LibraryThing blogs (combined feed)

50,000 Venues in LibraryThing Local

Sonya — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:01:00 -0800

During our mad rush to add all the used book stores at Abebooks.com (see blog post) and all the Barnes & Noble stores (see Talk thread), Dan added the 50,000th entry into LibraryThing Local.

So what's http://www.librarything.com/venue/50000? It's Barnes & Noble in Morgantown, WV.

There's no photo up yet, if someone near Morgantown wants to go and take a picture with a piece of paper that says "50,000!" on it...

Ring the bell! We hit 50,000 venues in Local!

Sonya — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:44:00 -0800

During our mad rush to add all the used book stores at Abebook (blog post) and all the Barnes & Noble stores (Talk thread), Dan added the 50,000th entry into LibraryThing Local.

So where is http://www.librarything.com/ venue/50000? A Barnes & Noble in Morgantown, WV.

There's no photo up yet, if someone near Morgantown wants to go and take a picture with a piece of paper that says 50,000! on it.

(crossposted from the other blog)

Your statistics: Ebooks and audiobooks

Tim — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:50:00 -0800

Our recent ebook push had one major flaw—something was up with the profile statistics page.

That's been fixed, and the result is stunning. Instead of a few dozen ebooks, most users should see hundreds. My stats, for example, include fifteen LibriVox ebook editions, 45 Project Gutenberg editions and fully 99 Open Library editions—all free.

Check it out:

My ebooks: http://www.librarything.com/profile/timspalding/stats/ebooks
Your ebooks: http://www.librarything.com/profile/MEMBERNAME/stats/ebooks

Local Book Search: A new way forward for bookselling

Tim — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 05:00:00 -0800

We've just released a slew of new features (see overview). We hope members like them all, but Local Book Search is the most important. I won't mince words: it is intended to change bookselling forever.

The Idea. It's a simple idea: a location-based search for books. After all, you can ask Google for pizza where you live. But you can't do it with books, until now.

Just Show Me the Feature! Here are some sample links:

Imagine if all the bookstores and libraries in central London were searchable.

The Vision. More and more people look to the web, even for local information. I can't remember the last time I checked a newspaper for movie times or local music. Bookstores, however, have largely stayed off the "local web." Those that expose their holdings do it inconveniently. Many don't at all, either because their systems are old, or on principle. And nobody has ever tried to tie it all together, like Local Book Search attempts to do.

Physical bookstores often complain about online prices, but a lot of the problem is just convenience. If I lived in San Fransisco and wanted a copy of Steinbeck's The Moon is Down, I probably wouldn't bother to call up all my local bookstores; Amazon is quick and easy, and will surely have it. Local Book Search find a half dozen copies, new and used, in just seconds.

At a minimum, this is a cool test. Maybe bookstores will prefer to keep their holdings information to themselves and shut us out. A bookstore near me won't participate because they think the information is "valuable" and, if it were online, "people would know what we don't have." I think that sort of thinking is the road to a world without bookstores.

Online bookselling is here to stay. It's a wonderful thing. Same-day online delivery, as recently offered by Amazon, is something new. But physical book stores are also very important. We hope local book search can be one of the things they need to survive and prosper.

Who are you searching? The list currently stands as follows:

800 or so, mostly used, bookstores from Abebooks.com
402 Borders (US) stores
300 Waterstones (UK) stores
250 Indigo, Indigo Spirit, Chapters and Coles stores in Canada
40 library systems that use LibraryThing for Libraries. (We hope to convince all 160 to participate.)
40 Blackwell (UK) stores
4 Shakespeare and Company (NYC) stores
4 Powell's stores (Portland)
3 Tattered Covers stores (Colorado)
The Strand in New York City
Harvard Books (Cambridge, MA)
Porter Square Books (Cambridge, MA)
Foyles (London)
City Lights in Sylva, NC (they rock)

How are you doing it? We're doing it in a mix of ways. A number of bookstores, including Powells, Porter Square and City Lights, send us their files. We have special permission from Abebooks too, so we pre-parse the Abebooks sellers.* (Members have helped us connect them to LibraryThing.) Indigo/Chapters gave us their blessing, and a convenient way to do it.

The rest involve just-in-time searches. Every system is different, so we've written a special connector for each, but the usual pattern is some sort of multiple-ISBN fetch. In every case, we've obeyed a site's "robots.txt" file--going only where we're allowed, and hitting a website no faster than once per second. That's also why we've stayed off some biggies, like Barnes and Noble--their store holdings pages are prohibited by robots.txt.

Why aren't there more indies? We introduced basic bookstore integration back in 2006 (!), taking only indies. It never really took off, because we couldn't convince IndieBound to offer access to the files, and, I think, asking booksellers to upload their file to IndieBound and then LibraryThing was a hard sell.

Since then, we've pushed hard to get indies involves, with no success. We even lost our first participant, when Ann Arbor's Shaman Drum went out of business. Those who follow our Twitter stream will remember a lot of hand-wringing over the topic. (In fairness, IndieBound has expressed interest, but they are still working on their platform.) So, we went and did it outselves, with whom we could.

The "connectors" all take about the same amount of time, whether we pick up 400 stores in Borders, or a single store in the Strand. So, by time, we've spent most of it integrating with indies. We have a decent list of other indies to add, when we get the chance.

The Future. Obviously, we know this is bigger than LibraryThing. If you have an idea about where it should go, chances are we've had it too. We're working on it.

We are, incidentally, aware that we're weak on the library front. We have 40 libraries now and, if all LibraryThing for Libraries sites agreed, we could get up to 170 systems (more than 1600 buildings). Unfortunately, you can't really screen-scrape most library systems; they tend to break under the strain. Nobody really has the data necessary, except perhaps for OCLC.

So, OCLC, how about it? Our peanut butter. Your chocolate. Don't libraries deserve to be part of this? Can we let bygones be bygones?

What we need? Bookstores who want to participate should send me an email (tim@librarything.com) or a Tweet (@LibraryThingTim).

Bookstores concerned about LibraryThing servers hitting them too hard should also write us. We're keeping close tabs on how often we scrape sites. (We also cache results for 24 hours.) In many cases, we could do it more efficiently, if we were allowed to access search pages, not just product pages. And we can try fewer ISBNs. Or, if you are able, we can parse your files and never hit your site.

All told, we think the traffic is good for you—it will get you sales. But we are conscious of limited technology budgets, and will work with you to increase the benefit, and decrease the potential cost.

Kudos. Thanks are owed to:

LibraryThing members who are helping us connect Abebooks to LibraryThing.
Abebooks. In theory, local book search could cut them out of the equation, as people walked into a store, instead of buying online. But they saw it as a valuable service to their members, and an overall win. Abebooks deserves applause for taking a risk.
Indigo/Chapters. Every time I deal with them, I marvel at how easy they make things. No meetings, just agreement to test it out. Indigo, like Abe, is Canadian. Is there something in the water?
Powell's, Porter Square Book and (tiny) City Lights Books in Sylva, NC deserve thanks for being with us from the first. Because their method--sending us files--is so much easier for us, we're planning to create some special features for them.
Programemrs Chris and Mike, and non-programmers Dan and Stephanie. The "Get this Book" and "Local Book Search" project took over two months, and involved huge amounts of new code, and also data entry. As Chris remarked, for most companies, "this would be a site." It is an awesome achievement.

Come talk about it. Come talk about all this on Talk.

*Abebooks.com sellers already total over 1 million books, and we haven't caught up with all the Abe-to-LibraryThing work members have done. We think they'll end up around 1.5 million books total.

New Feature: Get this Book

Tim — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:57:00 -0800

This post does not discuss what I consider what may be the most innovative and promising new feature, Local Book Search. I'll get to that in the morning. (See it in action.)

Over the night we added a small avalache of features (for a list of Talk posts, see the top of this post.) This post talks about the "Get this book" feature.

Show me the feature! Check the Get this Book feature for Romeo and Juliet. Then come discuss this here.

Why the new features? For years now we've had a feature called "Buy, Borrow and Swap"—involved bookstore and library links, and integration with swap sites.

Two things moved us replace this feature:

We wanted to make it better—to integrate with as many sources as possible, so we show people what was out there, and send people to links that existed, not a lot of blind links to pages that might or might not exist. First, as discussed here, Amazon tightened up its linking policy, forcing changes.
Amazon required it. As a site that uses Amazon data (although we also use some 690 other sources), we had to follow their rules, which required us to drop links to competitor sites, except on secondary pages. We didn't want this to be a net loss for the site, so we decided to make the best secondary pages we could imagine. (Three programmers kept imagining for two months straight, and this is what came out.)

The new pages are accessible from any work page, and are pictured at the right.

Ebooks. Another book site integrated with a single attractive, but not comprehensive ebook supplier. So we decided to integrate with fourteen. We've included both pay sites (Kindle, Sony Reader) and free sites (Project Gutenberg, Hathi Trust).

