Twitter your reviews

We've added a feature to make it easy to Twitter (or Tweet) your reviews.



You'll see the option—a tiny Twitter logo—on your reviews. When you click it, it takes you to Twitter and fills in the message box. You can, of course, edit it however you like.



You can spot most such tweets with this Twitter search.

This is our second Twitter-based feature. The other is an easy way to Twitter your books to LibraryThing, handy for making a note of a book when you're in a bookstore or library. Like that, the Twitter your review feature is all about restraint and options. We've rejected the idea—popular among book and non-book sites—of automating that process, of making it easy to machine-gun all your friends and followers with trivial updates.

Are you on Twitter? Follow us. Most LibraryThing-related news comes from my account, LibraryThingTim. The LThing account is for incoming messages mostly. John, Chris and Luke are also on, discussing LibraryThing's irrationally vague vacation policy.

Reviews in many languages

I've added a bunch of features around the language that members write reviews in.

Reviews by language. The result is to make LibraryThing more attractive for non-English users—they now get reviews in their own language by default. A few languages, especially our Dutch, French and German sites, already have a decent number of reviews, and this should make it more fun for all non-English users to review books.

For the English-only members, the feature is mostly negative—it's now easy to screen out the clutter of reviews in languages you don't understand.



Most popular works have reviews in other languages. Something like the Da Vinci Code has reviews in thirteen languages, including twelve in Dutch, three in Swedish, two in Catalan and one in Greek! ("Un dels millors llibres que he llegit mai", "Το λάτρεψα"—maybe it's better in translation!)

Reviews uClassified: Most reviews have already been assigned to a language. Rather than use the default language in LibraryThing profiles, which turns out to be very, very weakly related to the language members write their reviews in, I took advantage of the excellent language classification service offered by uClassify (uClassify.com). uClassify runs a Bayesian filter on a piece of text and sends back a list of languages, and confidence scores.

It isn't perfect, but it's pretty good. Only very high scores were accepted as definitive. Short reviews weren't sent for the same. As a result, about 1/8 of LibraryThing's 730,267 reviews remain as "not set."

Feature changes. A bunch.

• You can now edit your reviews language everywhere you can edit or enter a review. 
  
  
• Your library statistics page (link) now shows how many reviews you've written in every language. Mostly importantly this shows the number of reviews that haven't been assigned to a language.
  
• For reviews going forward your default language is set on your account page. 
  
• The catalog now has a "Reviews language" field and a special search for all your reviews in a given language (eg., reviews in English, language not set). These links are available from your stats page).
  
• You can Power Edit review languages, and when you're looking at all your reviews in a language, if it differs from your default language, you will get a link to make all unset reviews be in your default language. For example, here are all your unset reviews (link).

Statistics. The numbers turned out something like this.

English/Unset: 650,988
Dutch: 8,636
French: 4,666
German: 4,651
Spanish: 4,463
Italian: 2,876
Swedish: 2,329
Danish: 1,587
Norwegian: 1,231
Portuguese: 1,098
Finnish: 662
Catalan: 443
Etc.

To be done, talked about. As usual, there's more to do. So far, there's no good list of recent or top reviews by language. Come to discuss it on Talk and suggest other improvements.

Collections, at last

It's arrived. Members can organize their books into "collections."

The Motive. From the beginning, LibraryThing members have used the site for different things. Some used it to list only the books they own, others what they've read and a few even just the books they wanted. Meanwhile, people like me used it for everything—owned, read, lost, destroyed, wanted—using tagging as our sole way of keeping everything straight. But even tag-zealots like me had to admit there were times you wanted sharper distinctions—"buckets" or "sub-libraries"—and ways to tie those to how you connected with other members and with book recommendations. New members, whether familiar with tags or not, were regularly asking for some way to do wishlists and currently-reading lists.

The Feature. The feature, literally years in the making, gives members the ability to separate out categories of books, like "Wishlist" and "Currently reading" more definitely than could be accomplished with tags. Each collections works like a mini library and can be separately viewed, sorted and searched. Other members can see your collections, on your profile and elsewhere. Features like member-to-member connection and book recommendations react to the new system as well. (See below on integration progress.)

As we offer users new flexibility, we avoid forcing members into "our" way of thinking about books. We've provided a number of default collections—Your library, Wishlist, Currently reading, To read, Read but unowned and Favorites. Data from these collections can be aggregated across all users, and their names are even translated on LibraryThing's non-English sites. But you can also create your own collections, and remove ours. And you can ignore collections entirely, keeping everything in "Your library."

A Work in Progress. As members know, we play things pretty fast and lose here. Our motto is "beta, forevah!" But collections had to be different. Before public release we subjected it to a month of testing in our large (and non-exclusive) BETA Group. We cannot thank that group enough for all the work they did, and the passion they showed.

We hope we got most of the major bugs, but the feature is not "finished"—and this is hardly the last blog post you'll see about the feature! Most significantly, collections is now mostly a "cataloging" feature, with only limited reach to other areas of the site. Although you can specify how collections affects member connections and recommendations—so you can stop having your Wishlist or for that matter your husband's books running the social and recommendation parts of the site—implementation is basic and, in light of extraordinary collections-related load, there's a lot of caching in place. We left a few features out in order to get it the main features out now.*

We also think "unfinished" (we prefer not prematurely specified) features are the best way to engage users, and get the best for everyone. Come and contribute on Recommended Site Improvements and Bug Collectors. We also have a Announcement post in New Features.

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*We had spec'ed out a complex interaction between reading-dates and "Currently reading." But the system was probably more than most members wanted. And it certainly was taking a long time to finish, so, for now at least "Currently reading" is just a collection.

Credits: Chris (conceptDawg) headed up the project, doing most of the user interface and a majority of the back-end code. Chris and I (timspalding) designed the feature together, and I did some core back-end code. Abby (ablachly) didn't code, but she dogged us about it for years. (I'm not sure what she's going to do with herself now.) But the most important factor was the members. Members, particularly the BETA group, contributed to the effort as I've never seen it—not in any website or project, ever. Chris and I owe members an enormous amount. (I'll be blogging about this specifically soon. It needs telling.)

Top photo by radiant_guy" (Flickr, CC-SA).

Widgets get a lot better

We've just brought live new, improved widgets, available from the make widget page.

Some highlights:

• New "animated" style cycles through your covers in a oddly mesmerizing way.
• Widgets are extensively customizable, so you can fit them to your blog without any special knowledge.
• Power users can do more, with Javascript and CSS customization. Check out Chris' blog for stylish use.*
• The new widgets are shareable (an example) so members can show off and swap styles. (Yes, we'll be having a widget-creation contest soon.)
  
• Widget links don't go off somewhere, but open up a slick lightbox "mini-book" page, with your information and (optional) links, to LibraryThing and elsewhere. You can, of course, fill in your Amazon Associates code, if you want to make money off your widget.
• Widgets now include (optionally) tags, ratings and reviews. You can filter by reviews and tags too.
• The code is good—based on our improved JSON Books API and designed not to slow down your page (they're "lazy-loading"). Weirdly this can make the widget look slow. That's because it's not slowing down the rest of the page!
• Internationalized from the ground up.
• Orcas, baby!

Go ahead and make a widget.

Talk about it here, or on Talk.

Luke! Widgets were helmed by new employee Luke (member: LibraryThingLuke), who wrote most of the core code, all the styling options, the share system and so forth. Other LibraryThing people helped. Chris—hard at work on collections, we promise—chipped in some attractive styles. Mike wrote the crucial cover-animation code, something he's been working on for our upcoming Facebook application. I made sure Luke got a list of changes every morning, including at least one thing I wanted the other way the day before.

Luke offered the following thumbnail bio:

"Luke Stevens lives in Portland, Me with his wife and three kids. He enjoys single malt scotch and silver-age comic books. He rides a motorcycle from the early 80's that elicits laughter from his evil co-workers. Twitter: saintlukas; blog: sacremoo.com."

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*Chris swears by Colourlovers.com.

LibraryThing Mac Screensaver

At the end of our Week of Code, Chris and I put together the RSS feed and directions you need to turn the built-in Mac OS X screensaver into a LibraryThing Screen Saver.



To do it you'll need to grab the following URL: http://www.librarything.com/labs-screensaver.php?userid=timspalding and change "timspalding" to your user name (public users only, of course). Then watch the video.

Update: Does anyone know of an easy way to make a Windows one?

Male or Female?

I've added a new meme page for "Male of Female?" (see yours or mine).

The page is similar to Dead or Alive?. It's based on our Common Knowledge, an editable, fielded wiki for author and work information. So if someone shows up under "Uncertain" you can edit in the right gender.

This feature is, of course, frosting. The cake was released Saturday: Introducing Distinct Authors. Check that out.

Distinct authors, phase 1 / Steve Martin is funny again

Short version. I've added a mechanism to "split" distinct authors with the same name. You can find it on the right of any author page, under "Author Disambiguation." The feature is only partially rolled-out, without separate pages for distinct authors or other rammifications for the LibraryThing system.

Long version. Since its inception, LibraryThing has been plagued by the "Steve Martin" problem. We all know Steve Martin, the comic and author of Shop Girl. But what about Steve Martin the author of Britain's Slave Trade, Sold! How to Make it Easy for People to Buy from You or some book about Newfoundland ships. Why was the original wild-and-crazy-guy writing such evidently unfunny books—or who were these other people?

The problem is deep in the data. Libraries have a system for disambiguating authors, called Authority Control, based on coming up with authorized forms of a name and adding dates and other metadata to make them unique, and then applying these forms across the books. Authority control is a good idea—if often problematic to implement—but it falls down in the face of LibraryThing's data. Libraries don't coordinate their authority control as much as you'd think, and LibraryThing draws from almost 700 libraries. And even if authority control worked in libraries, 90% of LibraryThing content comes from other sources, mostly Amazon. This data has no concept of authority control. (See Steve Martin at Amazon, for example.)

