'Twas the night before LibraryThing
I wanted to take a second to highlight an interesting use of LibraryThing. LibraryThing user _Celeste_ collects editions of the Clement Clarke Moore's "A Visit From St. Nicholas," better known as "The Night Before Christmas." Putting her collection online helps her—and the friends and family members who scout for her—keep track and avoid duplicates. In addition to putting her collection online, _Celeste_ has also added her own covers. (Needless to say, most of her copies are not available on Amazon.) Arrayed together, they are a pretty cool sight, and a monument to one collector's dedication. It would be great if more collectors put their collections and covers on LibraryThing. Old covers have a low profile on the internet because nobody has much of a financial stake in them, and there isn't anywhere central to "put" them. LibraryThing can be that place.Check out The Night Before Christmas for most of the editions. Scroll WAAAY down to see her covers. Not all the editions have been combined into the master "work" (not should they), so also check out her dedicated tag and the books in her catalog. Great stuff.
The library came to my attention when Celeste reported problems with her 100 copies sending "shared book" stats through the roof. I've revisted how these are calculated. Profiles now list both the number of works and the number of books, if different. I've also brought back the "Shared books" box for all users' profiles, not just yours.
posted by Tim at 3:14 AM
19 Comments:
This is cool. It's similar to but way bigger than my collection of One Hundred Years of Solitude in different translations. I only have 10 or 11 so far.
I've combined them all as advised, as with all my other books in the original language or translated into a language besides English.
I do miss getting recommendations based on the languages my books were in though. It's all washed away by a flood of what English readers are interested in now.
So should I separate out the original language editions of all my 20th century novels now?
For awhile, it looked as if I had half of my books in common with another user -- until I realised that most of the commonalities were links to their multiple collected editions of, "The Hobbit". :)
Oh -- and I'm still waiting for my membership to kick in. The email I sent to your LT email account got bounced back to me for some reason.
The first account I set up at Librarything - skstarwars - was for managing a shared collection like that. It's worked pretty well so far, too, although the catalog needs some cleaning-up and covers input now - I entered it all before I discovered the magic of ISBNs.
Not nearly as cool as _celeste_'s collection (and only the largest Star Wars collection on LT by about sixty books) but it's been great to have it there!
(And for some reason, the profile picture won't show up on the profile page. I wonder if a re-upload will help.)
I'm glad people are enjoying my 'Night Before Christmas' collection.
In case you are wondering why I'm doing this -- I am a graphic artist, and it fascinates me to see how different artists (from Arthur Rackham to Tasha Tudor to the Hildebrandt brothers to Grandma Moses) illustrate the same book.
One comment: If you put your collection online as I did and your browser is IE, you can expect stack overflows!
Celeste
Tim: "Old covers have a low profile on the internet because nobody has much of a financial stake in them, and there isn't anywhere central to 'put' them."
Yes, this is another wonderful (and possibly unanticipated) benefit of LibraryThing!
By the way, readers of John Crowley (best known for Little, Big) may enjoy visiting John Crowley: A Pictorial Bibliography. This wonderful website represents one fan's "attempt to catalog the variant editions/printings of the published works of John Crowley, in both the United States and Great Britain". (In fact, if you're hoping to add your own distinctive J.C. cover, this is a good place to snarfle it from.)
The site is absolutely superb. One only hopes that he gets around to adding covers from the rest of the world; for example, the gorgeous new Hebrew edition of Little, Big.
What a neat collection! It'll be interesting to see how many variations of it we have. Though we probably have far more versions of fairy tales then we have the night before Christmas.
I have every intention of uploadng tons of covers. Once I get things organized. I'm going from working 5 days a week to working 2 or 3, starting this next week, and sorting out our tons of books is a priority. (Especially since I'm guessing we average a hundred new-to-us books a month. 170 this weekend. I brought home three duplicates this week because I didn't have a list, aaargh.) And a ton of ours show up as coverless, since they're older. Even more frustrating is the non-existant ISBN thing... or when the inside and outside ISBN do not match.