Not pictured:

The integration is deep. For Hathi alone, we've linked 398,000 LibraryThing works, and OpenLibrary adds another 178,000 full scans. Because our catalog is so vast, and our data so "ratty" (it comes from over 690 source), LibraryThing can do a lot better than parsing ISBNs. This is how we connect to so many ISBN-less sources. My favorite is the Online Books Page, which collects links to some 30,000 books found here and there online, mostly one-off scanning projects at universities and the like.

There are, of course, more. We're not parsing Barnes and Noble ebooks—which will become important if the "Nook" takes off. If you don't see your favorite source, let us know. We'll work to add it.

Audiobooks. I haven't taken to ebooks yet. (For starters, my reader is broken.) But I listen to a lot of audiobooks. For people like me we've added links to three audiobook suppliers—Audible, iTunes and the wonderful, free, amateur-driven project LibriVox.

Live Price Comparison from BookFinder.com. Many of you use the price-comparison site BookFinder.com, so, with their help, we decided to integrate a good piece of it into the site itself. BookFinder reaches out to dozens of new and used booksellers, and comes back with good deals and rare buys.

Live results are a core principle of the site, so caching is for as little time as possible. The results are also distinguished by being cross-edition—a fairly new concept in price comparison. You can change the ISBNs or titles BookFinder uses, to get price-comparison that fits you best.

Swap sites. Swap-site integration has been with LibraryThing for some time now. We've spiffed it up, and added a long-missing site, PaperBackSwap.com. As a lot of members belong to more than one site, gathering them all together like this should be valuable.

All Sources. "Get this book" are just the best slices of a much larger pie. Check out All Sources (here, for Romeo and Juliet) to get all the sources. As with other parts of the site, the data is fundamentally under your control. If you don't see your favorite bookseller or book database, go ahead and enter it. We also want help improving the data.

Your Quick Links area is editable. To edit it, check out Edit Quick Links, which looks like "All Sources," but works a little different.

What's missing. Here's how we plan to improve the page, and how you can improve it too.

Members need to be able to add new ebooks.
We need more ebook sources. Seventeen is great. There are probably thirty we should have.
A lot of sources need improvement; they don't have all the link types they could have.
We have second slate of "book database" integrations coming up, including a full conversion of all Wikipedia citations.

Come talk about the new features here.

Help put used bookstores on LibraryThing

Tim — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 12:48:00 -0800

We're about to push a slew of new "local" features, including the first-ever "local book search." To make this as good as it can be, we need to connect as many bookstores as possible to the LibraryThing Local system. We previously asked for help with IndieBound stores. We're now asking for help with a really hairy category category—used bookstores.

Check out this page and pitch in: Help put used bookstores on LibraryThing

It lists all Abebooks.com booksellers—mostly, but not exclusively used—and allows LibraryThing members to connect them to LibraryThing Local venus. Once connected, the local page gets a link to their Abebooks page, and is entered into our upcoming Local Book Search feature.

I'd like to thank Abebooks for cooperation here—allowing us to include results from their affiliates. I say "generously" because "local search" has the potential to cut Abebooks out of the transaction. They feel—and I think they're right—that the loss will be small, and will be offset by the value of giving their affiliates another way to expose themselves to the world, and book lovers another way to discover their books.

As usual, we have a Talk discussion going on about this—how best to do it, etc.

Update: We pushed this a few hours ago, and the response is already huge—more than 130 linkings, by two dozen members. As with IndieBound, I'm in shock at how readily members take up the call. We won't let you down—the upcoming feature is going to be great, and all the better for this work.

Free movie passes to "The Road" in Detroit and Philadelphia

Sonya — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 02:58:00 -0800

The folks who are bringing Cormac McCarthy's The Road to the big screen are inviting LibraryThing members to attend free advance screenings of the new movie.

You can start speculating on the adaptation now, in the Made Into a Movie and Book vs Movie groups. This was one of those books I bought so I could loan out. I can't wait to find out what the attendees think.

There are two screenings, with limited seating. Tickets will be given out to the first-emailed, first-served.

Philadelphia (downtown)
Sunday, November 15th at 7:30 pm

Detroit area (Novi, MI)
Thursday, November 19th at 7 pm

If you live in either area, and are interested in attending, email Holly Cara Price (hcp@ddanielspr.net). It's first-come, first serve, so email her ASAP if you'd like to go. Holly will email you instructions on tickets and the theater location.

For the rest of us, the movie will be released November 25th: http://theroad-movie.com/

Here's the movie synopsis:
From Cormac McCarthy, author of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, comes the highly anticipated big screen adaptation of the beloved, best-selling and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, THE ROAD. Academy Award-nominee Viggo Mortensen leads a distinguished cast featuring Academy Award-winner Charlize Theron, Academy Award-winner Robert Duvall, Michael Kenneth Williams, Molly Parker, Guy Pearce and young newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee in this epic post-apocalyptic tale of the survival of a father (Mortensen) and his young son (Smit-McPhee) as they journey across a barren American landscape that has been destroyed by a mysterious cataclysm. THE ROAD boldly imagines a future in which men are pushed to the worst and the best that they are capable of - a future in which a father and his son are sustained by love and an unshakable morality even in the face of total devastation.

Directed by John Hillcoat

Update 11/13/09:

Today in the Wall Street Journal is an incredible, lengthy interview that Cormac McCarthy. The writer spent a record 7 hours with McCarthy talking about the film, the book, and life in general.

November Early Reviewer books

Sonya — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:54:00 -0800

The November 2009 batch of Early Reviewer books is up! We've got 102 books this month, and a grand total of 3571 copies to give out.

First, make sure to sign up for Early Reviewers. If you've already signed up, please check your mailing address and make sure it's correct.

Then request away! The list of available books is here:
http://www.librarything.com/er/list

The deadline to request a copy is Saturday, November 28th at 6PM EST.

Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to many many countries—too many to list here! Make sure to check the flags by each book to see if it can be sent to your country.

Thanks to all the publishers participating this month!

Kensington Publishing	Dafina	Citadel Press
Bell Bridge Books	The Permanent Press	Open Letter
Penguin	Red Hen Press	Bloomsbury
W.W. Norton	Bantam	Ballantine Books
International Publishers Marketing	Human Kinetics	St. Martin's Paperbacks
St. Martin's Griffin	Weiser Books	Conari Press
Tor Books	Universalis Publishing	Doubleday Books
O'Reilly	South Dakota State Historical Society Press	HarperCollins
Bascom Hill Books	Rovira i Virgili University Press	Bethany House
Small Beer Press	Little, Brown and Company	Grand Central Publishing
St. Martin's Press	Orca Book Publishers	Picador
Pocket Books	Avon Books	Harper Paperbacks
Viking Books	Putnam Books	Random House
Henry Holt and Company	Faber and Faber

Speaking at Charleston Conference

Sonya — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:41:00 -0800

Abby was slated to give a talk about LibraryThing at the Charleston Conference, tomorrow. Then, she came down with the flu. So, I'm heading to Charleston, SC as I blog now. I'll be speaking at 12:30.

Anyone who happens to be there, and can lend me an Apple video dongle gets a free teeshirt.

The Concord Free Press, Gregory Maguire, and "generosity-based publishing"

Abby — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:34:00 -0700

The Concord Free Press is a revolutionary new publisher, doing some fantastic things. They publish books and give them away. For free. All they ask is that the reader then makes a voluntary donation to a local charity or person in need. And then pass the book along to someone else (this is definitely the hard part), and ask that they too read, donate, and pass. I think it's fantastic. They just hit their one-year anniversary, released their third book, and have recorded more than $90,000 in donations so far (you can see a record of donations on their site).

Their third book, The Next Queen of Heaven by Gregory Maguire just came out last week, and the Concord Free Press (founded by novelist Stona Fitch) gave us 14 copies to circulate among LibraryThing members. The book is great—a departure from Maguire's typical writing (which I also love).

Book description from the Concord Free Press website:

Set in the grotty upstate town of Thebes, The Next Queen of Heaven is a Christmas tale gone horribly wrong. Clocked by a Catholic statuette, Mrs. Leontina Scales starts speaking in tongues. Tabitha Scales and her brothers scheme to save their mother or surrender her to Jesus—whatever comes first. Meanwhile, choir director Jeremy Carr, caught between lust and ambition, fumbles his way toward Y2K.

Only a modern master like Gregory Maguire can spin a tale this frantic, funny, and farcical. Novelist Ann Patchett calls it “an out-of-control carnival ride—terrifying, thrilling, a once-in-a-lifetime adventure.” And we agree.

I'm putting the copies in Member Giveaways, and we'll send them to anyone, anywhere around the world. Request a copy now, if you're interested! And remember, when you're done reading, you donate, and then pass the book along. We're hoping we can keep the books circulating among LibraryThing members—since the Concord Free Press only prints a limited run (2,500 copies), many people won't otherwise get a chance to read it.