In solving the problem, I decided to ignore how libraries solved the issue and concentrate on how LibraryThing could do it most easily. Authority control requires librarians to assemble data (eg., birth and death dates) about name variants before a split is made. (Thus was born librarians' unfortunate policy of putting out hits on individuals they could not otherwise distinguish.*) Although LibraryThing members have done an amazing job finding birth and death dates, it was still a lot of work. And a full authority-control solution would have members updating each other's records with the "authorized" forms of the names!

I felt a better way could be found. Instead of establishing unique names and pushing them to records, members could split works arbitrarily, and the authors would come to be known by the name they share and the works that cluster under them. This is actually an old system—calling someone "the author of Ivanhoe" or "the one who wrote the Parthian history." And, as with other features of LibraryThing cataloging, it accords with how regular people talk about. In a real-world situation, like a meeting of Newfoundland commedians, you wouldn't refer to "Martin, Steve, 1945-" and "Martin, Steve, 1947-" but "Steve Martin, you know, the one who wrote Shopgirl" and "Steve Martin, the one who wrote that book about that boat."

How it works. To split an author, find the area on the right labelled "Author Disambiguation." It will take you to a splitting page; here's Steve Martin's. This page allows you to assign all the author's works to numbers. As you assign the works, LibraryThing assigns separate colors, making it easy to see at a glance how the thing is going.

More to do. This is just a first step. The "distinct authors" feature has to "go" all sorts of places on the site. First up will be separate pages for distinct authors--and a "disambiguation page" (a la Wikipedia) tying them together. Once that's done we can move to separate author metadata, such as Common Knowledge, bettween distinct authors.

Quite frankly, I'm going to do a few more things and then let this sit for a while. My main focus right now—and Chris'—is to see "collections" to the finish line. When I realized I could bang out the first phase of distinct authors in a long evening (it's after 5am now), I went ahead and did it. But now I need to refocus on collections.

Talk about it. I've set up a New features post to discuss the change, and its potential rammifications. I suspect that the Combiners! group will get in on the act quickly as well, working out various technical issues. They have a number of threads (here, here and here, at least), in which members have made lists of "identically named authors." They would be a good starting-point.

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*The hits are, of course, carried out by OCLC.

Member Giveaways: Early Reviewers for everyone

We've just introduced a major new feature: Member Giveaway, a simple but flexible way for authors to get review copies into readers' hands, and other members to clean out their attics!

Member Giveaway is built on top of our Early Reviewers program, which invites publishers to send LibraryThing members pre-publication copies of upcoming books. It has been a huge success, often giving out more than 1,500 books per month. But Early Reviewers has strict rules on participating, quantity and release dates, to keep up quality and encourage publishers to send out as many copies as they could spare.

Member Giveaway differs from Early Reviewers in a couple of ways:

• Any LibraryThing member can participate.
  
• There are no quantity restrictions. You can post a single book or a hundred.
  
• Books do not need to be pre-release or even new.
  
• Members are encouraged to review Giveaway books, but not reviewing them cannot hurt you.
  
• Giveaway selection is random, not based on a similar-books algorithm. To discourage sockpuppetry, requesting members must have cataloged at least fifty books or be a premium (ie., paid) member.
• Early Reviewers has a bird, but Member Giveaways uses squirrels. As you know, squirrels are lovely, sociable animals who share books readily.

Some other fun details:

• If you've signed up for Early Reviewers, you are ready for Member Giveaways. The two programs have the same sign-up.
  
• When you post a book you have a lot of options, including length of time it will last and where you're willing to send it.
  
• The sending member is responsible for all shipping. If you request and receive a book, the sending member will get your shipping address.
  

We made Member Giveaway for authors who couldn't get their publisher to sign on to Early Reviewers, couldn't get enough copies together or whose book was already out. (Early Reviewers also does not allow most self-published works, which has angered a few members, but both publishers and members reacted strongly when we included self-published books before.)

Publishers and authors aside we wanted to give regular members a chance to send good books to good homes. We have long pondered whether LibraryThing should enable book-swaps. But our friends at BookMooch do that so well already, and swapping is very hard to get right. But many members still wanted a simple way to get their old books to new homes. So, we set up a system to do that too.

We've started Member Giveaways off with seven great books.

Cancer is a Bitch and Beef were offered by my friend Larry Weissman, literary agent to both authors.

Released this Fall, both have already drawn great reviews from LibraryThing members and others. LibraryThing member skrishna wrote of Cancer Is a Bitch: "It’s funny, witty, sarcastic and will have you laughing out loud. Read this book. That’s all I really have left to say." Of Beef, a microhistory in the tradition of Salt, the Boston Globe praised its "bovine evolution is riveting stuff." Eats.com called it an "eloquent, poignant and influential account of man’s historical relationship with the cow."

The other five books all come from a single member, keigu, Robin D. Gill, of Paraverse Press, which promises bilingual books "at a monolingual price."

The books consist of Japanese text and English translations of hundreds or thousands of short Japanese poems—haiku and senryu on various topics. The publisher, who is also the author, sent LibraryThing a huge box some time ago, in anticipation of such a program. Abby and I, custodians of the books for so long never got around to reading them, but we will sorely miss people's reactions at finding tall stacks of The Woman Without a Hole and Rise Ye, Sea Slugs!.

Three cheers for Mike! Memeber Giveaways was developed by Mike Bannister (LTMike) after I rather blithly tossed out the idea of opening Early Reviewers to everyone on a separate page. It took a while, but i is a beautiful, and solid piece of code.

Its completion frees Mike up to concentrate on Facebook full time, while Chris and me (but my programming time is somewhat hobbled by everythin else I do) continue work on collections.

Come talk about it here.

Twitter your books to LibraryThing

We've added integration with Twitter, the popular SMS/microblogging site. Basically, it's an easy way to add a book to your LibraryThing while standing in a bookstore, library or friend's house.

Go to the new Edit your profile: Sites page to add your username. Once you follow LThing, you can direct message at any time to add a book to your library.

Example:
D LThing [ISBN or Title] #tag1, #tag2, etc.

Add my wife's novel, Every Visible Thing with the tag "wishlist":
D LThing 0066212898 #wishlist

Add Huckleberry Finn:
D LThing Huckleberry Finn

Search always goes off Amazon for now. It picks the first edition if you don't specify.

Coming soon: We'll be integrating deeper soon, so you can let your Twitter friends know when you add or review books on LibraryThing.

Follow us: The LThing account will only be used to send out Twitter/LibraryThing messages. If you want to follow what I'm doing my Twitter account is LibraryThingTim.

Brains! Brains!

New Feature. I just released a minor feature, a new meme "Dead or Alive?" which breaks down your LibraryThing authors by whether they're dead, alive or unknown. Check out mine or go to your profile and select "Memes" to find yours.

The information is based on the various authors' birth and death dates in Common Knowledge. It works pretty much as you suspect. People with death dates are dead. People with birth dates only are alive, unless they'd be over 100. The rest are unknown. The system tracks when you use it, so I can add some statistics on whether your authors are more or less dead than others' authors.

UPDATE: For clarity, you can change authors by going to their author page and editing in a birth or death date. For now, organizations are identified by being of the gender "n/a."

New Books. I need no segue to mention two books I recently discovered. The first is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies from Chronicle Books, due out in April. According to the description:

"Pride and Prejudice and Zombies -- Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she's soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen's classic novel to new legions of fans."

It's an amusing idea. Taking on classics from a different vantage point has been done many times—think Wide Sargasso Sea, whose heroine is the "madwoman in the attic" of Jane Eyre. Others have have done prequels and sequels to famous works; at a low-point of my youth I read the entirety of Heathcliff—The return to Wuthering Heights. But has anyone taken the full text of a classic and inserted scenes of an entirely different character? The possibilities are endless. It's the tragic story of star-crossed lovers set against the backdrop of 16th-century Verona—and an alien invasion! (Working title: Romeo and Juliet and Aliens).*

Another good titles is Jailbait Zombie by Mario Acevedo, picked up by Sonya at the recent American Library Association meeting in Denver. According to Sonya's friend, another zombie-lover (but not literally), Zombie Jailbait "isn't as good as the author's Undead Kama Sutra," an assessment that brings into high relief the problem with comparatives.

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* I'm looking for other good titles. There is, of course, the moving story of two parents locked in a tragic custody battle over their young son—and stalked by a killer from another planet (Kramer versus Kramer versus Predator), but the movie is better known than the book.

UPDATE: A commentor points out All the World's a Grave by John Reed, piecing together Shakespearian lines into a new play. The granddaddy is Pingres of Halicarnassus' lost reworking of the Iliad, inserting a pentameter of his own creation between Homer's hexameters (here). Those aren't quite what I'm talking about.

Hat-tip to Lux Mentis for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Who has a book?

I've added a small section to work pages. The "Members" section shows who of your friends, interesting libraries and other connections have the work.

It also surveys the Legacy Libraries, a member project to catalog the libraries of famous dead people. So you can find out if Hemingway and Marie Antoinette owned, say, the Lusiads (Yes, they did). I think it gives this project—now growing quite impressive—a deserved boost

Discuss here.

New Feature: Find Friends

We've added a feature that makes it easy to connect to people you know.

These include people who may be using the site already, but you don't know their user name, and people you want to invite to the site. It can use contacts from your current email system, or manual entry.

Check out Find Friends, from your profile or here.

An excess of caution. Automatic email systems like this have come under much criticism, including my own. After the nastiness that has hit other companies' efforts, we've taken every precaution to avoid mess ups with our system.

The protections are quite extensive:

1. Members can only be found if they want to. We added the checkbox for that a few weeks ago. All older members were set to "false," unless they already had their email publically shown on their profile.
2. No emails or other data are stored by us.
3. Emails are only sent once, and can't be resent by you either.*
   
4. When your list of contacts comes back NONE are pre-checked. (The sites that helpfully pre-check 1,000 names are really flirting with disaster.)
5. We have removed any option to check all contacts, so you can't even do it by mistake. But we kept the option to un-check all contacts. If you do that by mistake, okay.
6. Instead of misleading you about what will happen in one direction, we slightly mislead you in the other. That is, the button marked "invite selected contacts" (above) does not actually go ahead and send the emails. Rather it shows you the invite list one last time and asks you to reconfirm the list.

