BookSense Events!

We just added over six-hundred and fifty events to LibraryThing Local, LibraryThing's portal for local bookstores, libraries and events.

The events come direct from our friends at BookSense, the nationwide organization of over 1,200 independent bookstores. They made their complete events calendar available to us, and we were only to happy to add all the events we didn't already know about.

BookSense is the best; if you have a favorite local bookstore, chances are they're a BookSense store.* BookSense also gets the best authors. Upcoming events include David Sedaris at Vroman's in Pasadena and Salman Rushdie at Vroman's and at Caucer's in Santa Barbara. Of course, as happens with distributed data collection, not every BookSense store has their events in the feed. And some events had already been added by members. Be the total gain is some 660 upcoming events—a big leap. We'll be updating from th BookSense feed periodically from now on, which should take some of the data-entry load off of dedicated LibraryThing members.

So, thanks to the people at BookSense for working with us on this, and happy event-attending to the rest of us.

PS: There's a short article about this in the ABA's Bookselling this Week by David Grogan.

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*My favorites—Books, Etc., Longfellow Books and the Harvard Coop—are all BookSense stores. My wife spent much of her 20s working at another, Bookline Booksmith, together with her best friend, who went on to work at Booksense. So, I've wanted LibraryThing to do something BookSense since we started.

Does your bookstore have it? (Calling BookSense stores!)

Introducing our new series: "29 Things You Didn't Know you Could Do with LibraryThing" our attempt to introduce cheesy "style magazine" graphics and arbitrary numbers to the LibraryThing blog!*

Today's topic is Bookstore Integration. Did you know that LibraryThing integrates with local bookstores? Basically, we'll tell you if your local bookstore has a copy of a book in the store, and what it's going for. It's free for you and for the bookstore. It's particularly easy for the bookstore to set up.

So far, we only have three bookstores in the system:

• Porter Square Bookstore, Cambridge, MA
• Shaman Drum Bookshop, Ann Arbor, MI
• City Lights, Sylva, NC

If you're near any of these stores, you can add them to your work pages in two ways. Either go to your profile and select "edit profile," or click the little pencil next to "Buy, borrow or swap" on a work page.

We need bookstores! We'd love to get more bookstores involved. In particular, any independent that uploads its inventory to BookSense can upload the same file to LibraryThing—no problem. If you aren't a BookSense member, but can still export inventory data, let us know. Basically we need ISBN, price and quantity updated at least once per week.

At one point we explored some "high-level" discussion but, like so many "deals," nothing came of it. Since the whole thing is basically free promotion for local bookstores, and a service to local customers, we hope that we can get more bookstores, and even bookstore chains involved without another conference call with a corporate marketing director!

As stated, this is a free servie. Like our Early Reviewers program—free buzz for publishers, free books for readers—we aim to do nothing more than make LibraryThing more useful and fun for everybody**. We succeed if LibraryThing gets better, which "aligns" our interests much better than if we negotiating complex deals.

Email tim@librarything.com for more info! Please note that this is a local bookstore offer. We're not soliciting online bookstores to send their inventories. AbeBooks.com and BookFinder exists already!

*Why 29? Because it looked better than 27 or 28!
**This also applies to our recent movie-ticket give-away, although in exchange for the promotion New Line Cinema did agree to cast Abby as lead in a future production.