As it says on the back of the book:

"This novel is free. By taking a copy, you agree to give away money to a local charity, someone who needs it, or a stranger on the street. Where the money goes and how much you give—that's your call. When you're done, pass this novel on to someone else (for free, of course), so they can give. It adds up."

So if you win a copy, please remember to read, donate, and then pass it along (maybe even put it back on Member Giveaways, so another LibraryThing member can have a chance to read it).

Simultaneous flash-mob cataloging

Sonya — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 15:16:00 -0700

On the weekend of October 3-4, we had two simultaneous, two-day, flash-mob cataloging events. Here's the wrap-up:

Central Park School for Children – a small public charter elementary school in Durham, NC
(centralparkschoolforchildren.org, centralparkschool on LT, blog post announcing event)

1,391 books cataloged, barcoded, assigned Dewey numbers, physically labeled the volumes for shelving, uploaded cover images, and shelved. All this was done by 22 catalogers on Saturday and 10 on Sunday.

It's easy to underestimate how many books are in a library, and children's books are particularly notorious (skinny little volumes that they can be), so this flash-mob is heading back to finish up the collection. They don't have a date set (they're thinking early November), so if you live in the area and you'd like to help, you can email erin_stalberg@ncsu.edu for details.

Erin and Laura Abraham presented "Cataloging: Who Knew it was a Community Service?" at the North Carolina Library Association conference this past week. You can download the PowerPoint here.

The Canton Museum of Art in Ohio
(CantonArt.org, CantonArt on LT, blog post announcing event)

Over two days, catalogers managed to add 1,090 books in a total of about 7.5 hours. They had seven catalogers on Saturday, four on Sunday, and a dedicated book lugger (also the father of the flash-mob organizer) for both days.

See more photos here.

October State of the Thing

Abby — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 02:10:00 -0700

I just sent out October's State of the Thing, our monthly newsletter. Sign up to get it, or you can read a copy online.

This month's State of the Thing features 2 exclusive author interviews:

Allison Hoover Bartlett, is the author of The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession. Bartlett digs into the true-crime story of John Gilkey, the obsessed rare book thief and Ken Sanders, the self-appointed "bibliodick" driven to catch him.

Hope Edelman's newest book is The Possibility of Everything, a memoir about a week in 2000 when she traveled to Belize with her husband and three-year-old daughter to visit a shaman.

Both Hope and Allison are also participating in chats with LibraryThing members right now—stop by and ask them questions here.

Next month, one of the interviewees we have lined up is Gregory Maguire. Got a question for him? Post it here and we might use it in the upcoming interview.

Ebook economics: Are libraries screwed?

Tim — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 19:09:00 -0700

"Kindling" by Flickr user oskay

The advance of ebooks will no doubt bring much good. As often with technological change, we probably can't even predict what wonderful new things will emerge! But we can see some serious dangers ahead, and try to deal with them. I see three major areas of concern: to libraries, to physical bookstores and to the freedom to read in unfree countries.

This post explores the first of these—the danger to libraries. There are, of course, arguments to be made about the viability of physical libraries in a digital age—that while libraries aren't just buildings, the building still define much of what they do. That is not my point here.

Instead, I want to advance a pricing argument: that ebooks will end up costing libraries far more than paper books ever did.

Premise: Libraries will need a "library model" for ebooks.

A few libraries, such as NCSU have been experimenting with ebooks. Without exception, they are following a "consumer model," buying a large pool of devices and then buying books locked to individual devices in the pool.

This model is great for experimentation—to test what patrons think of ebooks and figure out what to do with them—but it's not a long-term solution. Digital books locked to individual physical devices are worse than physical books. That is, when you take out a physical book, one book is unavailable. When you take out a Kindle with 100 books on it, 100 books are unavailable. NCSU has bought extra copies when students need another copy in circulation. Obviously that's not a long-term solution.

Because the "consumer model" won't work, libraries will need—and publishers and ebook providers—will create a "library model." The library model will involve a "site license" model—a pool of books, with rights to use them on X devices at a time. Publishers are already talking about this.

Thus, libraries and consumers will be using different models. The market will "split." (I understand that Netlibrary and Ebrary, two library-centered ebook vendors, already used by many libraries, work this way now.)

Economic effect: Libraries are screwed.

With regular books, libraries took advantage of the same deal regular people got, but extracted a lot more value of that deal. That is, a regular person mostly got a single use out of a book; libraries got many more uses. We didn't think of it this way, but libraies had a "site license" of sorts—the so-called "first-sale doctrine."

With the first-sale doctrine sidelined by digital rights management (DRM), publishers will seek to extract the higher value of their books within a library context. This will cause prices to rise.

With physical books, library price discrimination was impossible. Libraries and regular people bought the same stuff, and paid the same prices. If a given edition was pitched to libraries, its price was held in check by the availability of non-library editions. As a result, only purely academic titles had run-away libary prices—think Brill with its $300 monographs.

Once the market is "split," price discrimination is possible. Publishers will charge libraries more for the extra value they get because they can do so without hurting the consumer market. This will cause prices to rise.

The cost of paper books have traditionally been held down by the existence of a secondary market. Copyright is, of course, a legal monopoly on the production of a given work, but once paper copies have been sold, new sales compete to some degree with the used copies out there. If you don't want to pay $242 for Brill's Collected Papers on Greek Colonization, BookFinder lists 25 used copies under $215.

Because ebooks are non-transferable—and if such ability is added, it surely won't allow a consumer to pass an ebook to a library under library terms—no secondary market will exist. Until copyright expires, libraries will have to go to a single source—the publishers who have the copyright monopoly. This will cause prices to rise.

The "library model" will be inevitably pushed toward "rental" not "ownership." As many have remarked, ebooks are already more like "renting" than "owning," with no right of resale and at least the technical ability for the book to vanish at whim. Libraries, afraid of buying goods that a technological change or company bankruptcy will obliterate, will seek to avoid the "lock in" of ownership. Publishers will also see opportunity in offering large "packages" to libraries—packages that provide rental access to a collection that would take years to build up in a traditional buying-and-owning model.

This logic is how libraries were pushed to renting their journals. It's also at work in enterprise software, either de jure or—through regular version upgrade payments—de facto. Libraries will rent, not buy, their ebooks.

The combination of monopoly and rental is dangerous. It's how journal subscriptions have risen faster than inflation for 40 years, and spiked precipitously upward in the last decade. (The classic ARL graphic can be found here.)

The logic of journals is the logic of the site-licensed ebook. Prices will rise unchecked. Some relief may come if the open-access movement goes past scholarly journals into other scholarly publishing—there's really no reason Brill books need to cost $300! But this will take a while, and it will only affect scholarly titles.

Rental means prices will rise.

In the past, libraries could "coast." Collection development was a long-term thing, and libraries could, if necessary, restrict their acquisitions budget in line with financial realities. When times are bad, you buy less. When times are good, you buy more. As long as you have both ups and downs, the library as a whole stays healthy.

Rental will change this. Libraries will only be as good as their last subscription check. This will change the nature of collection development (in both good and bad ways), and give politicians new opportunities for both unsustainable budget growth and budget-cutting during crisis. This may not cost libraries more, but it will put their value on the knife-edge.

What do you think? I've started a discussion topic in the "Librarians who LibraryThing" group.

I'm sure there are lots of good arguments against this post. Here are two that came up as people read earlier drafts.

Jason Griffey argues (by Twitter) that prices will be kept in check by wide availability of pirated versions. This is a good argument. The counter-argument is corporate software. It's not hard to get a free copy of InDesign or Photoshop, but corporations continue to shell out nearly $1,000 for each, because the penalties are so steep.

Another correspondent suggested the "dawning age of biblioplenty"—a world in which "millions of books will be available from almost anywhere"—will act to hold down prices, presumably through what economists call indirect competition.

October Early Reviewer Books

Abby — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 02:24:00 -0700

The October 2009 batch of Early Reviewer books is up! We've got 55 books this month, and a grand total of 1590 copies to give out.

First, make sure to sign up for Early Reviewers. If you've already signed up, please check your mailing address and make sure it's correct.

Then request away! The list of available books is here:
http://www.librarything.com/er/list

The deadline to request a copy is Friday, October 23rd at 6PM EST.

Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to the US, Canada, the UK, Israel, Australia, France, Germany, Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden. Make sure to check the flags by each book to see if it can be sent to your country.

Catalan books. A special treat this month–we have a Catalan publisher (Rovira i Virgili University Press) participating, who is offering a few books in Catalan! There are only 5 copies available for each of the books from Rovira i Virgili University Press, since they're testing the waters to see what kind of audience there will be for Catalan books.

And of course, thanks to all the publishers participating this month!