We are confident these steps together make LibraryThing's invite feature the most conscientious of its kind.

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*To know whether you've emailed someone already we do store a "hash" of the email, a mathematical derivative of it that can't be used to reconstruct the original.

Recommendations, part 2

I've added a few improvements to the new member recommendations:

• You can now dismiss individual recommendations and never see them again.
• I've added a checkbox to make member book recommendations reciprocal--so both books recommend each other.
• The Recommendations Zeitgeist page is more complete.

LibraryThing recommendations!

LibraryThing Recommendations—called "the best feature on the site" by one user—are back and much better than before.

You can find recommendations at the top of your profile page. Or check out mine.

The new recommendations include:

• A large number of primary recommendations for ever member—usually 1,000—based on a single comprehensive algorithm.
  
• Individual recommendation lists for each member's tags.
• Filtering of recommendations by popular LibraryThing tags.
• Individual lists of other members' recommendations (member recommendations were added two weeks ago)
• Up to 500 so-bad-they're-good recommendations, building off the LibraryThing Unsuggester, and called "Your Unsuggester."* We hope "What I shouldn't read" has some meme legs.
  
• A "why" feature for each recommendation, laying out what the recommendation was based on.
• A pony.**

I let the recommendations themselves out early—see the original talk post, with over 140 messages!—and members had mostly positive reactions. Those who don't like them can perhaps be molified by the greater number and ways to filter and angle the recommendations.

Recommendations now change daily—faster if you are below 200 books and keep adding them. The system keeps track of all recommendations and when you received them. In the near future I plan to provide personalized recommendation emails based on new recommendations.

I've created a new Talk thread to discuss the changes, and suggest changes. My thanks to those who participated in the initial thread, influencing development in a number of important ways.

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*If Thomas Jefferson is in Hell, I am confident the Devil is torturing him with books from Jefferson's Unsuggester List—heavy on the chick- and tween-lit!
*With apologies to Last.fm.

Works, editions, ISBNs and cocktails

We got your Harry Potter and the Angus an Orchloch right here!

Short verson.I've just completed a major change in the "substructure" of LibraryThing's data, the "works system" that links different editions together. The system is better and will allow more betterness down the road. It was the reason we were down most of last night. We regret that, but think the change will prove worth it.

Long version—What are "Works?" LibraryThing's work system brings users together around the books they've read, not the peculiarities of publisher, format or even language. Works are created and tended by members, who "combine" editions together into works. Anyone can do it, but the die-hards created a large and active group—Combiners!—to trade tips, debate philosophy, muster effort—and complain about the system!

Combiners is a remarkable community, and one that has gone without a nod from me for some time. I hope these changes encourage them, and the prospect of future improvements built on surer footing.

The Combiners! know the stakes, as their group logo tells us.

Since the beginning I've promoted the idea of the "cocktail party" test.* This test answers whether two books belong to the same work by asking whether their readers would, in casual conversation, own up to reading the same book or not. So, for example, in such a context it wouldn't matter if you had read a book in its hardcover or paperback edition, or listened to it on CD. If the cute girl with the backless dress mentions she's fond of the Unbearable Lightness of Being, the edition is immaterial (but see this link). I also suspect that title differences occasioned by marketing considerations—eg., Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (UK) vs. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (US)—wouldn't matter. Nor should language itself matter; few would turn a cold shoulder to a Finnish Tolkien fan merely because he read Tolkien in Finnish.**

What's Changed? The core concept used to be that a work consisted of a discrete set of title-author pairs. We chose title-author to emphasize the loose, verbal nature of the cocktail party test, and because ISBNs are much less perfect than many believe.*** These title-author pairs we called "editions."

Unfortunately, there are a small number of works that can't be identified based on title and author alone. This happens particularly in science fiction and graphic novels. (Apparently the Fantasy Hall of Fame currently entombs two distinct works—same title, same authors but different contents and publisher. Someone should be punished for that.) My bête noire are Cliff's Notes filed in with the works they "interpret." No appletini for you "Great Expectations"!

The system still automatically assigns new editions based on author and title. But I've added ISBNs to the mix, so members can combine and separate editions looking at and according to their ISBNs.

Other changes:

• Title-author-ISBN bundles are now distiguished by the smallest details, so you can separate "Hard Times" from "Hard times" from "Hard times" with a period at the end. It has vastly increased the number of editions in the system. (There are now more than 1,200 editions of the Hobbit!) This is was mostly a technical decision.
• The original system produced a few "hash collisions," utterly different books thrown in together unhappily. This has been a long-running defect—and complaint. The new system will allow their separation, although existing ones will need to be separated.
• The Combination and Debris (renamed "Editions") pages should be faster. Some will start—and stall!—on a message about updating edition information. Once the editions have been calculated, the page will be faster.

As mentioned above, the new system was responsible for our extended downtime last night. Between a few mistakes and a database just shy of 27 million books, it took longer than we thought. I hope that the changes prove worthwhile in and of themselves.

Being much better designed, the new system should enable:

• Edition-level pages
• Edition-to-edition and work-to-work relationships
• Member and book matching that takes editions into account
• An end to the "dead languages" exception to the cocktail party test.
• More opportunities for me to discuss the Pop-Up Kama Sutra at library conferences.

I've created a Talk thread for members who want to discuss the changes.

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*Perhaps wishing I'd get invited to a few more cocktail parties! Speaking of which, are you going to Book Expo America 2008 in Los Angeles? We are.
**Whether you choose to avoid the Finnish Tolkien fan at cocktail parties is, of course, up to you.
***In fact, publishers recycle ISBNs, steal ISBNs, make up ISBNs, print wrong ISBNs, apply ISBNs to large sets of seemingly discrete items and otherwise abuse the system all the time. Most of the time they work in a bookstore context. They aren't really fit for a project of LibraryThing's size and scope.

Import upgrade

Mike—welcome Mike!*—has completed a major upgrade to the import system. The improvements are:

• Better user interface.
  
• Import now reads files from LibraryThing competitors, so you can move to us or synch your accounts.
  
• Depending on the site, we pick up tags, reviews, ratings and comments. If you already have the books in your library, you avoiding adding the books again, but synch your user data.
  
• The sites include Anobii, Shelfari and Goodreads. If you use someone else—there are more than 35 of them!—let us know. If the offer export—not all sites do—we can work it out.
• If your file is formatted properly—formatted like the LibraryThing export or any of our competitors'—we now import non-ISBN books.

Import is still based on the idea that—when possible—LibraryThing re-fetches the bibliographic data. This adds another step, an "import queue." But it also allows members to import full records, which no other site exports, and to get high-quality library data, if they want it.

Tell us what you think on Talk. It's probably going to take a while to spell out what it does and doesn't do and to update the old Adding and Importing FAQs.

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*Mike (member: notmydadslibrary) is a new intern up here in Portland. This was a doozy of a first project!

Member book recommendations

I've just added a small new feature, Member recommendations. You can check it out under "Recommendations" here or here.*

Basically, you can now add your own recommendations to LibraryThing's six (!) algorithmic recommendations. If you want, you can also leave a short explanation of your choice.

I'm throwing this one out pretty raw.** It's available from the primary page of a work, and from its recommendation page, and on a single Member Recommendations page.

To be done:

• A way to see all the recommendations you've given
• A way to see all the recommendations others have applied to your books
• Recommendation flagging
• Up/down voting on recommendations?

Come talk about the feature and where it could go on Talk here.

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*I hope to link to some better examples soon, one members start adding them. I find fiction recommendations very hard, so most of my recommendations so far have been off ancient history, which makes the feature seem much less interesting than it is!
**I've had this on ice for a while, while dealing with tags and scaling issues. I don't think I'm going to be making major changes until Chris comes back from paternity leave later this week or next.

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.

Top bar better, cuter

I made some changes to the look and functionality of the "top bar" in Your Library. They include new "pads," new icons, yellow and baby-blue colors and new tag functionality. Non-English users will also notice the labels can nw be translated--no more untranslateable "text as image."

List:


Covers:


Tags:


The tag bar includes a new new features. "Down" and "Across" control whether the tags are sorted "down" (like an index) or "across" (like some other things). You can also control the size of the text and the space between tags, and the number of columns to show.

Come talk about the change and suggest more on Talk.

New feature: Tag view / edit your tags

I've added a new feature—a "Tag view" for "Your library", alongside the List and Shelf views.


The Tag view replaces the Tags tab. Like the tab, it shows your tags alphabetically, or by frequency and allows you to jump to a tag in your catalog.

But the tag view also allows you to edit your tags, "gardening them" in a very satisfying way. You can rename tags, delete tags or add tags. For example, from the tag view you can add "history" and "greece" everywhere you use the tag "greek history." Editing is done in a lightbox, and "ajaxes" the changes back onto the screen with the "yellow fade technique."

The technical infrastructure here is going to key to the upcoming (really) collections feature. Collections, which I think I'll call "sets," will turn the Tag view into "Sets/Tags." (Anyway, that's the plan!)

Let me know what you think about the new feature here, or on Talk.

Covers: Better, Bigger, Blanks, Defaults and Statistics

Casual visitors are often surprised to learn that LibraryThing members have contributed more than 800,000 covers, for use when Amazon doesn't have the right cover. It's time to make the most of this strength!

I've added a five new features related to how LibraryThing handles covers. I hope you like the changes!

1. Choose member-created "blank" covers for every book.
2. Choose your default cover.
3. Better cover "guessing"
4. Cover Statistics and links to different cover types.
5. Member-contributed covers now available in all sizes.
6. Member-contributed covers now available in maximum quality.

Choose member-created "blank" covers for every book. Way back in November, I asked for members to send in images of blank covers--real, doctored and built from scratch--for books that have no other cover (see post and follow-up). More than a dozen members sent covers, often very many and beautiful. These covers are now available from the "change cover" page of every book. They vary from ordinary to fanciful, general or tailored to look like a specific publisher's books. They're a blast. Go crazy.

It's hard to understate the care that some members lavish on projects like this, exercising their creative side and helping other members out. Check out the image credits, available under the display and when you roll over the images.

