Introducing LibraryThing Local

Today we* unveil a major new section of the site, LibraryThing Local.

What is it? LibraryThing Local is a gateway to thousands of local bookstores, libraries and book festivals—and to all the author readings, signings, discussions and other events they host. It is our attempt to accomplish what hasn't happened yet—the effective linking of the online and offline book worlds. Books still don't fully "work" online; this is a step toward mending them.

LibraryThing Local is a handy reference, but it's also interactive. You can show off your favorite bookstores and libraries (eg., mine include the Harvard Bookstore, Shakespeare and Company and the Boston Athenaeum) and keep track of interesting events. Then you can find out who else loves the places you do, and who else is going to events. You can also find local members, write comments about the places you love and more.

LibraryThing members rock. LibraryThing Local just opened, but for the past week we've let a few members in to check it out and add venues.** They went crazy!

Together, about two-dozen members added over 2,600 venues. The coverage is spotty, covering the members personal interests. So, Paris is a literary desert, but Chicago and Antwerp are a mess of little green and blue dots, and even frosty Juneau (pictured right) is done.*** LibraryThing Local would be boring without content, so everone owes a debt of gratitude to members like SilentInAWay (400), alibrarian (351), christiguc (302), Talbin (242), SqueakyChu (240), boekerij (217) and others for kicking things off so well.

This kind of passion give us hope that LibraryThing Local will swiftly become the web's best, most complete source for finding bookstores and library—and for the events they throw. Unfortunately, we only got events working yesterday, so there are only 200 so far. Something to work on?

Authors! Publishers! Libraries! Bookstores! Right now, everyone can add events. But they won't necessarily get to you, so go ahead and add your venues and events. We are experimenting with the concept of "claiming" a venue, so that a bookstore of library can assert control over its basic factual information. (You don't control the comment wall, of course.) For now, you need to email us. Go to a venue for more details.

Beta, Forevah. LibraryThing Local is not "done." It's missing key features, like RSS. And it has a few bugs. For good or ill, that's how we work around here.

The main planned improvements are:

• RSS Feeds
• Fine-grained privacy settings
• Author and work integration
• Enhanced features for bookstores and libraries that take part
• More stats, like the most interesting events

I've started two discussion threads:

• Introducing LibraryThing Local (but we hope people leave blog comments too)
• LibraryThing Local bugs

Needless to say, I can't wait to see what members think of it. We'll do our best to make it as good as we can.

Use BookTour! (We do not.) LibraryThing Local was something I've wanted to do since visiting Ireland a year ago and not knowing where the bookstores were. But I didn't get serious about the idea until approached by BookTour.

BookTour is a startup founded by Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and the upcoming Free. Chris' idea was to make a central site to collect information about authors on tour.

LibraryThing agreed to be BookTour's first partnership. But along the way we ran into difficulties. We wanted strong venue information, so members could show off their favorite bookstores and libraries. BookTour is focused on the events more than venues, which include many duplicates. Eventually it became clear to me we were after different things, so we parted ways.

Although LibraryThing Local is now doing some of the same things, I hope blog readers will check out BookTour. I expect them to be adopted by other book-related sites and, at present, their data is more copious than ours. Certainly, no author should tour without first adding all their events there, and they have a very handy Excel-based upload option that will appeal to publicists with large numbers of events.

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* Chris (conceptDawg), whose favorite bookstores include Bienvielle Books, built much of LibraryThing Local. Send praise his way!
**We released LibrayThing Local to a private but non-exclusive beta group two weeks ago. Later, after deciding not to use others site's data (see above), we let members add their own venues, and later events.
***Best of all the Alaskan-adder, alibrarian, has no connection to Alaska whatsoever. He just got tired adding every library in New York City.

Powell's books!

Powell's City of Books

Click on a store to see holdings.

Powell's Books, "the world's largest new and used bookstore," located in Portland, OR, has joined our neighborhood bookstore program.

This means that work pages now show store-by-store availability from Powell's, alongside the other bookstores you elect. You can click to find out details, hold the book or buy it online.

There are a couple of ways of add Powell's to your LibraryThing "experience." The easiest is to go to edit your profile. Down at the bottom you'll see bookstores, including Powell's.

In keeping with the neighborhood focus on the program, we've split the data out individual Powell's locations, and not counted inventory in warehouses, whether in Oregon or elsewhere. This meant that—barring last-minute changes—if it shows up on LibraryThing, they have it in stock where it says. We've also broken up results into New, Sale and Used categories.

As elsewhere, we pull in all editions of a work, from the paperback to the hardback to the CD version—even versions in other languages. In some ways, this "works"-level view of Powell's inventory goes beyond what they do. (And in some ways it's more annoying, since LT's first result may be the French version on eight-track tape.)

Our thanks go out to our new friends at Powell's. The catalyst was apparently a rabid LTer at Powell's—can the user reveal himself?—but I found everyone there extremely sympathique and eager to get this done.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention LT has a Powell's Group. I'd love comments here, but I also started a post on Talk.

What it means. First, we hope this makes our Portland members happy; they've been agitating for us to do something with Powell's for a long time now.

It may be a bigger win. So far, our bookstore program has been small. We still have only eleven bookstores in the system, six Powell's stores and five others. But Powell's is the biggest independent and a leader of them. We hope it convinces others to take advantage of us on this—completely free—service.

We're particularly interested in getting Booksense stores in. We already parse the Booksense format, so we could add a few hundred stores with virtually no effort.

The big picture. On the web, books are broken. A few small parts are solved or on their way—Amazon, Abebooks.com, Google, Powells—and this gives many the illusion that books are a solved problem. But the rest of the "bibliosphere" isn't where it could be. Libraries and publishers, authors and most bookstores are adrift, and not part of the conversation.*

But things are changing. One day—not too far off—local bookstores will be fully "on" the web, just like Amazon is. They'll not only have websites, they'll have feeds and APIs, and sites like LibraryThing will be able to give and get data seamlessly. You'll be able to find a book in your town as easily as you find a pizza. They'll be truly part of the web, not just on it.

We're not there yet. Most of the bookstores we've worked with have had another, different data format. None have APIs.

But it's going to happen! And we think that, if we keep working to hook up the pieces, we'll be part of the solution.

*My correspondent at Powell's asked me for examples. Here's my rant/reply:

You can't Google a book and find out where in town to get a copy. You can't Google a book and find out whether your public library has a copy. Your library doesn't know the author is touring the area. The author doesn't know which independent bookstores are selling the most copies, and so where to read. Bookstore software is crap and most independent bookstores aren't online at all. The second-largest US bookstore chain—Borders—is less online that Powell's! Libraries are absolutely *terrible* online; you will rarely get a library in the first ten pages of a Google search because search engines can't "see inside" library websites. Library data is largely inaccessible and dominated by an inflexible data monopoly. Book data is mostly from Amazon or from a welter of other companies that don't or can't help any but the largest providers. Publisher websites a seldom more than 1990s brochure-ware. Small presses sometimes have good websites, but aren't included in the book-data game. There's no online network for authors and agents. There isn't even a decent "works" system for books—and to the extent there are systems like this, publishers and libraries have completely different systems.

PHOTO CREDIT: Powells.com.

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.