proclaim that LibraryThing has more tags than any library in the world!

PLA. I managed to sneak down to Boston to catch the end of the Public Library Association’s 2006 conference. (A tip of the hat to my “connection,” who saw that I didn’t pay the full rate for what amounted to 1 1/2 hours of attendance and a Diet Pepsi.) Although I stupidly left my beautiful bookmark business cards at home, I managed to mention LibraryThing to a bunch of people. Nine in ten had never heard of it, but one in ten’s eyes lit up and they got effusive—a great sign, I think. I gave a well-received product demo to a library OPAC supplier. And I picked up information on getting some real-live LibraryThing library cards, which would be fun, if totally useless, I think. Were any other Thingamabrarians there?

Super-librarian Nancy Pearl talked at the PLA, but on Wednesday, so she dodged an abject plea for a NPR story on LibraryThing. Fortunately, I have the life-like Librarian Action Figure (“With Amazing Push-Button Shushing Action!”*), modeled directly after Ms. Pearl.

Nancy, if you’re reading this, does the word voodoo have any meaning for you?

*My wife got me her action figure under the false impression that it actually made shushing noises, or at least moved its “Shushing Action” under battery power, but it just sits there and you have to do both the shushing and the motion. Hey, what gives?

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Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006

Slashdot and LibraryThing

Slashdot is running a topic Solving the home library problem? Happy users—and unhappy ones?—are invited to go on over and “represent.”

Current opinion is largely in favor of Delicious Library, that elegant but limited Mac desktop application. LibraryThing hasn’t come in for much mention, largely, I think, because Slashdot people are unaware of it. (If only Slashdot were written by librarians, who’s awareness of LibraryThing is approaching a saturation point, with each new mention starting “You’ve probably already heard about it from other people, but…”)

Delicious Library is, I agree, very beautiful and works very elegantly. But it’s totally desktop bound. Once you enter your books, they just sit there. Worse, it only uses Amazon. That’s great if all your books are in print, in an Amazon language, and you don’t care about cataloging data quality (or Deweys, etc.). Nor does it have tags…

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Sunday, March 19th, 2006

Most Requested Minor Feature, The

LibraryThing is now sorting books without initial the/an/a, so a book like Shelby Foote’s The Civil War goes under C rather than T. It took a while, but it’s done now!

I’ve made a stab at foreign-language support. At present it works with: English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Welsh, Albanian, Hungarian, Tagalog, Turkish and Malagasy. The most important missing language is Italian.

At present, it’s a totally dumb process, removing definite and indefinite articles without attention to the underlying language, which LibraryThing doesn’t current track. This leaves it open to interpreting Die Another Day as Another Day, Die (German die), and is why I’ve absented Italian from the list (the article I would produce such non-books as Was a Teenage Dominatrix, I). This problem will go away when I start tracking languages.

For cataloging geeks: (1) I used the list provided by the Library of Congress. (2) Although MARC records can indicate “the number of character positions associated with an initial definite or indefinite article to be disregarded in sorting and filing processes,” I have decided not to use this information. The system needs to adapt when someone changes a record, at which point the MARC record can no longer be a reliable guide. Also, many records don’t have MARC records. (3) Unless I’m mistaken, here’s an example where language is important, even when the definitive article has no potential ambiguity: Les Bons Mots : How to Amaze Tout Le Monde with Everyday French. Right?

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Saturday, March 18th, 2006

Widgets! Widgets! Widgets!

I’ve substantially upgraded LibraryThing’s widgets, the little things you stick on your blog or web page to tell people what your reading (and more). The major improvements are:

  • Tag and author cloud widgets! Show your tags or the authors in your collection, either by frequency or randomly. Control the type size, size “contrast,” number, style, etc.
  • Cover-only widgets, with fixed width and height options for better display
  • Preset widgets for ease of use, customized widgets for every need, and you can still muck around with customizing them yourself with CSS*
  • Control over showing title or title and author, where links go, etc.
  • AllConsuming-like widgets
  • CSS now includes LTodd and LTeven styles, so you can add striping if you want
  • Super Ajaxorific look and feel; you’ll see more of this around LibraryThing

I hope you have as much fun with them as I had making them. I’d love to hear what you think of them, and what you want. Improvments I’m working on:

  • Sorting by the data-read, date-bought fields
  • Connections widgets. Do you want them?

*Julie Meloni’s blog post Styling the LibraryThing blog widget remains the best discussion of how to hyper-customize widgets with CSS. The only real change is on odd/even striping; tags don’t add much.

UPDATE: Show us how you use your widget and if you’ve modified it in a cool way by posting the URL in the comments!

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