I'm curious... any chance we could have some sort of forum to say, "hey, does anyone know what book this is?" I have a couple I'm still trying to learn the title of.
Shawna said: I brought home three duplicates this week because I didn't have a list
Hee, hee, hee. This is *exactly* why I'm a member of LibraryThing. In theory, I'll print out a list for each of my series authors before I go to bookstores so as to avoid duplicates.
Regarding book covers: I can't find a way to upload a cover to librarything and not have that uploaded cover show as my cover. Can this be changed, so that people who upload other covers from online sources who don't acually have that edition can contribue?
"Regarding book covers: I can't find a way to upload a cover to librarything and not have that uploaded cover show as my cover."
Wow. That's a level of generosity/obsession I never even contemplated. I'll give it some thought...
Generosity, perhaps, but it doesn't take much work - many authors or author fansites have galleries of covers.
This is one of LT's best features. I love the fact that I can simply scan and upload hard-to-find covers (e.g. the slightly creepy slipcased Bronte covers with woodcuts by Fritz Eichenberg) that simply aren't available otherwise.
Hey can someone tell me in a "low tech" kind of way how to upload or scan a book cover from a book I am holding in my hand? Thanks
"Hey can someone tell me in a "low tech" kind of way how to upload or scan a book cover from a book I am holding in my hand? Thanks"
I have done two of my books by putting the book on the floor and stand over it with my digital camera, then crop etc using PhotoFiltre before uploading to LT.
Scanners don't cost much these days. I bought mine in Autumn for 40 euros. Won't work with big covers, but for anything else it will provide superior quality to using a digital camera. And installing it was just basically plugging it in and waiting a few moments.
I haven't started the scanning process yet, mind. Have to a) enter all my books, which will require me to b) get full membership.
Oh, what is the preferred size for the cover images?
I would to see covers linked with editions and then some way for me to select that cover/edition to swap with mine.
I am entering a lot of previously read books by browsing Amazon (to jog the memory) and then using your "add to LibraryThing" tool. Unfortunitly, many of these editions are not the ones I read. When I then look at others covers I see the one I want. I can switch covers but I would like to be able to actually switch my library to that edition. Does this make sense?
mikeandtim
What does it take for the book covers to get indexed in Google's image search? I've been using that a lot for a book cover project on another site, but I haven't noticed any LT covers come up in the search results.
I wrote the previous post on how to get a cover from the book to my library catologue. I scanned the book cover to my computer and then tried to upload the picture and I got this message: Problem: That file was too large (OK). So now how do I get the cover picture on my book in librarything?
What does it take for the book covers to get indexed in Google's image search?
Last I heard, Google doesn't run their image indexer very often at all. Some time ago there was a bit of a scandal about why images of the prisoner abuses at Guantanamo Bay were "censored". It turned out there was no censorship, just that Google hadn't updated their image index in aeons!
I was impressed by your comments regarding LibraryThing user _Celeste_'s collection of Clement Clarke Moore's "A Visit From St. Nicholas," editions.
I'm new to LibraryThing, but have also used it to get a better grip on my miniature book collection. I collect both mass-market miniatures and private press limited editions. I love it's ability to help me better organize and categorize my collection. So far I've added nearly 800 titles. I tend to use the standard definitions for a miniature book. A "real" miniature book is between 1 inch and 3 inches tall. Micro-mini's are between 1/4 in. and 1 in. tall, and Ultra-Micro-Mini's are smaller than ¼ inches. A Macro-Mini is over 3 inches. The purists don't consider anything over 3 inches (and certainly not over 4 inches) to be a miniature, but I and many others are less rigid on how we define very small books.
Many of my miniature specimens are antiques, and as you can imagine, I have to upload almost all the images of their covers. In some instances where there is nothing appealing or visually interesting about a book's cover, I might scan in the title-page.
For the record, I am also a professional librarian and have worked in the field for 35 years.
Congratulations on developing a very fine tool for bibliophiles -- and especially for us minibibliophiles. :)
--Fred
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