Kensington Publishing	Dafina	Citadel Press
B&H Publishing Group	Bleak House Books	South Dakota State Historical Society Press
Delacorte Press	New York Review Books	New American Library
Little, Brown and Company	Barbour Books	Rovira i Virgili University Press
Self-Counsel Press	5 Spot	The Permanent Press
Hunter House	Harper Paperbacks	Avon Books
Random House	Springer	Faber and Faber
Picador	Open Letter	York House Press
Bloomsbury	Orca Book Publishers	Timber Press
Bethany House	Bell Bridge Books	Doubleday Books
HarperCollins

1,512 libraries in LibraryThing for Libraries

Sonya — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 03:18:00 -0700

LibraryThing for Libraries, our enhancements to public and academic library catalogs, continues to advance. The official list shows some 159 "libraries" getting our tags, recommendations and reviews in their catalogs. But many of those 159 "libraries" are really much larger systems.

So, we thought we'd figure out how many individual libraries were using LibraryThing for Libraries, and add them all to LibraryThing Local. It wasn't until we started searching out every member library of every consortium and adding every branch to LibraryThing Local that we realized we had WAY more libraries than we had thought: 1,512!

Some of the biggies include ALS/RSA in Illinois, with over 250 member libraries, NOBLE in Massachusetts, with 28, and the King County Library System in Washington, with 43. Over in Australia, the State Library of Tasmania pretty much covers the island, with some 50 libraries.

LTFL in LibraryThing Local. To get this number, we had to add all the libraries to LibraryThing Local. All LibraryThing for Libraries members get this badge:

We have some other plans for this, of course. But for now we're going to sit back—and dream about an around-the-world trip to visit all of them...

Flash-mob cataloging party in Canton, OH

Abby — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 05:06:00 -0700

The Canton Museum of Art in Ohio (CantonArt.org, CantonArt on LT) is having a flash-mob catalog party. More about flash-mob cataloging.

Details:
Saturday October 3, 2009, 10:30am - 2:30pm and Sunday October 4, 2009, 1:30pm - 4:30pm

Canton Museum of Art
1001 Market Ave.
Canton, OH 44702

Space is somewhat limited, so please RSVP: Troy at talpeterkent.edu

Troy says: We will have tasty food and beverages. Participants should help us be “green” and bring your own mug (with your name and phone number on it). We will have valuable door-prizes throughout the day! Bring your Laptop, NetBook, iPhone/iPod Touch to help catalog, or just show up and help move things along.

The talk post.

Geeks vs. Nerds: Hard data

Tim — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:40:00 -0700

LibraryThing's systems administrator, John Dalton, came up with this—using LibraryThing's tagmash feature to demonstrate the difference between geeks and nerds:

See also:

September State of the Thing

Abby — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 04:52:00 -0700

I just sent out September's State of the Thing, our monthly newsletter. Sign up to get it, or you can read a copy online.

This month's State of the Thing features 3 exclusive author interviews:

Audrey Niffenegger, author of the best-selling The Time Traveler's Wife, who has a new book coming out next week—Her Fearful Symmetry.

Christopher McDougall, author of Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, which has been on The New York Times best sellers list for 13 weeks now.

Dan Chaon, author of Await Your Reply which was called "ambitious, gripping and unrelentingly bleak" in The New York Times.

The interview with Audrey Niffenegger has a few questions that LibraryThing members came up with, in the Author interviews—you ask the questions group. We're trying that again for next month, when I'm interviewing Allison Hoover Barlett, author The Man Who Loved Books Too Much and Hope Edelman, author of The Possibility of Everything (both were Early Reviewer books, so you might have read an advance copy recently). Have a question for Bartlett or Edelman? Post it here for Allison Hoover Bartlett and here for Hope Edelman.

Arr! How LibraryThing went pirate

Tim — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 10:43:00 -0700

Talk Like A Pirate Day is over for us now. You can visit the translation at pir.librarything.com.

Chris and I decided to take pirate photos for our author pages. He's pretty convincing, apart from the inflatable parrot.*

At 5 pm on Friday we jumped the gun on International Talk Like a Pirate Day, sending the whole site into Pirate-talk. (We'll turn back off tomorrow evening, but click "Turn OFF pirate-speak" to turn it off sooner.)

"LibraryThing in Pirate" was a secret project of the Arr, me hearties! group. Members came up with all the translations. Some of my favorites are the little ones, like "enlarge" translated as "use yer spyglass", the month January being translated as "January (me britches be cold)" and "Terms of Use" changed to "Rules o' engagement." Some like "Finger to the Wind" (for Zeitgeist) take some thought, but it would take a genius to discern that "Wi' naw halp fram 'ny matey"—is that Glaswegian?—means "Automatic."

Arr, me hearties! was composed of volunteers from the Beta Group who spent the last week going string by string through LibraryThing's interface, using the same code we use for our non-English sites. We ended up translating some 2,400 bits and pieces, about 44.2% of the site, making it only the 19th most-translated language, just above Albanian. (That sheds some light on how much effort has gone into the near-complete Portuguese, Dutch, French, Catalan and other translations!)

Top translators included readafew, rastaphrog, lorax, Carnophile, sqdancer, conceptDawg and me.

For posterity's sake, I took some screenshots:

*All LibraryThing employees were originally going to take photos of ourselves eating cake, in honor of LibraryThing's fourth anniversary. (We're in eight different cities, so we can't just all eat cake together.) Anyway, Sonya had to miss the meeting where we cancelled this plan, and we forgot to tell her, so she dutifully sent her cake photo. Well, I hope she enjoyed the cake!

LibraryThing, IndieBound and love

Abby — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 08:08:00 -0700

As Tim blogged last night, we needed some help from members to link LibraryThing data on bookstores to IndieBound data. We connected 1,200 automatically, but that left 1,362 that had to be done manually—checking exact names, addresses, sometimes even creating a new "venue" on LibraryThing Local.

Tim posted the plea for help at about 5:30 pm last night. By 11 am this morning, it was entirely done. That's right, in less than eighteen hours—most of which were in the middle of the night, in the US at least—LibraryThing members completed the task. That's incredible. Insane. Fantastic.

As Tim tweeted, "IndieBound/LT demonstrates what I believe: Independent bookstores can win online if they engage the community. Love is powerful." His sentiments were retweeted all over, and the IndieBound folks agreed. (See IndieBoundPaige, mattsupko, SarahABA on Twitter)

LibraryThing members are indeed an incredible community, and love indeed is powerful.* We're going to add a new helper badge to recognize these folks. Thank you, thank you.

*Anyone who hasn't seen Clay Shirky's "The Internet Runs on Love" talk, should (blogged here in 2007). From the talk:

In the past, we could do little things for love, but big things, big things required money. Now, we can do big things for love.

Connect IndieBound to LibraryThing

Tim — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 10:24:00 -0700

Summary: We need your help connecting LibraryThing to IndieBound. Like peanut butter and chocolate, we taste great together. Help us out.

Why IndieBound? To make the new "Get it Now," and the "Local" section, LibraryThing needs to update and improve our local data. We want to give members as many options as possible about where to get the book. And we've always supported independent bookstores.

We turned to IndieBound (formerly BookSense), the large and influential organization of independent bookstores in the US and Canada. After explaining ourselves, they gave us a feed of their store data—thank you IndieBound! But we need to connect their data to our data, the venues in LibraryThing Local. Store names and addresses are seldom exactly the same.

We were able to connect 1,200 automatically, but another 1,300 bookstores need connecting. In some cases, a new LibraryThing venue has to be created.

How can you help? We need your help. We're programmers and librarians, and we don't have the manpower to tackle a job like this. And, frankly, we think others can do it better than us.

We've made a "Help Put IndieBound on LibraryThing" page. It shows all the IndieBound data on the left, and LibraryThing data on the right. A simple interface helps you match up the data, and connect it. You can also improve the data—adding pictures, phone numbers and etc. Everything you do will raise the profile of independent booksellers on LibraryThing. Needless to say, IndieBound is getting a feed back. What LibraryThing knows can, we think, help them too.

Here's a New Features' talk thread to ask questions, ask for help and etc.

The Amazon policy change, and how we're responding.

Tim — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 10:08:00 -0700

"Amazon Cardboard Boxes" by Flickr member Akira Ohgaki (Attribution 2.0 Generic)

Summary: Amazon is requiring us remove links to other booksellers on work pages. We're creating a new "Get it Now" page, with links to other booksellers, especially local bookstores and libraries, and a host of new features. Talk about it here.

The challenge. We're days away from releasing a series of changes to our book pages, both forced and intentional. Amazon is requiring all websites, as a condition of getting any data from them, to have the primary page link to Amazon alone. Links to other booksellers are prohibited. Secondary pages—pages you go to from the primary page—can have non-Amazon links.

Everyone at LibraryThing disagrees with this decision. LibraryThing is not a social cataloging and social networking site for Amazon customers but for book lovers. Most of us are Amazon customers on Tuesday, and buy from a local bookstore or get from a library on Wednesday and Thursday! We recognize Amazon's value, but we certainly value options.