Choose your default cover. The same member-covers are also available as default covers, the cover you get when you have no other cover. You can change your default cover from every book's change-cover page, as well as from your Cover Statistics.

Better cover "guessing". This feature caused some members consternation when it was released provisionally a few days ago. Suddenly members got a whole bunch of new covers, some of which they didn't want, with no way to opt out. I've added powerful opt-out options, so it's time to reintroduce the feature.

The feature takes advantage of LibraryThing's 800,000 member-uplaoded covers. If you have books from more than a few years ago, like I do, a lot of your books don't have Amazon covers. Before now, you could choose these covers manually, replacing our "blank" cover with your own or someone else's uploaded cover.

Now were taking that data—the covers people choose for a given ISBN—to "guess" at the covers for coverless books. In general, members choose the right cover for their edition, especially when LibraryThing can look at many members' decisions. In the case of my books, LibraryThing found 69 covers. Only one is dead-wrong, with two others being subtle variants of the cover I have. Of course, you can easily switch to a different cover, a blank cover or no cover.

Cover Statistics and links to different cover types. I've added a page for Cover Statistics. It shows where all you covers come from, with a link to all the books in that category. It's a great way to go through your blanks or confirm LibraryThing's new "best guess" covers.

The Cover Statistics page also has a link to change your default cover. (In case you're wondering, I'm working on a all-encompassing "preferences" page. One thing at a time.)

Member-contributed covers now available in all sizes. Until now, LibraryThing only displayed two sizes for member-contributed covers--tiny and medium. For the last eight months we've been saving large versions, but we didn't use them. Storing all the sizes or making them on the fly scared us.

A new server and some technical changes have given us the opportunity to show covers at whateve size they're needed. The result is a much more attractive and even Cover View, which scales from teeny to upsettingly large (see image).

Member-contributed covers now available in maximum quality. As said, we were not previously taking advantage of original images, but only two presized versions. Although early-on we didn't store them—server space was just too dear—we have been storing original versions for about eight months. This amounts to some 300,000 out of 800,000 covers. (Of course, not all "originals" are actually large; some are thumbnails.)

The result is that some member-contributed covers can now be sized to elephantine dimensions within your catalog, and look great on work pages, which use medium-large images. Unfortunately, some covers look a bit "pixelated" at these large sizes. The examples below illustrate both effects:



A final word. I want to thank members who pushed me on this feature. Although the general change has been planned for some time, it received impetus from a "bug fix" that introduced many best-guess covers. Without an easy way to "opt-out" of guesses—without choosing another cover—a few members went bananas.

The were right to do so! It created a weird situation, one I realized the more when I spent an hour "gardening" my covers. Once again, it was a pleasure to work through the issue with members. I've very pleased with the feedback, and as I rolled out some of these features over the weekend.

Maybe some day I'll write a book about working with and for you guys. But you're doing the cover.

Introducing Author Chat

We're kicking off a new feature today, Author Chat.

Nick Trout, author of New York Times bestseller Tell Me Where It Hurts is going to be on LibraryThing for the next few weeks (from today, April 14th through April 30th). He'll be talking about the book, and his work, and answering questions from you, the readers. Start coming up with questions!

If you were one of the lucky 24 to receive a free copy of the book in last month's batch of Early Reviewer books, then you've got a head start!

If you didn't get a free copy, then don't fret. The book is out in bookstores and libraries, so go buy or borrow a copy now, and get reading.

Join the discussion in the Author Chat group. The direct link to the Nick Trout thread is here.

About the book

It's 2:47 a.m. when Dr. Nick Trout takes the phone call that starts another hectic day at the Angell Animal Medical Center. Sage, a ten-year old German shepherd, will die without emergency surgery for a serious stomach condition. Over the next twenty-four hours Dr. Trout fights for Sage’s life, battles disease in the operating room, unravels tricky diagnoses, reassures frantic pet parents, and reflects on the humor, heartache, and inspiration in his life as an animal surgeon. And he wants to take you along for the ride...

From the front lines of modern medicine, Tell Me Where It Hurts is a fascinating insider portrait of a veterinarian, his furry patients, and the blend of old-fashioned instincts and cutting-edge technology that defines pet care in the twenty-first century. For anyone who's ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes at your veterinarian's office, Tell Me Where It Hurts offers a vicarious journey through twenty-four intimate, eye-opening, heartrending hours at the premier Angell Animal Medical Center in Boston.

Nick Trout is a staff surgeon at the Angell Animal Medical Center and lives near Boston, Massachusetts.

For more on the book, check out this YouTube video, or even read an excerpt on the Broadway Books website.


Future Author Chats
This isn't a one-time feature. I've got several other authors lined up, and am looking for more! If you're interested in participating, email abby@librarything.com

Common Knowledge in your library

What just happened. Yesterday saw two huge announcements I'm loathe to "push down."

• We jumped from 250 to 669 sources, giving LibraryThing solid, high-quality cataloging in many new languages (e.g., Russian, Arabic, Lithuanian, Thai).
• The April Early Reviewers books went up. It's the biggest month ever, with 1,599 free books on offer--all free.

(What it didn't see was an April Fools message, although some took the 160% increase in sources for one! Does this mean we get to fool people later on this year?)

Common Knowledge in your library.



Today we've introduced our "Common Knowledge" feature directly into your catalog—allowing members to look at and edit series information, important places and the rest directly in their catalog.

To look at it, go to your catalog and choose the "edit" link to the right of the A, B, C, D, E styles. You'll see a number of CK fields as options. To edit CK fields, just double-click in the cell. A CK editing "lightbox" will pop up (see right).

Some thoughts. On one level, this is a minor feature. The data was always a click away. But I suspect it will substantially change members' relationship to Common Knowledge—and make it grow all the faster. Together with my introduction of pages for member's series, CK now "does" something.

Caveats. Right now you can't sort by CK fields, and you can't search by them. Sorting is doable, although it will take some sort. Searching is going to be harder, frankly. But it's not out of the question. Lastly, we still haven't solved CK language issues, so you may get series information in a language you don't understand.

Discuss it here.

Series authors and work info in your catalog

I've added two small-ish features that point the way to other features:

Series Authors: Series pages now show all series authors, with photos if there are any. (The example below is from Star Wars.) Mouse-over a picture to get the name. In general, I want to move in the direction of graphical representations like this. I dislike profile pictures, but this is something different. It's attractive, I think, and encourages people to add author photos.

Work info in you catalog: You can add the field "Work: Title and author" to your catalog display. In the example below you can see I have two copies of the work, the Histories and that my Penguin edition three Aeschyls play is otherwise known as the Oresteia. Incidentally, it cannot current sort by work title. If you sort by the "shared" column, however, it sorts by shared-copies which basically "groups" by work anyway.

Series improvements

Chris and I have added two small but important features to LibraryThing's amazing member-driven "series" feature (first blogged here).

First, authors now show series as well as works:



Second, I've added a page laying out all the series and series-books in your library. You can find it from your Profile tab under "statistics." Here's one from a user with many series, oakesspalding.



Oh, I forgot. FriendFeed, a fast-rising social-network aggregator I haven't played with, added LibraryThing support a couple days ago.

Twenty-five million books!

Back when we had five million books

We just hit 25,000,000 books.

It's been a good week. LibraryThing and social cataloging were profiled on All Thing Considered and spent more than a day at the top of NPR's most-emailed list. I was named a "Mover and Shaker" of the library world, a rare thing for a non-librarian. LibraryThing Local, only a few weeks old, hit 20,000 venues (now 23,000). Our Redesign LibraryThing project has been going well too. We unveiled a Bonus batch of free Early Reviewer books. And we opened up the LibraryThing Authors program. We've been unusually busy--my statistics (a new feature)—show I've already written more words on Talk than any other month, but also happy. And did I mention Casey got to talk about LibraryThing in Taiwan? Good times!

Suggestion contest: We've been casting around for an appropriate contest to commemorate the event. We're going to give the book-pile contests a rest for a while; I'm not sure past winners can be topped. And although the LibraryThing haikus are one of my favorite parts of the site, many members find writing and poetry contests intimidating.

Instead, we're going to make the contest about LibraryThing itself. I've opened up a Talk post: Ten ways to make LibraryThing better.

The rules are:

• Post only once.
• Provide no more than ten suggestions.
• Keep the suggestions short--a few sentences at the most!
• Focus on your suggestions, not on others'.

The suggestions can be of any kind. Technical requests--feature requests and bug fixes--are fine. But so are tips for how to promote LibraryThing or partnership ideas. You can mix them up--tell us to change the whole design around and go open source, and correct one small spelling error.

This is NOT a vote! You are free to post whatever suggestions you want, but we aren't going to be tallying up how many times an idea is repeated. Instead, I see this as an opportunity to surface many ideas.

I'm asking that the main thread be kept clear of commentary; I've made a second thread for that.

At the end of our "Week of Twenty-Five Million Books" I'll announce 25 winners. Fifteen will be randomly selected from members who posted. Ten will be selected for one or more of their suggestions. We'll post our favorite suggestions on the blog, and get to work on at least some of them. Winners get a gift account, and their choice of:

• A CueCat barcode scanner
• A LibraryThing t-shirt.
• First dibs on a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book.*

The lucky member: The twenty-five millionth book was The Listerdale mystery, and other stories by Agatha Christie, added by LibraryThing member irkthepurist (Chris Browning). It was added at 2:47pm on Sunday. For his luck, irkthepurist gets a free membership, a CueCat barcode scanner and a t-shirt.

Look out LC! The next big milestone is going to be thirty and then thirty-two million books (specifically 32,124,001). The latter is the size of the Library of Congress, the largest library in the world. That'll going to be something, isn't it?

Update: I forgot Rosina Lippi's banners!

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*In case there's a rush, we'll allow no more than ten members to claim first dibs on an individual book. The individual must otherwise qualify. Unfortunately, we do not set the country restrictions, which are about who has publishing rights where.

New Member Stats

I've add two new sub-pages available from your Profile Stats page. They are "Overlap with Legacy Libraries" and "Talk and Group Statistics."