Importanly, the decision is probably not even good for Amazon. Together with a new request-monitoring system, banning iPhone applications that use Amazon data, and much of their work on the Kindle, Amazon is retreating from its historic commitment to simplicity, flexibility and openness. They won through openness. Their data is all over the web, and with it millions of links to Amazon. They won't benefit from a retreat here.

But agree or not, we have to follow their terms. We thought long and hard about giving up Amazon data entirely, converting to library data only, in concert with a commercial provider, like Bowker or Ingram, and with help from publishers and members. Unlike our competitors, who are exclusively based on Amazon and who don't "catalog" so much as keep track of which Amazon items you have, that option is available to us. But we'd lose a lot, particularly book covers. Ultimately, we've decided the disadvantages outweigh the benefits.

The Response. Most of all, we think we've found a way to give Amazon what they require, and continue to provide members with options: We're going cut back our primary-page links to Amazon alone, and give people the best, most diverse secondary pages we can make. We are allowed to link to other booksellers, like IndieBound and Barnes and Noble on secondary pages, and we're going to do it far better than we ever have. We're going to take something away, but also make something better—something that goes way past what we did before, in features and in diversity of options.

The upcoming "Get it Now" page will go far beyond our current "Buy, borrow, swap" links, with a live new and used price-comparison engine, as well as sections for ebooks, audiobooks and swap sites. The page will be edition-aware, and draw on feeds or live data (so the links work). Many members have wanted live pricing data for the books they already own and these features can be used for that purpose too. We'll also be doing some stuff with libraries nobody else has, or can, do.

Key to the upcoming Get it Now page is a "Local" module, drawing on LibraryThing Local, showing all the libraries and bookstores near you. Where possible, this list will incorporate holdings data and links to buy—the sort of information you never get from a Google search on a book. If not, we'll give you their telephone numbers and show you where they are on a map. We'll make the page customizable, and let members add sources to it.

We think the new page will make a lot of members happy. For one thing, LibraryThing has never been about buying books, so having all these links on a separate page won't be a great loss. And if the new format doesn't make members happy, we'll listen, and together we can plan to take LibraryThing on a truly independent course.

Post your comment here, or come talk about this on Site Talk.

Tagmash, redux: Tim's favorite feature

Tim — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 07:08:00 -0700

Tagmash. I've redone, improved and expanded my favorite feature, tagmashing.

Introduced back in 2007, tagmashes, allow you to investigate what books satisfy two or more tags. It's a great way to find books of a clear type, but for which no single tag really works.

For example, no one has yet used the tag "vegetarian Indian cooking" and there's no Library of Congress Subject Heading for it either. But combine three tags, like vegetarian, India and cooking into the tagmash vegetarian, India, cooking and you get over 50 good matches.

Simple two-tag combination can work wonders:

Some of my favorites are off-beat: all those books about knitting for your dog and—shiver—knitting with dog hair can be found at knitting, pets. erotic, zombies is 80% Laurell K. Hamilton. And who can say no to humor, pirates? (Did you know that this Saturday is Talk like a Pirate Day? You will.)

On the serious end, fairly complex topics also work:

fiction, young adult, leukemia

France, wwii, nonfiction

You can also use - (minus) or -- (double minus) to mean "demote" or "remove" a tag. For example:

politics, -United States Politics books, demoting books with "United States" tags
politics, --United States Politics books, removing every book tagged "United States"

An important feature of tagmash is that it's not just a "search." Once created, tagmash pages stay there, and it enters the "swirl of relatedness." Somtimes a tag page will suggest the perfect tagmash. Other times, a tagmash will suggest an unconsidered subject.

New Feature: Tagmash overlap. I've added a new feature that, I think, brings tagmash to a new level—the tagmash overlap.

It works something like tag mirrors. Instead of showing you how you tag things, it shows how others tag your stuff. Except instead of showing you Individual tags, it finds tagmashes.

The results is, I think, a good list of topics you're interested in—topics more complex than a single tag can express. In my case, it surfaces topics like Macedonia, history, Greek, divination, Ottoman Empire, travel and erotic, poetry (!). Abby is apparently interested in adventure, surreal, English, death, love and—what a winner—evil, love.

You can find the feature from your profile statistics page. If you're signed in, this link will take you to yours.

What do you think? Comment here or come over to the New Features Talk thread.

September Early Reviewer books

Abby — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 11:43:00 -0700

The September 2009 batch of Early Reviewer books is up! We've got 59 books this month, and a grand total of 1310 copies to give out.

First, make sure to sign up for Early Reviewers. If you've already signed up, please check your mailing address and make sure it's correct.

Then request away! The list of available books is here:
http://www.librarything.com/er/list

The deadline to request a copy is Friday, September 25th at 6PM EST.

Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to the US, Canada, the UK, Israel, Australia, France, Germany, Denmark, European Union, Hong Kong, Iceland, India, Ireland, Isle of Man, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. Make sure to check the flags by each book to see if it can be sent to your country.

Thanks to all the publishers participating this month!

Bloomberg Press	Weiser Books	The Permanent Press
Bell Bridge Books	Tilbury House	Kensington Publishing
Dafina	Citadel Press	Bloomsbury
B&H Publishing Group	New York Review Books	St. Martin's Minotaur
Faith Words	Hachette Book Group	St. Martin's Griffin
Orca Book Publishers	Random House	BelleBooks
Picador	Gefen Publishing House	Bleak House Books
HighBridge	University of Wisconsin Press	Barbour Books
Osprey Publishing	Beach Books	Doubleday Books
Kiwi Publishing	Henry Holt and Company	How To Books
HarperCollins	Brandeis University Press	University Press of New England
Bascom Hill Books

Chapters/Indigo adds LibraryThing tags to store kiosks

Tim — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 06:07:00 -0700

Update: INDEX // mb just took another look at the Indigo Kisoks, concluding "The addition of the Library Thing tags make a heap of difference."

Chapters/Indigo, the largest Canadian bookseller, just rolled out thousands of brand new in-store kiosks. (See the mostly positive review at Index//mb). Among other things the new search is enhanced by LibraryThing tags. The tags aren't shown on the page, but they're helping drive better search results.

For example, a search for "medieval murder mystery" turns up appropriate books, starting with the Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael books.

We wish we could link to the system, but kiosks are in-store only. So, if you're in Canada, check it out. (And try big ones like "chick lit" or "steampunk" for us, will you?)

Other users of LibraryThing tags include Random House (example), AquaBrowser and the more than 150 public and academic libraries using LibraryThing for Libraries, from Seattle to Utrecht.

Luke's bookbuying spree

Abby — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 03:50:00 -0700

Hiring good employees is tough. So we try to sweeten the pot a bit. Last fall we offered $1,000 worth of books to anyone who could find us a good employee. Luke, genius that he is, "found" himself.

Voila Luke, holding his gift cards to Porter Square Books in Cambridge, MA. Ironically, by the time we got to cashing in his prize, Luke had moved on (a new company and a new state! Now he's conveniently located near to the fantastic Porter Square Books and, of course, me.)

The bookstore wasn't quite sure how to handle our request for a $1,000 gift card. Apparently they'd never done that before, and the system couldn't handle it. So Luke wound up with five $200 gift cards. All the better for sharing.

LTFL: now available for Evergreen

Sonya — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 08:40:00 -0700

We've been working on adding the LibraryThing for Libraries enhancements to the open-source catalog Evergreen. We've worked out the kinks, and it's ready to roll.

We've integrated both the Catalog Enhancements (tags, tag browser, recommendations, other editions and translations) and the Reviews Enhancement (300,000 LibraryThing reviews, patron reviewing, Facebook app, blog widgets).

If you'd like to see how LTFL looks, check out the catalog of Kent County, Maryland. We owe them a thousand thanks for working with us on making this work.

Flash-mob Cataloging Party: UIllinois prof's folktale collection

Sonya — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 03:30:00 -0700

Once upon a time, this hearty group of library students from the University of Illinois (my alma mater) came together to finish up flash-mob cataloging the folktales collection of storytelling professor Dan Keding. They had started in the spring by cataloging 600 books, which was less than half the collection.

The final count was 1,413 books, which you can see in Dan's LibraryThing catalog here. Dan is also a LibraryThing author, with several folktale books of his own.

In addition to cataloging the collection, the mobbers added Mylar covers to the dust jackets. The books in the collection are available to students taking the storytelling course. See more photos of the flash mob here.

While getting my library science degree I took this class, and used books like these for finding stories to perform, as well as information about the history of various stories and storytelling. I'm happy students will have an even larger collection – as it turns out, finding stories you want to tell isn't as easy as you'd think.

Dan's guitar case now boasts a LibraryThing sticker. LibraryThing now boasts a new member with a large folktale collection. Students can now see the collection online. We all lived happily ever after.

Early Reviewers - September bonus batch

Abby — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 05:42:00 -0700

We have a small bonus batch of Early Reviewers up right now. The September bonus batch (hey, we're *almost* to September!) has only 25 copies of one book from Riverhead Books in it, but we think it's pretty fitting book for LibraryThing...

First, make sure to sign up for Early Reviewers. If you've already signed up, please check your mailing address and make sure it's correct.

Then request away! The list of available books is here:
http://www.librarything.com/er/list

The deadline to request a copy is Monday, September 7th at 6PM EST.

Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to the US only. Make sure to check the flags by each book to see if it can be sent to your country.

Author interviews - you ask the questions

Abby — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 07:49:00 -0700

Each month, we conduct a few exclusive interviews with authors and then publish the interviews in LibraryThing's monthly State of the Thing newsletter. We're going to try something new—crowdsourcing part of the interview, and using questions from members in addition to our own questions.

How it will work
I've created a group: Author Interviews - you ask the questions

In the forum for that group, there's a topic for each author I have lined up for an interview. Got questions? Ask them in the thread for that author. Then I'll pick my favorites and send them to the author along with my own questions. The author will answer everything, and we'll publish the interview both in the State of the Thing and on the author's page on LibraryThing.

To start with, I need questions for Audrey Niffenegger! Add your questions for Audrey here.

Looking for inspiration? Past interviewees include Elizabeth Strout, Lisa See, David Ebershoff, Ayelet Waldman and more...

And an added twist
While I do have a slew of authors slated for upcoming interviews, there are many more out there we'd love to have. So, you can also add your own thread for an author we haven't signed up for an interview yet. Make the author's name the subject line, followed by "wanted". For example, the subject could be:

Neil Gaiman (wanted)

Then add questions you have for that author. When we have a bunch of questions, I'll write the author/publicist/publisher, begging for an interview.

Questions? Know an author who might want to be interviewed? Email abbylibrarything.com

Author chats upgraded

Abby — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 07:20:00 -0700

Author chat gets a makeover! In one of his last projects before he leaves us (goodbye!), Luke gave author chats a facelift. Previously, you could only find out about author chats (current and upcoming) by going to the Author chat group.

We now have a module for the homepage, which shows current and upcoming chats (you can customize how many you want to view at once).

You'll also see links to current, past, and future chats on all the relevant author and book pages.

Sears--Taxonomy--Not Safe for Work

Tim — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 06:03:00 -0700

Screenshots from Sears.com, showing unauthorized headings. The first one could be placeholder text, but the second one suggests to me someone is being let go and is taking out on the subject headings...

Click to see a larger image, and check out the breadcrumb trail.

Update: It was apparently done by changing the URL, which includes the category. A good tech lesson their. But I couldn't get it to work. Maybe it still works for the second one because it's cached.

Glowy magic, wolves and damsels in distress

Tim — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 14:25:00 -0700

Sci-fi/fantasy publisher Orbit has compiled a chart of 2008 Fantasy Cover Elements, charting the prevalence of unicorns and swords, elves and "glowy magic" (a big winner).

I'm disappointed in the minimalist "damsels in distress." As a boy with a good collection of Conan novels, I feel that fantasy covers are all about occasions to show impossibly good-looking women in clothing of dubious practicality. I'm betting, if tallied, chainmail brassieres might well beat out glowy magic.

LTFL: Non-ISBN Matching

Tim — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 07:04:00 -0700

Short Story. We've been going through so many big changes at LibraryThing lately that we let a pretty substantial improvement go by without giving it the fanfare it deserves: the LibraryThing for Libraries (LTFL) Cataloging Enhancements now pick up many non-ISBN items. All LibraryThing for Libraries libraries will see better coverage (5-15%), and academic libraries with older materials should be especially pleased:

Some examples:

An 1819 edition of Don Quixote, in Spanish at Bowdoin College
A 1952 edition of Tom Jones from King County Library System
A cassette audio recording of Great Expectations from the Great River Regional Library

The coolest thing about the LibraryThing office: Need a photo of an old book? Grab iphone, swivel chair 180 degrees and shoot. Second coolest thing: The only hot Web 2.0 company with a 1774 edition of Terence.

Long Story. Our enhancements usually run on the basis of the ISBN. ISBNs are easy to pick out of the HTML without knowing the structure of the page ( /[0-9Xx]{10,13}/*, if you speak regular expressions*), and most books have them, so they're our primary way of knowing what content to load for a particular page.

However, as a part of our reviews enhancement, we developed a JavaScript library called the LibraryThing Connector that, among other things, screen-scrapes the title and author of the book out of the HTML. This is what allows our reviews to work on any item a library owns, whether or not it is in LibraryThing or has an ISBN. It's tricky stuff, because it requires specific code for every type of library software that we provide reviews for.

To get title-matching therefore, we take the title and author extracted by the Connector and feed it to our own "What Work" fuzzy matching API. Of course, this method is far from foolproof, so we err on the side of caution, only loading enhancement data if we've got a strong match on both the title and the author. We haven't seen any false positives yet, but even with being pretty strict about matching, based on real world stats, we're able to provide around 5-15% more content in the catalog. Academic libraries will get more of a boost out of this, because they tend to have a lot more non-ISBN items than public libraries.

We did this because it's fun and useful and kind of magic, but more importantly because we want to constantly improve our products. LibraryThing for Libraries is a subscription service. Every year when it is time for a library to renew with us, we want it to be clear that they're getting something better from us than they were a year ago, and that even better things are in store for the future. It's more fun and challenging for us that way, but it's also something we know works pretty well as a business strategy too.

In my mind a big reason why LibraryThing.com has succeeded is that a membership comes with an expectation of improvement. We don't call a membership an investment, but you get to expect that you will be able to do more and better and cooler things with LibraryThing over time, and that it will become more valuable to you. As a result of this, our members become deeply involved in the site and how it works, and if a LibraryThing membership is a great investment, members end up making an even greater investment of their knowledge and enthusiasm right back. It's a great thing to be a part of, so I hope it's a philosophy we can keep bringing to the library world as well. — Casey

*Pace Casey, who wrote this post, ISBNs are/([0-9]{9}[0-9X}|97[89][0-9]{10})/i !

Upcoming book: Library Mashups

Tim — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 05:04:00 -0700

If you're interested in Library 2.0 and library technology generally, you might want to pre-order Library mashups : exploring new ways to deliver library data (website), a collection of articles on innovative ways to use (and abuse) library data.

I haven't read it yet, except for the chapter I wrote, "Breaking into the OPAC." I'm looking forward to many, including one on John Blyberg/Darien Library's SOPAC and something on "Zack Bookmaps," an effort to show local library copies of a book, without using OCLC. There's also a chapter on the LibraryThing API and libraries, written by Robin Hastings. Nicole Engard (a LibraryThing author), shepherded the whole thing to completion.

I found the book-process frustrating at times. At their fastest—and multi-author collaborations aren't that—books are slow things. This one took about a year. But the articles still look timely to me, and it's going to be good to hold "my" book in my hands.

LibraryThing for Libraries at ALA: new features and hungry rhinos

Sonya — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 07:58:00 -0700

Are you ready for this?

Tim and I will be at the American Library Association's annual conference this year. We have new, new LTFL features to show off. You can find us at booth 2857 in the exhibit hall.

1. New features! We'll be demoing our new catalog enhancers - never before seen by librarians. We'll post an announcement all about the new features in a day or two.

2. An art installation! Yeah, you'll just have to wait and see it. I can't even describe it, other than to say that it takes away ennui.

3. More rhinos! Tim and I are both flying to Chicago with an inflatable rhino in our luggage. We plan on playing "Toss the Rhino", and perhaps if we are feeling extra daring, "Pass the Rhinos".

(Thanks to Brixton for the masticating rhino photo. The rhino tossing one's mine. That's Tim and Casey putting some English on the rhino.)

Categories for your LTFL Reviews

Sonya — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 04:46:00 -0700

Teen reviews from Seattle Public Library

Library home page | Get this widget

We've a new feature to LibraryThing for Libraries, suggested by Lare over at the Seattle Public Library. He was looking for a way to show off just some of their reviews—reviews for their summer reading program.

Libraries can now add "categories" for their reviewers to check off—library book club books, Big Read books, reviews by library staff, etc. And the library can show off just one category of reviews in their LTFL blog widget.

Seattle has made blog-widget pages for their kids section, teen section, and even their adult section of the site. By categorizing the reviews into age-related groups, they can feature items in their catalog that would interest the patrons for each demographic.

We'll be releasing some more cool features at American Library Association meeting in Chicago next week.

Project Managers Sought for OSC

david — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 07:22:00 -0700

Due to an increase in work commitments for both Laena and David, new
project managers are sought for the Open Shelves Classification project. Below is a status report of the project. Interested leaders should contact Tim Spalding (tim@librarything.com).

OSC status report June 2009:

One year into the project, here is what we have accomplished so far:
-Many wide-ranging discussions were held in the LibraryThing Build
the Open Shelves Classification group and the OSC blog.

-Optional facets were agreed upon initially as the way to handle audience, format, and language.

-An initial list of top level categories was compiled by the end of 2008 and put out for review.