Overlap with Legacy Libraries is split from the main stats page. We're up to 13 complete "Legacy Libraries" now—W. H. Auden, Eza Pound and Walker Percy* were just addded. I can't link to yours directly, but here's mine.

"Talk and Group Statistics" provides way too much information about how you've used the Talk feature, including statistics like total messages, total messages by group and month and even a word count of all messages. (I have apparently written 336,449 words in Talk, which comes to some 1,121 typewritten pages!)

"Talk and Group Statistics" are private—other members can't see your stats. Privacy aside, we didn't want the stats to become, um, boasts. For demonstration purposes, however, all LibraryThing employees, however, are wide-open. Check out mine, Chris' and John's.

By popular demand, I have also included a nostalgia link to "Your first message." Let me know what other stats you want on Talk.

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*I was pleasantly surprised to find Walker Percy also read Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of scientific revolutions and Malinowski's Magic, science and religion.

Change us! It's LibraryThing Zen Garden.

Introducing LibaryThing Zen Garden!

Have you heard of CSS Zen Garden? It's a legendary website (and popular book) devoted to showing the "power of CSS." Every page, from the home page to the the military "Zen Army" to the charming old-fashioned movie theater stage set, has the same content, but has been "styled" differently with CSS. For many web developers, the first time they saw CSS Zen Garden was like an effective Zen koan—instant enlightment!

Best of all, most of the designs were submitted by regular web developers, not the site's developers.

Well, why not let LibraryThing members change the site? Members have been agitating for a design redo for some time now. We've posted files for people to play with. Well, why not let them play with the site in real-time? We have been fooling with some designs too. Why not show them off?

Well, step on over to the LibraryThing Zen Garden. You can:

• Sample different styles.
• Set your preferred style and browse around the site with it.
• Create your own styles. Every design you make is available for others to look at.

As a demo, I set five styles under my name:

• timspalding-1. This is a design Abby, Sonya and I played with one afternoon. Set this to your style and browse around. The subnav on the profile page is different. You'll also notice the tabs are slightly curved on some browsers.
  
• timspalding-2. LibraryThing member existanai sent a few dozen alternate logos. Here's one. Note the CSS to hide the normal image and use a background image.
• timspalding-3. Another existanai logo.
• timspalding-4. Don't like the logo—kill it!
• timspalding-5. Screwing things up is funny! But I've done it, so it's not funny anymore. Bonus points for having a browser that displays the BLINK tag.*
  

Show us what you can do? We want comments on the designs we create, but we really want to see what members want. You don't need to make a complete design. If you can change a few characters, you can show us a new background color.

I've decided not to award any prizes or hold any votes. Design is a very personal thing, and I don't want anyone feeling left out. All ideas are good, even if they only demonstrate the terribleness of a particular style. Needless to say, if we end up using ideas from your design, we'll shower you with praise and free memberships.

I've made a group for people to talk about designs, swap bits of CSS and so forth. It's called Redesign LibraryThing.

Incidentally, has anyone ever heard of a site doing this?

Some weeds:

• I am not a CSS true believer. I use tables for positioning more than I ought. I use <b> when I should use <em>. I torture kittens for fun. Chris is better, but not without sin. This limits what you can do somewhat.
• Ones with changed logos will not work in IE6. This is about PNG24 transparency, if that means anything to you.
• The easiest way to work on a design is to modify one of ours. timspalding-1 has comments in it.
  
• The CSS you write is added onto our—very complex—CSS. (The main files are this and this, but we wish it were always so simple.) Something like Firebug will come in handy when editing
• Your default style will not carry throughout the site. Some pages, like catalog, require special tweaks. Other pages just don't have the code that adds custom CSS.

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*Update: Incidentally, I also anticipated that someone would replace the logo with that of a competitor. Ha ha. :)

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.

New feature: "Series"

Chris and I have added "series" to our Common Knowledge feature, creating a way to deal with book series like the Chronicles of Narnia, The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, Will and Ariel Durant's The Story of Civilization or the Bluffer's Guides.

We've started off simple:

• A page for every series, with covers and titles.
• A simple method of ordering works within a series.
• A series-level tag cloud.
• A mechanism for showing series overlap, as between the Chronicles of Narnia in publication and chronological order.

There's a lot more we could potentially do. But this is just the sort of feature that should develop over time, with lots of input from users. Each series page has a short section on some of the important issues, and I've set up a Talk post for discussion.

I've also added fields for a work's "Canonical Title" and "Canonical Author." As of now, the values of these fields do not affect work or author titles. They will soon.

Fifteen new languages

The non-English LibraryThings are flourishing. Every day we move closer to the dream of a truly international community of book lovers—contributing to the community even when we don't speak the same language.* Good sources have been critical. We're going release a flurry of Spanish ones on Monday, and hundreds more in many languages are forthcoming soon. Equally important has been all the effort members have put into the translations. Participation has been really astounding—202 members have made at least 20 edits each. A few languages have been shouldered by a single member—moriarty with Albanian or avitkauskas with Lithuanian—but most have been a group endeavor.

At least a dozen languages are ready for general use. It's time to introduce some more!

• Afrikaans (afr.LibraryThing.com)
• Arabic (ara.LibraryThing.com)
• Armenian (am.LibraryThing.com)
• Chinese, traditional (cn1.LibraryThing.com)
• Chinese, simplified (cn2.LibraryThing.com)
• Farsi/Persian (ir.LibraryThing.com)
• Hindi (hin.LibraryThing.com)
• Japanese (jp.LibraryThing.com)
• Korean (kr.LibraryThing.com)
• Macedonian (mk.LibraryThing.com)
• Polish (pl.LibraryThing.com)
• Russian (ru.LibraryThing.com)
• Serbian (sr.LibraryThing.com)
• Tagalog (tgl.LibraryThing.com)
• Urdu (urd.LibraryThing.com)

By and large, the languages above correspond to languages we hope to support with one or more sources. In some cases, as Armenian, we haven't found a source yet, but we're hopeful. In some cases, as with Korean, we haven't yet figured out how to make our source work, but we haven't exhausted our options. As always, we need help finding open Z39.50 connections.

PS: Don't forget Basque. It's still almost untranslated. We'll be releasing a largely Basque-language library on Monday too.

*Notably, LibraryThing's work system means that when it comes to a book that crosses boundaries, everyone counts. That is, if Albanian readers of Heinlein also enjoy Alfred Bester, that will count when it comes time to generate recommendations. Speaking of which, we have a site-wide re-think of recommendations going on. So, expect bumps.

12 fonti italiane! (12 Italian sources!)

I have been cataloging my Italian books manually for months, but for the joy of all Italian readers, this is finally over! We've just added 12 new Italian sources!

It's really no fun at all to enter book data field by field for hundreds of books, so I am sure all Italian Thingamabrarians will love the new sources! I'm personally really looking forward to cataloging books by scanning the ISBNs with my lovely CueCat!

Anyway, this is a good news for all users: among the 12 new sources there's the Vatican Library, which owns books in a number of languages, and the European University Institute Library in Florence, with a lot of books on social sciences and European studies in English.

Now, I know this is an English speaking blog, but I'm sure (well, I hope!) Tim and Abby wouldn't mind some Italian ... so, if you wanna read further and you're not Italian, well, Babelfish is just one click away!

Da quando poco più di un anno fa LibraryThing è stato tradotto in italiano (e in più di 20 altre lingue) dagli utenti di LibraryThing (la pagina traduzioni è qui, se vuoi dare il tuo contributo!), il numero di utenti italiani è cresciuto insieme alle lamentele per la mancanza di una fonte di catalogazione ;-)

Biblioteche e non solo. Finalmente siamo in grado di aggiungere non una, ma ben 12 nuove fonti di catalogazione! Oltre a 11 biblioteche* abbiamo aggiunto anche una libreria online di Roma, DEAstore, perfetta per libri di recente pubblicazione. Non offre gli stessi dati delle biblioteche, ma ha delle copertine fantastiche!

Gruppi. LibraryThing in inglese (e in alcune altre lingue) ha centinaia di gruppi di discussione molto attivi. I gruppi italiani non sono molto vivaci**, ma forse con qualche utente un più, possiamo rianimarli. Già, ma dove li troviamo altri utenti italiani? Ecco un piccolo incentivo!

Invita i tuoi amici e ricevi un account gratuito per te e per un tuo amico! Dal proprio profilo è possibile invitare i propri amici su LibraryThing. Non perdere tempo, regaliamo un account annuale per te e per un amico ai primi 15 che invitano un amico che cataloga almeno 15 libri!***
Non sei riuscito a convincere nessuno?! Prova a mostrare la visita guidata a LibraryThing.

Ma da quando Tim ha imparato l'italiano?! Beh, Tim non ha imparato l'italiano ;-) Da alcuni mesi LibraryThing ha un italiano nel suo team. Domande, dubbi, bugs? Scrivetemi! Nel frattempo, buona catalogazione a tutti!

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* A parte il catalogo delle biblioteche Liguri, le altre nuove fonti sono biblioteche universitarie o di centri di ricerca. Se qualcuno conosce biblioteche italiane che supportano il formato Z39.50, possiamo cercare di aggiungerle. Scrivetemi!
** Adesso che abbiamo delle fonti di catalogazione, di cosa parleremo nei gruppi?!
*** Mandate il nome del vostro account e dell'account del vostro amico a giovannilibrarything.com

Photo credit: "Italian flag flying on top of Monte Sighignola" photo by Flikr user ovuigner, used under a CC-Attribution license.

SantaThing: Secret Santas for LibraryThing!

UPDATE: We just (9pm) hit 100 Secret Santas, and a lot of interesting comments on them. Some users are confused about the money. The situation is this. When you sign up, you pay $25. When you get someone you pick out up to $20 worth of books, and tell us what they are—by ISBN presumably. We buy the gifts and pay the shipping. I suspect we'll make or lose about $1 per Santa. This is hardly about the money.

It had to happen and here it is: SantaThing!

SantaThing is Secret Santa for LibraryThing members.

The idea is simple. Pay $25. You play Santa to a random LibraryThing member, and find them up $20 worth of books, based on their library or a short description. Someone else does the same to you. LibraryThing orders the books and pays the shipping, so no addresses are exchanged and no members are stalked!

Now, this isn't just for you. You can also go in for someone you know—a relative or a friend. Describe their library a bit and someone will find them the perfect present. And you can become a Santa as many times as you like. So, for example, I entered myself and my wife. Heck, I might outsource all my Christmas buying to the LibraryThing community! :)

Lastly, even if you don't want to be a Santa, you can help by suggesting books for others.

Crucial dates. This is going to end very soon.

• Thursday, 12 Noon Eastern. Santa-signup ends. Secret Santas are picked.
• Friday, 10pm Eastern. Submit gifts to LibraryThing. LibraryThing buys everything. According to Amazon, if it's ordered before Tuesday it will make it by December 24.

Back story. I wanted to do this last year, but couldn't get it out in time. This year I aimed low. You'll notice it's very basic. (You can make suggestions, but you can't delete past suggestions, use touchstones, etc.) But, what the heck? It's going to be gone in a week—it's good enough!

Addendum: I haven't even blogged it yet, and one user has already signed up. The "tastes" section was filled out as follows:

"Please refrain from choosing anything involving wizards, elves, dragons, swords, etc... or anything Oprah demands be read."

Better at what we do best

We've introduced a series of improvements to LibraryThing's core strength—high-quality book cataloging.

Detail pages and edit pages. We're replaced the previous detail and edit pages with more attractive and functional ones. That's an edit page over on the right. For a detail page, check out my copy of my the obscure-but-wonderful*, Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army.

Employing a simple tabbed interface, the new detail pages cover both the "work" level and the individual book level. The latter has been sorely lacking.

Multiple authors, roles. When it comes to cataloging our weakest point was always our handling of "secondary" authors—illustrators, translators, editors and the like. Doing them better has been one of the most insistent requests.

We've got a real system now. Books added today come with secondary authors and author roles built in. We've set down a small number of preset "roles," such as Editor, Translator, Photographer and so forth—based on Amazon's preset roles—but all roles are editable. In time, these roles will be spread throughout the system, so that the author page for someone like Steven King will include not only his own works, but collections he appears in. Translators in particular will finally get their due.



For now, enhanced author and role information is available only for newly-added books. As the system is firmed-up we will begin allowing members to "upgrade" existing records, with multiple authors as well as other cataloging enhancements.

New fields. So far, we're releasing only two new fields. The first is for the number of copies, in case, like I, you have 500 copies of your wife's novel, resisting relocation in the foyer. The second is the much-anticipated "private comments" field. Go ahead, pour your hearts out. The field is only viewable when you are signed in.

We're starting with two, but we have many more waiting in the wings, including fields for edition, publisher, place of publication, binding, physical size and weight, list price—even OCLC number and ISSN. Casey and I spent a lot of time figuring out what more we can squeeze from library data, and from Amazon too. (Did you know, for example, that all library data records declare whether or not they are a Festschrift, but there is no standard way of indicating a CD?)

New Libraries. We've been unveiling libraries slowly. By New Years, however, we will have almost 700 libraries. Including among these will be many outside of English-speaking countries, and including books in non-Latin scripts, such as Arabic, Korean and Armenian. Library systems are notoriously twitchy with non-Latin data, and between LT employees we cover nothing beyond Greek. If you're interested in helping us test these systems, we'd love to hear it.

New Languages. LibraryThing is already available in more than a dozen languages. We're about to release sixteen more. They are:

Afrikaans, Arabic, Armenian, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Farsi, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Macedonian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Tagalog, Urdu

Some of our existing translations have done well—German, Dutch, Welsh—while others—Basque, Latvian—have languished. I think I see now that the key ingredient is a small cadre of zealots willing to do enough initial work that subsequent, interested but less-daring helpers can carry thing the rest of the way. If you're interested in helping out on one of these languages, let us know. We'll give you a special key in.

MARCThing. Underneath many of our improvements is an exciting new package we're calling MARCThing. Developed by our own Casey Durfee, MARCThing is a complete, self-contained and largely idiot-proof way to access and parse library data. We're going to making it available for non-commercial use and extension. We expect lots of interesting things to come of it.

I've asked Casey to write up a post on MARCThing over on the Thingology blog. It'll be there in a sec. Check it out.

Talk about it. Yesterday was Götterdämmerung for everything new. So much changed so completely that a lot ended up broken. For that we apologize. Chris and I are very grateful for the flood of bug reports, suggestions, criticisms and encouragement. That thread is threatening to hit 200 posts, so I'm starting a new thread for lingering issues (there are a few) and other topics related to this blog post. Of course, you can also comment on this post. Blog posts are a lousy place for bugs, but they're a great place for more detailed questions, disagreements and so forth.

Future steps. In the next week we'll be unveiling the other new fields, and building a "data-enhancement" option for older records. After that, the path is clear for collections. (But don't shoot me if I slip a Secret-Santa feature in this week.)

Final thoughts. We've undertaken to improve this aspect of the site despite some contrary advice—that most people don't care about getting the data right, and that we need to focus on the purely social parts of the site. After all, we're already the best at this side, so why spend time and money to get better?

Although, with cataloging improved, we intend to turn our attention to better UI—such as collections—and to improved social features, we feel that LibraryThing isn't MySpace—that content and conversation are inextricably linked. As Tim O'Reilly recently put it in an interview, LibraryThing is one of a number of sites that provide different, interesting takes on the "social graph." You don't get to interesting relationships around books without making the book-side as powerful and flexible as can be.

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*And, on LibraryThing, insanely over-promoted!

Which of your authors are on LibraryThing?

I'd added a feature to show you which of your authors—the authors of the books in your library—are also LibraryThing members. We call them LibraryThing Authors.

The impetus was an unfortunate event. Two LibraryThing Authors went hog-wild "friending" members. Some members were annoyed, and I stepped into create an upper limit of requests and comments per day (it's 70). But it did raise the fact that there was no adequate way for LibraryThing authors to connect with their readers.

LibraryThing Authors? If you don't know, LibraryThing Authors are authors who are members of LibraryThing and have put some or all of their personal books onto the site.

Wouldn't it be great to see what your favorite authors were reading? Well, that's the idea, and, so far, it's been quite a draw. We have 667 authors so far. We hope this makes it even more attractive for all concerned.

28 Australian libraries / The Book Show

UPDATED UPDATE: ABC's The Book Show aired the interview. It was fun to do. And today (Dec. 5 over there) we got a—admittedly syndicated—mention in Australia's national newspaper The Australian. Go Australia!

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We've jumped from 2 to 28 Australian libraries. This should make it a lot easier for Australians to add books to LibraryThing.

In related news, I'm appearing on Australian Broadcasting Corporation's The Book Show, at 10am today (Nov. 22 in Australia), to talk about LibraryThing. The show is repeated at midnight. You can listen in from their shows page or with their podcast.

The Book Show. The Book Show is a DAILY show! I listened to a half-dozen of them to prepare. I enjoyed the one on the PR industry, with Bob Burton (Nov. 19), the one on marginialia (Oct. 19). They did LT Early Reviewer's author Amy Bloom on October 9.

Libraries. The libraries include state libraries from Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales and universities like Canberra, Tasmania, Sydney, Flinder's University and Charles Darwin University. There are also some special collections, like the Australian Defence Force Academy and the Australian Graduate School of Management. And of course we still have the National Library of Australia and the Australian National University.

The new Australian libraries raises our total to 97. Over the coming weeks it's going to go much higher. But we figured it would be fun to unleash them in groups. Also, the new libraries introduce a host of new challenges, including new standards, like UNIMARC, and non-Latin character sets, and we wanted to make sure we got everything right.

Casey will go into much greater detail about the new libraries soon. But you should also see a substantial increase in cataloging quality, particularly with character sets. At first, this will just be for newly-added books, but we'll make an effort to improve older records too. We also have a new "author authors" and "roles" system. We were going to unveil it today, but a couple of minor bugs kept us from it. We'll get that out tomorrow.

Wish me luck on the radio. From listening to old ones, I determined that the show is very much up my alley, but very relaxed. I'm not. Maybe I should have a whiskey or two before I go on.

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The photo above come from the one to the left, this photo, by Johan Larson. It was the first commercially-usable and remixable Flickr result for "Australian flag."

Unfortunately, LibraryThing's Australian—Tasmanian!—systems guy, John Dalton (Felius), was unavailable for under-flag exuberance. The individual in question is almost certainly not excited about LibraryThing's new libraries. But, if he has any interest, how about a free account?

Common Knowledge explodes

It's been 48 hours since we introduced Common Knowledge, our "social cataloging" initiative and it's been a HUGE success.*

Six-hundred and fifty members have contributed an edit, making 17,437 edits total (adding multiple characters, for example, counted as a single edit). Check out the changelog and watch it happen.

It's our job to support what you're doing. Apart from obsessively adding facts ourselves--Chris and I both made the top 20 contributors!--Chris has been working on UI improvements, and we've both been very active discussing it, bugs, new fields, the gender issue and other topics. There's a lot to do.

More statistics. The top contributor was shortride with an astonishing 1,383 edits. English got the lion share of edits, with second-place German coming in at 441 edits. (We're still working on how to show information from other languages.)

Top contributors		Top fields
Shortride	1383	Awards and honors	4412
MikeBriggs	614	Character name	3398
fleela	458	Gender	2297
realSandy	383	Important places	2255
PhoenixTerran	350	Places of residence	1587
tardis	336	Birthdate	1197
sabreuse	311	Education	869
VictoriaPL	301	Date of death	552
tripleblessings	291	Organizations	430
AnnaClaire	277	Description	200
Rtrace	275	Disambiguation notice	116
andyl	247	Publisher's editor	62
rorrison	242	Agent	60
timspalding	238
SqueakyChu	234
conceptDawg	228

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*We're pretty impressed by all the activity, especially considering it hasn't been as blogged as much as some past features.** But I gave it a good push talking yesterday at the Ohio Library Council. (Come see me talk again today.) And something like this can only grow. APIs will be key.
**Tip of the hat, however, to Superpatron, Joshua M. Neff and Wicked Librarian.