-In January 2009, LibraryThing members tested these categories by applying them to works in LibraryThing using the ClassifyThis feature.

-In January, a brainstorming meeting was held at the ALA midwinter meeting and was attended by librarians and non-librarians.

-In February, the feedback from the testing was used to further refine the top level categories.

-Starting in February and running through May, small groups began to construct the secondary levels for certain categories.

-Throughout the spring, Laena and David did outreach for the project, writing pieces for the PLA blog and the IFLA
newsletter, and reached out to libraries in an unsuccessful search for public library data.

-In May, the current list of categories of the OSC was added to sandbox of the National Science Digital Library Metadata Registry.

Categories with second levels in development:
-Art
-Biography & Autobiography
-Design
-Fiction
-History
-Performing Arts
-Religion
-Science

After working on the project for a year, we have the following recommendations:
-The project needs a steering committee structure for leadership. The
project is too large in scope for one or two librarians to manage
without other leadership.

-More involvement and leadership from public librarians! They know
the intended audience of the OSC best.

Intern at LibraryThing!

Tim — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 10:52:00 -0700

Not sure what to do with your summer? I just posted this to a few local lists—librarians, design people, etc. I thought I'd post it here too.

LibraryThing.com, the innovative social site for book lovers wants an intern.

We can think of four possible "types" for whom we could create a nifty internship. We're only looking to get one intern, though.

"Weird Library Science" (MLS students)
"Web 2.0 Programming" (computer students)
"Web 2.0 Marketing" (anyone)
"Web 2.0 Design" (design students)

We offer:

*Minimum wage, probably
*Full- or part-time
*Cool, anarchic work environment (4 people in Portland, 6 elsewhere)

We'd love to get someone in who could help us, but the focus will be on learning from us, and doing interesting, open-ended and intellectually stimulating projects.

We'd rather get someone local (Portland, Maine), but if you really want to do something remote, and have a strong idea what you could do with us, we'd love to hear from you.

About LibraryThing:

LibraryThing (http://www.librarything.com) is a social networking and social cataloging site for book lovers. Over 700,000 members have used the site to catalog over 40 million books--and created a whole new way of relating to books and to book people.

Contact: Tim Spalding, Founder (tim@librarything.com)

Ann Arbor's Shaman Drum closing

Tim — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 05:56:00 -0700

Ann Arbor's legendary Shaman Drum Bookshop (website, LibraryThing Local) just announced they are closing after 29 years—and I'm devastated. They were my refuge in graduate school, and one of my favorite indies.

Links: Ann Arbor Chronicle, LA Times, Galleycat, Shaman Drum Announcement

New developments on the FRBR front

Tim — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 09:41:00 -0700

The Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records have changed direction.

Hat-tip: Karen Coyle.

Category Feature Added to LTFL Reviews

Sonya — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 03:12:00 -0700

We've added a new feature to the LibraryThing for Libraries Reviews Enhancement: the ability to categorize reviews for the blog widget.

Thus far, library patrons have been able to write reviews and rate books in their library's catalog, add their reviews to their Facebook page and even create a widget that lets them show off their reviews on blogs and websites.

Now, libraries can show off reviews written by their patrons for specific library programs. Patrons and librarians can add categories to a review. The library can then create blog widgets with said categories – keep track of reviews for the Summer Reading Program, One Book, One City and book discussion groups.

This should be helpful all year round, but the inspiration for the feature came from a librarian's request to manage the reviews children were going to be writing for the summer reading program at their library. They wanted some way to display the reviews separately from the rest of the reviews coming in.

Anyone who's bought the Reviews Enhancement can use this feature starting immediately. Read here for instructions how to add and use it.

If you'd like more information about LTFL, and the enhancements that can take your OPAC from Library 1.0 to Library 2.0 overnight, fill out the interest form on the LTFL page.

The Reviews Enhancement isn't available for all OPACs – currently, it supports Horizon, iBistro, iLink, eLibrary, Webvoyage, Voyager 7, WebPac, WebPac Pro and Koha. More are coming soon!

LTFL Reviews: you stand 300,000 deep

Sonya — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 09:38:00 -0700

At the end of May, we reached 300,000 reviews vetted and available for LibraryThing for Libraries!

We'd previously been bragging about having 250,000 reviews, so here's my core sample: at the beginning of April, we had 24 reviews for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. Now, we have 74. Of course, popular books will get more reviews, but trust me – we also cover the long, long tail of library collections.

The LTFL Reviews Enhancement is currently available for Horizon, iBistro, Webvoyage, Voyager 7, Koha, WebPac and WebPac Pro. The LTFL Catalog Enhancements are available for practically every OPAC. Contact us for more info.

How to start a dance party

Tim — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 09:00:00 -0700

A good illustration for social efforts of every kind.

Hat-tip: Ze Frank, David Weinberger

New Kindle model released

Tim — Thu, 21 May 2009 04:49:00 -0700

Funny Videos | Funny Cartoons | More Video Clips

Non est potestas: OCLC Policy withdrawn

Tim — Thu, 21 May 2009 04:25:00 -0700

Non est potestas super terram quae comparetur ei / There is no power on earth that compares with it (frontispiece to Hobbes' Leviathan)

The OCLC Review Board finally put OCLC's Policy to bed. In a short speech to the OCLC Members Council, board chair Jennifer Younger, affirmed "that a policy is needed, but not this policy." After the drubbing they got from the ICOLC and ARL—neither of which took into consideration OCLC's recent push into the software market—you can be sure OCLC will take its board's advice.

While the result was the right one, and I'm sure the members are good, conscientious librarians, I'm not going to echo others' praise about their decision. The writing was on the wall. If they had pushed forward, OCLC would have met even more hostility than it already engendered. The speech itself, like their "push poll" survey, show where the OCLC Review Board's sympathies lie. I don't think you could read the ICOLC or ARL reports against it and conclude OCLC "gets" it. It was, as one of my email correspondents put it "all about protecting WorldCat, identifying 'threats,' and 'appropriate use by members.'"

I think one of Dr. Younger's phrases nicely encapsulates the flaw in OCLC's approach, namely "we must revisit the Social Contract between OCLC and its members." I'd like to go into the phrase a little deeper, not without some fun-poking.

The Social Contract. The phrase "social contract" is an interesting one. The idea also appeared in the the ARL report*—and may well go have been used before. As everyone knows, it's a key concept in political theory (hence the Hobbes' frontispiece above) as the thing that, some believe, makes government power legitimate.

Why, therefore, does a cooperative need to express itself in terms of state-formation, rather than a voluntary cooperative? Why does OCLC want to cast itself as a government?

Sitting in OCLC's Brobdingnagian Dublin, OH headquarters, with thousands of OCLC workers shuttling about like so many ministry secretaries, and an interior hall bedecked with flags like the United Nations, it must be easy to think of OCLC as a sort of "government of libraries."**

Architectural criticism aside, OCLC's answer might be that, unlike cooperatives, a government gets to enforce its will more broadly. If you run afoul of a cooperative, the mutual consent that bound you to the cooperative is withdrawn, and you leave or they kick you out. But if you break the rules of a state, they put you in prison, whether you consent or not. Indeed, while philosophers have sometimes proposed a formal ceremony of consent, states act on non-consenting members all the time. Anarchists go to prison too (indeed, they tend to go to prison for being anarchists). This model, therefore, fits in better with OCLC's plan to bind former members and non-members use of library data. As a cooperative, OCLC is a purely member institution. With a "social contract," OCLC get to dictate more like a state.***

If the idea of OCLC-as-state is accepted, however, there's a gap between the ARL report's idea of a "mutual social contract"—a social contract between citizen equals—and Younger's description of the "Social Contract between OCLC and its members." The latter is a nice description of the more antique view of a contract between citizens and their sovereign. Even if libraries accept a government over them, I suspect they would be more comfortable with the more modern view of a contract between equals.

Nullum timeret? As libraries consider the matter, one factor can be put to rest: Fear.

Writing for the Next Generation Catalog for Libraries list, Karen Coyle speculated that libraries were responding to OCLC through organizations like ARL and ICOLC, out of a "combination of 'strength in numbers' and 'safety in numbers.'"

"I've seen a remarkable tendency of libraries to not want to confront OCLC. Remember that the proposed policy had penalties for mis-use of records, and severe ones at that (loss of rights to use OCLC records altogether). There is an intimidation factor involved. Agreed, as a member organization the members should not be afraid, but I think they are."

That fear should be much diminished. Members spoke up, and OCLC backed down again and again (by my count they postponed, revised, revised, revised, delayed for revision and now shelved). Libraries—and, quite importantly, lots of people who merely love libraries—rose up and forced OCLC to back down.

The frontispiece to Hobbes' Leviathan, shown above, quotes the Vulgate of the first clause of Job 41:33, non est super terram potestas quae conparetur ei ("There is no power on earth that compares to him."). No doubt Hobbes or anyway his cover-designer felt this a good description of the legitimate sovereign.