Common Knowledge: Social cataloging arrives

Chris has just released Common Knowledge, the innovative, open-data and insanely addictive "fielded wiki" we've been talking about for a month.

Common Knowledge adds fields to every author and work, like:

• Author: Places of residence, Awards and honors, Agent
• Work: Important places, Character names, Publisher's editor, Description

All-told there are fourteen fields. But Common Knowledge is less a set of fields than a structure for adding fields to LibraryThing. Adding more fields is almost trivial, and they can be added to anything existing or planned—from tags and subjects, to bookstores and publishers. They can even be added to other Common Knowledge fields, so that, for example, agents and editors can, in the future, sport photos and contact information.* This can lead to, as Chris puts it, "nearly infinite cross-linking of data."

Common Knowledge works like a wiki. Any member can add information, and any member can edit or revert edits. All fields are global, not personal. Common Knowledge diverges from a standard wiki insofar as each field works like its own independent wiki page, with a separate edit history.

Some example:

• Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I've been conservative with characters and places. (See Longitude, worked on by Chris for the opposite approach.) But I wish I had her editor!
• The history page for "important places" in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, showing improvement over time.
• David Weinberger. Half-filled. He mentions his agent, but I can't tree his major at Bucknell and the honors section is empty.
• Hugo Award Winners. This is going to get very cool.
• The global history page. Mesmerizing.
  

Right now we're basically slapping fields on pages, but this structure is built for reuse. The license is also built for reuse. We're not asking members to help us create a repository of saleable, private data. Whatever you add to Common Knowledge falls under a Creative Commons Attribution license. So long as you include a short notice (eg., "Powered by the LibraryThing community"), you can do almost anything you want with the data—take it, change it, remix it, give it to others. You can even sell it, if someone will buy it. Regular people, bookstores, libraries--even our competitors--are free to use it. We'll be adding APIs to get it out there all the more. Go crazy, people.**

Common Knowledge isn't the answer to everything. Some data, like web links, requires a more structured approach; some, like our "work" titles, works best when it "bubbles up" from user data; and some, like page counts, have yet to be extracted from the MARC and ONIX information we have. But the possibilities are great. Series information? Blurbers? Cover designers? Books about an author? Tag notes? Other classification schemes?*** Bookstore locations? Publicists? Venues? Book fairs? Pets? Pets' vacination dates?

Anyway, we've done our thinking, but this is the ultimate member-input feature. We're going to have to figure it out together. Fields will need to be added (and removed?). Rules will be debated, formatting discussed. Although the base is solid, the feature set is still skeletal.****

Go ahead and play. Chris, John and I spent the evening playing with it, and we guarantee it's addictive. Or talk about. Leave a note here. I've also changed the WikiThing group into a Common Knowledge and WikiThing group. I've started a first-reactions topic and another for bug reports.

Why I'm excited. LibraryThing means a lot of things to a lot of people. Some come for the cataloging, some for the social aspect. A lot come for what happens between those two poles. As I see it, Common Knowledge is the perfect LibraryThing feature. I don't mean it's good; I mean it's in tune with what makes LibraryThing work. It's social, sure, but it's based in data. It's not private cataloging and it's not MySpace-like "friending."

LibraryThing is sometimes called a "social cataloging" site. When I used this term at the American Library Association, it became an unintentional laugh line. Social cataloging sounded impossible and funny, like feline water-skiing. This more than anything else got me fired up about doing this. True "social cataloging"; it was an idea that had to be tried!*****

Details, acknowledgements and caveats. Common Knowledge is deeply unstructured. This is going to give some members hives! Names aren't in first-middle-last format, but free text. You can enter places however you want. We've arranged some careful "hint" text, and fields have a terrific "autocomplete" feature, but we're not validating data and returning hostile error messages. We're aiming for accessibility and reach, not perfection. This is Wikipedia, not the Library of Congress. It scares us too, but we're also excited.

Abby, Casey, Chris and I planned this feature during the Week of Code. We worked through the issues together, and Casey, Chris and I all wrote the initial code. When we broke up, the rest of the coding and the interface design all fell to Chris. Although it was a team effort, this is really his feature. I'm very pleased with what he did with it.

We decided to work on this (and on our standard wiki, WikiThing, which grew out of it) because it was an ideal project for the entire group to tackle. This jumped it past collections. I still think this was a good idea, but there has certainly been some grumbling. We heard you. Collections is next on our list, with nothing new in between.

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*So far we have only three data types—radio buttons (gender), long fields (book descriptions and author disambiguations) and short fields (everything else).
**Competitors who use it might want to stop asserting copyright over everything posted to their site. This was legally bogus already, but it certainly would conflict with a Creative Commons license... Incidentally, we haven't decided whether to go with CC-Attribution Share-and-Share-Alike or straight CC-Attribution (discussion here), but it's going to be one or the other.
***This particular one may happen very soon.
****And yes, we can discuss the whole radio-buttons-for-gender topic. See here, here. I'm of the opinion that two genders plus maybe "unknown" and "n/a" (for Nyarlathotep?) are the best you can get without consensus-splitting disagreement. You'll note we aren't including other potentially-contentious fields, like sexual orientation or religion.
*****In conception, Common Knowledge most closely resembles the Open Library Project, the Internet Archive's incipent effort to "wikify" the library catalog. Open Library is also a "fielded wiki," based on Aaron Schwartz's superior Infogami platform. You'll notice that we've mostly steered clear of the "traditional" cataloging fields that Open Library is starting from. We do cataloging differently, and we don't want to duplicate effort. Anyway, we're hoping they and others mash up the two data sets, and others.

"Your library" tab now remembers

I made a small change, but a basic one. It may cause some confusion, so I figured I'd do a quick blog post about it.

The "Your library" tab now "remembers" where you were in your library, rather than resetting things. This recreates the dead (and much-mourned) "back to catalog" button, found on work pages until they were redone. So, if you are on the fifth page of your catalog, go to an author and from there to a tag, a help page, the wiki, your email, a YouTube video of laughing babies and then back to LibraryThing and the "your library" tab, you'll find it where you left off.

Because it's basic, there may be some hiccups. Report problems on Talk, here.

New book pages

Chris and I have made some major improvements to our book pages (e.g., Blood Music, The Magician's Assistant).* The overall goal was to make them simpler and more user-friendly. We wanted to appeal more to first-time visitors, and to members uninterested in seeing excessive detail (eg., 100 alternate covers) on a book's main page.

At the same time, we didn't want to "take anything away," or dampen the community's characteristic lust for detail, gorgeous detail. So we arranged and rearranged, added pages and changed labels. On the whole response seems to be pretty positive. (Feel free to comment here or there.)

A second goal was to speed loading time, and here we know we've succeeded. Popular books are no longer sand-traps for unsuspecting visitors. Once we install our new web server**, things will take another big jump.

Some new features:

• We've added book descriptions, something we've always lacked. So far they're all in English and all from Amazon. That will change, and members will be able to craft a community summary, free of promotional jib-jab.
• More stats can be seen at a glance, including popularity, recent adders and ratings.
• Instead of a square box, we now have an attractive "default cover" (example book). In the near future we hope to allow members to choose their default cover. As we've mentioned, we'll have some sort of contest for these.
• The main cover is bigger. The top-six covers are shown on the right, with a link to see all covers. Covers there are larger.
• The conversations page looks and works better.

A couple things need work:

• We haven't found a place for everything on the old work pages. This includes the "elsewhere on the web" section, which had Wikipedia links. We'll get them on soon.
• The "members" page is missing a new "Connections: Who has it?" section. Also coming soon.
• *We have a "customization" page for works already built. It will allow you to determine what the "main page" has. (Don't like tags? Junk 'em.) We aren't going to put customization out there until the feature set and labels have settled down.

The new book page was a necessary first step for some other cherished improvements—our wiki-like "Common Knowledge" feature, coming tonight or tomorrow night—and collections, which is next on the plate. Meanwhile, Casey is hard at work on better library-data parsing. It's going to be a week or two more, but I can reveal one thing. Besides improved data quality and character handling, we're going to at least triple the number of libraries around the world.

Update: We also made similar changes to the author pages. These are still in flux.

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*We call them "work pages," but not everyone knows that.
**It came today. Unfortunately, I was sleeping, so DHL will have to come back tomorrow.

Google Book Search ... on LibraryThing

Save this bookmarklet to your favorites

Introducing something new we're calling "Google Book Search Search."

Google Book Search Search is a bookmarklet that searches Google Book Search for the titles in your LibraryThing library. It works not unlike the famous SETI@Home project. You set it up and searches Google Book Search slowly in the background.* You can watch, do something in another window or go out for coffee.

When it's done you can link to and search all the books in your library that Google has scanned. You'll find a "search this book" link on work pages, and a Google Book Search field to add to the list view in your catalog.

But this isn't just a selfish thing. There's a lot of searching to do, and you can help. If you choose, you can pitch in and help with others' books. All of the data gathered is free and available to everyone. A lot of people want a reliable index of what Google has, not least libraries.

What do I do?

Google Book Search Search is a "bookmarklet." You save it to your "favorites" or "bookmarks." Then you got to Google Book Search and you click it. You can see what pops up on the right.*** Press start and it will start collecting information.

Here it is: Google Book Search Search

We've tested it on FF and Safari on the Mac, and FF and IE7 and IE5.5 on the PC. We haven't tested it on PC IE6 yet. I have no idea about Opera.

Why a bookmarklet?

We've wanted to do this for a long time. But to link to a book on Google reliably you need its Google ID. For some reason Google doesn't publish these, making it impossible to tell what they have and what they don't, and impossible for sites like LibraryThing to send them the traffic they want. Secretive and self-defeating? Seems like it to me.

Efforts have been made to collect Google IDs before. The well-known Lib 2.0 blogger John Blyberg tried, as have others. We tried too. The trick is that Google Book Search—like the rest of Google—has a system in place to stop machine queries.**

Making a bookmarklet distributes the work. And because it takes place within a browser, it tends not to trigger machine-collection warnings.