But for our purposes, the second clause is particularly apt, qui factus est ut nullum timeret, "There is no power on earth that compares to him, who was made to fear nothing." Job thought that whales were fearless.

Well, OCLC, you've met the architeuthis. And he is all of us.

See also:

*"In the eyes of the community, the guidelines expressed a mutual social contract, and the new Policy represents an authoritarian, unilaterally imposed legal restriction."
**The trees growing inside are also a nice touch. The Assyrian throne room just had a carving of a tree, and the White Tree of Gondor was outside. ;)
***Similarly, nobody minds if you belong to two cooperatives. But states tend to be jealous about allegiance. AS ICOLC wrote, libraries are involved in a "complex set of relationships," of which, "OCLC is one vital component among many that libraries will use." That's not really a "social contract" idea.

Photo by Flickr user OZinOH.

OCLC Policy, Good night

Tim — Tue, 12 May 2009 15:18:00 -0700

The International Coalition of Library Consortia, a very loose but extremely large group of library consortia, just released a Statement on the Proposed OCLC Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records.

For a while there it looked like OCLC was going to succeed in locking down the world's library data, converting a wonderful sharing and coordination tool into an unbreakable data monopoly. But, together with OCLC's recent, revealing decision to enter the library systems market, the ICOLC statement effectively ends that possibility. OCLC isn't getting its new Policy, or anything like it.* Good night, OCLC Policy.

The details are worth a look. The ICOLC's statement was short, signing onto the "substantial and broad" concerns highlighted by the Association of Research Libraries. It goes on to add three concerns, two of which address the risk to innovation—a topic the ARL report barely touched on:

The proposed policy appears to freeze OCLC’s role in the library community based on historical and current relationships. We share the concern, voiced by many, that the policy hinders rather than encourages innovation, and we urge the Review Board to carefully examine this issue. It is unclear that the policy has been constructed with a focus on an evolving role of OCLC in enhancing the missions of an international library community with diverse and complex interests.
The scope of the proposed policy goes well beyond any concerns about inappropriate commercial exploitation of WorldCat records. It applies as well to non-commercial uses. ICOLC member consortia are member-created, member-driven innovation agents. Our initiatives are generally non-commercial and undertaken with member approval based on member needs. Any OCLC record use policy should account for the rich and diverse innovation that takes place through many consortia.
The proposed policy is legally murky. There is no mechanism for negotiation of terms and conditions nor is it clear what constitutes acceptance by member libraries. A new policy must address these problems.

As significant as the content was the list of signatories. Lyrasis, the former Palinet and Solinet, includes over 2,500 members. With "regional base and national scope" (their words), and about to merge with Nelinet, bringing their members to 4,500, Lyrasis is a major player. They're no longer just a "regional service provider" for OCLC, and can be expected to collaborate or compete with OCLC as its members' interests lead. They were joined by many of the big regional and state networks out there—MINITEX, NERL, the Florida Center for Library Automation, the Washington Research Library Consortium, the Michigan Library Consortium, WiLS, four Canadian consortia and both the Swedish and Finnish national libraries. Some of the signatories ought to have been sympathetic. Orbis Cascade, a source of much original cataloging, is also an important OCLC partner in developing consortial software. In Ohio, OCLC's home state, OhioLINK, OHIONET and INFOhio all signed. Other members will add their names to the list as they affirm it.

The Next Step. It's time now for the library world to step back and consider what, if anything, they want to do about restricting library data in a fast-moving, digital world. Some, including some who've deplored OCLC's process and the policy, want restrictions on how library data is distributed and used. Once monopoly and rapid, coerced adoption are off the table, that's a debate worth having, and one with arguments on both sides.

From my perspective, restrictions on the use and transfer of cataloging data—which is not usually copyrightable and is most frequently created by bodies responsible to the public good—is legally dubious and ethically stingy.

Instead, libraries should embrace "radical openness," a commitment to sharing what they know freely, something that looks less radical in light of the library's historic dedication to the free exchange of information. Selling other people's library records isn't a real threat, but, if it were, the answer would be more openness, not less. When you sell tickets, you get scalpers. But nobody makes money selling passes to Central Park. (A few people make money walking dogs around it. Most just enjoy the free grass and sunshine.) And in a world that's looking less and less friendly to the long-term success of libraries, an unwavering commitment to sharing and openness may well be libraries' saving grace.

So, three cheers to ICOLC for speaking up on this issue. Now, librarians and library programmers, let's get back to work. Let's earn our freedom.

Artwork: "Flickr is Freedom." Creative Commons, Attribution, by Timtak.

*I note with some interest that Edward Corrado, whose OCLC posts have been very perceptive, isn't quite as excited about this as I am. Where he wishes the statement was "worded a little stronger" I take great solace in phrases like "The proposed policy appears to freeze OCLC’s role in the library community based on historical and current relationships." I'm hoping some others weigh in. The library world is, I think, somewhat exhausted by the whole OCLC Policy affair, and now that the organizations are weighing in strongly and negatively, the bloggers and newslist-ers who raised the initial questions—and were excoriated for it—may no longer be as necessary.

Improved support for Koha

Chris Catalfo — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 07:10:00 -0700

Setting up LibraryThing for Libraries in Koha is now a only couple of clicks away!

The 3.2 version of Koha (which isn't out yet) will include the improved integration for LTFL. If you are using Koha without a host, and run on the bleeding edge, you can try it now via Git.

What this does is enable and disable LTFL through the Koha Enhanced Content system preference page. Simply enter your LTFL account number (found on your LibraryThing for Libraries Account page), decide where you'd like LTFL content to display (in tabs or under other bibliographic details) and enable it. No need to edit Koha templates.

The work to make this possible was initiated by me and extended and improved by Chris Hyde of East Brunswick Public Library. Thanks, Chris!

Podcast 3 is over there

Tim — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:25:00 -0700

Check out the main blog for Podcast Number 3 ("Murder! Politics! Books!"), a delightful romp through the Legacy Library project with its coordinator, Jeremy Dibbell.

The conversation touches on LibraryThing's contribution to 18th century American history scholarship—Jeremy's discovery, with Monticello's Endrina Tay, of the library of George Wythe, a prominent Virginian and signer of the Declaration of Independence, reconstructed from an untitled book list in the Thomas Jefferson papers.

Check it out here

OCLC news reactions

Tim — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 10:24:00 -0700

This post follows on The OCLC End Game, posted early this morning.

Library Journal's Josh Hadro did an excellent follow-up article. Besides citing this blog post, Hadro got responses from Carl Grant, president of Ex Libris on OCLC's tenuous non-profit status—I'll have another post about that soon—and a number of bloggers. Iris Jastram/Pegasus Librarian's thoughts deserve quotation:

"I'm pleased that this is yet another competitor against the current lumbering giants in the ILS market, and I like the idea that (if I understand correctly) this will add a hosted option to the ILS market. ... On the other hand, this means that that pesky new policy on the transfer and use of OCLC records really wasn't just about protecting a bunch of member-produced data after all. There were bigger plans afoot, and these plans involved leaning even farther toward the vendor model rather than the service model. And if OCLC is a vendor rather than a service, that new policy feels even more like a land-grab rather than an effort to protect member investments."

Ms. Jastram's misgivings are comforting to me, at least, as her previous thoughts on the OCLC Policy were more mixed. Ultimately, the fate of OCLC's Policy will be decided by the people in the middle—the fair-minded people, not the ones who equate OCLC with the Matrix, The Empire or the All Your Bases villain.*

The Smithsonian Libraries on the OCLC Policy. I missed this, but on April 2 the official blog of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries weighed in on the OCLC Policy and the ACRL/ARL response (PDF), "support[ing] the recommendations" emphasizing a number of points. Among these were:

"The policy should recognize and affirm traditional library values of cooperative cataloging and shared bibliographic information without any claim of ownership of the bibliographic records."
"OCLC’s new policy should recognize, and not be in conflict with, existing legal obligations or requirements that may apply to some OCLC member libraries (such as federal libraries)."

It's great to see a federal library making such a public statement. Having been passed by in the OCLC Policy discussion—Federal librarians have told me they were amazed OCLC thought it could unilaterally change licensing terms with government entities—and not included on the ARL/ACRL board either, at least one is lending its voice to the criticism. Hooray for them. James Smithson, who left his estate for the "increase and diffusion of knowledge"—and to a country he had never even visited!—would, I think, be proud.

*Chris Bourg left a comment to the effect that the AYBABTU reference was purely humorous, and she does not consider OCLC a villain, even if she thinks I've got a good argument. Now, can anyone think of a way to tape Jay Jordan saying "You have no chance to succeed make your time"? I'm thinking we could sky write it over OCLC headquarters in Dublin, OH and secretly film OCLC employees puzzling it out. Ideally, though, he'd need to wear the bionic monocle.

I will never run out of interesting Flickr chess images. This one's by Shyald, from a series.