Ultimately, however, Google can put a stop to this. The bookmarklet has a signature. And Google can send us a note, and we'll disable the bookmarklets. Just as Google respects the robots.txt file, we'll respect such a request.

Why not use "My Library"?

Last week Google introduced an interesting "My Library" feature, allowing people with Google accounts to list some of their books. A few tech bloggers saw an attack on LibraryThing.

LibraryThing members were quick to dismiss it. It wasn't so much the lack of any social features, or of cataloging features as basic as sorting your books. It wasn't even the privacy issues, although these gave many pause. It was the coverage.

Google just doesn't have the sort of books that regular people have. Most of their books come from a handful of academic libraries, and academic libraries don't have the same editions regular people have. Then there are the books publishers have explicitly removed from Google Book Search. Success rates of below 50% were common. Of these a high percentage are only "limited preview" or "no preview."

The Google-kills-LibraryThing meme has another dimension. We WANT people to use Google Book Search. It's a great tool. Being able to search your own books is useful, and LibraryThing members should be able to do it. Call us naive, but we aren't going to be able to "pretend Google isn't there." And we aren't convinced that Google is going to create the sort of robust cataloging and social networking features that LibraryThing has.

Our bookmarklet works by transcending ISBNs, using what LibraryThing knows about titles, authors and dates to fetch other editions of a work. In limited tests I've found it picks up around 90% of LibraryThing titles.

Information wants to be free

Our commitment to open data is long-standing. We've railed against OCLC for its desire to lock up book metadata.

But we're not railing here. We think it's perfectly fine for Google to control access to the scans it's made. All we want to do is link to them, to send them traffic. It's not clear to us that Google is trying to control access to its ID numbers.

You can see and edit the data here. Full XML downloads of the data are also available there.

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*Come to think of it, it works like Google.
**The system is overzealous. It often refuses to show me Google Blog Search pages in Firefox because I look at LibraryThing's blog coverage too much.
***It's quite amazing what a bookmarklet can do. We could have never done it if Altay hadn't shown us the way in this sort of Javascript. The script itself is, however, pretty amateurish--a notice attempt at what Altay did expertly.

As we put on the bookmarklet: "Google and Google Book Search are registered trademarks of Google. LibraryThing is not affiliated in any way with Google or the many libraries that have so generously provided Google with their books and bibliographic metadata, although we share a love of books, a desire to make information as freely available as possible, and similar opinions about evil."

WikiThing: A wiki for LibraryThing

We've had the whole team up in Portland, ME, getting to know each other, brainstorming, planning and working on projects. We chose two projects to work on all together. We wanted something that could engage the talents of the whole team.

The first release is WikiThing*, a full-featured wiki for LibraryThing. A wiki is, of course, "a collaborative website which can be directly edited by anyone." You can use them for lots of things. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. DiscourseDB tracks published opinion pieces. So what's WikiThing for?

We're not sure! But we're kicking it off with:

• FAQ. We've put our static Frequently Asked Questions pages up on the wiki, where everyone (including us) can edit them. If it works out, we'll get rid of the static pages, or reduce them to a few questions, and link to WikiThing.
• Help. We've got a few Help pages that aren't FAQ pages.
• Bug tracking. This was a tough one. We do not want to move all bug conversations to the wiki. Bug tracking can seem like a simple record, but it is generally a conversation, with questions and answers back and forth. Feature requests are even more so. At the same time, a simple list of bugs, with links to Talk posts, could be a big help for everyone.

What do you want to do with it? Leave a note here or on the Talk: New Features post about ThingWiki.

How do I do it? Editing is super easy. Just go to a wiki page and click the "edit" link at the top, or one of the "edit" links by a section.

WikiThing is based on the MediaWiki engine, the same software that runs Wikipedia. So, if you know how to edit Wikipedia, you know how to edit WikiThing. If you don't, it's easy to learn. Mostly you just type. If you need to do something fancy, like insert a link, we have a Wiki help. If you screw up, don't worry. Someone else will come along and fix it.

What about a "content" wiki? We thought long and hard about having a "content wiki." A content wiki would have wiki pages for all works, authors and so forth. It would cover often-requested fields, like the year of original publication for a work and series information, and hitherto unrequested ones, like the name of the acquiring/literary editor. Members would be able to edit them and the edits would get picked up and put on work and author pages.

After a lot of thought and experimentation we decided that MediaWiki wasn't the right tool for the job**. We needed a true "fielded wiki." We looked at options like Aaron Swartz's Python-based Infogami, which also runs Open Library.****

In the end, we decided to do it ourself, and it turned out easier than we thought.

We've got one more day together, and plan to make the most of it. Whether we can finish it up today or now, we should get it out this week.

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*I was overuled on the name. I wanted ThingWiki, in keeping with ThingISBN, ThingTitle and so forth. Casey and Chris** were against it.
**The individual formerly known as "Christopher" (ConceptDawg) shall henceforth be known as "Chris." Although friends call him Chris, we were calling him Christopher because we also had a Chris (Chris Gann), but Chris Gann is long gone, and Chris—the Christopher Chris—wants his name back! Who's on first?
***We also decided that tools like Semantic MediaWiki and WikiForms weren't there yet.
****Since Infogami runs ThingDB—yes, he used the name first—we were thinking of calling our product ThingGami!

Some videos

We've added work-page links to forty-four promotional videos from Simon and Schuster and BookVideos.tv.

The videos are a mixed bag. There are some good ones, but many have a superficiality and gloss to them that I find grating--more 2am infomercial than, say, Booknotes. I don't think it's a coincidence that the company that made them, TurnHere, makes similar spots for luxury homes and fitness clubs. But kudos to them for posting the videos to a blog, with comments on.

In the last few months, publishers have been going in some interesting new directions with viral marketing and social media. Some ideas, like the HarperCollins and Random House widgets, make sense. Some, like VP Book Club, don't.

In this case, the publisher could get as more impact, and pay a lot less, if they pointed a cellphone video camera on one of their authors at a reading. Then again, regular people will do that without prompting or payment. Check out all the YouTube videos of Neil Gaiman reading at book shops.

Add a dynamic signature line to your email

Wouldn't it be neat to tell the people you email with what you're reading now? I saw this on emails from friends over at AbeBooks, and thought it would be cool to have it done dynamically, and from LibraryThing data.

Email clients don't allow scripts or for example RSS feeds, so I created a way to do it, based on images that many (but not all) email clients allow you to include in your signature.

Here's what I'm talking about, with the signature line called out in yellow:



To play with the feature, click here. (You have to be logged in.)

Some notes:

• This feature will get a lot more useful when we have a proper "currently reading" collection feature (coming soon). You pretty much have to use tags now.
• No complaining about "fluff" features, please. Chris Gann first made this feature almost a year ago. I dusted it off and hacked together a user interface. It didn't distract us from making your favorite feature.
• We need your help! We're going to need to come up with directions for adding this to different email clients. Some just won't allow it. I've started a thread for discussing this.

Tag-based recommendations

I've added a simple drop-down menu on members' LibrarySuggester page, allowing you to see recommendations based on the books that fall under just one tag.

It's not the everything—an ideal solution would have includes, excludes, percentage-interests, and so forth.—but it's still pretty cool. Certain topics I'm interested in—as here Alexander the Great—get swamped by more numerous interests.

I'm also excited by the effort to put Thomas Jefferson's library into LibraryThing. See the Thingology Blog.

More small catalog improvements

I'm redoing the catalog extensively so that wish lists and "collections" aren't tacked on Rube Goldberg-style. Most of the improvements are on the "back end." But two are on the front, and have been eagerly anticipated for some time:

1. Subsorting. As most (but apparently not all*) members know, you can click a column in your library, such as "Title" or "Author," to sort by it. But how do you sort by two columns? Well, you couldn't, but not you can. We adopted the common but hardly universal convention of subsorting by the last sort. So, if you want to sort by author, and title within author, click "title" to sort by title, and then "author" to sort by author and subsort by title.



2. Suggested display styles. You can now set a "Suggested display style for visitors to your library." Visitors then get this as an option to use this when they look at your library.





"Suggested displays" was introduced last week, on Talk. Users have come up with very good recommendations for improving it. I indend to take them up on some of them.

Tagmash!

Tagmash: alcohol, history gets over the fact that almost nobody tags things history of alcohol

Short version: I've just gone live with a new feature called "tagmash," pages for the intersections of tags. This is a fairly obvious thing to do, but it isn't trivial in context. In getting past words or short phrases, tagmash closes some of the gap between tagging and professional subject classifications.

For example, there is no good tag for "France during WWII." Most people just don't tag that verbosely. Tagmash allows for a page combining the two: France, wwii. If you want to skip the novels, you can do france, wwii, -fiction. The results are remarkably good.

Tagmash pages are created when a user asks for the combination, but unlike a "search" they persist, and show up elsewhere. For example, the tagmash for France, Germany shows France, wwii as a partial overlap, alongside others. Related tagmashes now also show up on select tag and library subject pages, as a third system for browsing the limitless world of books.

Booooring? Go ahead and play a bit:

• Tagmash: alcohol, history
• Tagmash: dogs, humor
• Tagmash: historical fiction, renaissance
• Tagmash: erotica, zombies
• Tagmash: french, philosophy, -existentialism, -postmodernism

That's the short version. But stop here and you'll never know what Zombie Listmania is!

(full post over at Thingology, "Tagmash: Book tagging grows up")

Project Ocelot: Social changes

New look; new connections controls.

This announces a series of major "social" improvements, previously dubbed "Project Ocelot."* Most have already been released, but were never blogged.

They were talked about, however—and how! The first batch were released to the Recommended Site Improvements group on July 11, where they garnered 187 messages. Two pre-release topics, here and here, racked up another 228 messages. And there were spin-off topics too.

As usual around here, the conversation drove our work. It was a great fun to work through everything with everyone. In case there is any doubt, developing LibraryThing is a blast.**

Here's a run-down of the changes:

1. Friends and Interesting Libraries. (On your profile.) LibraryThing now offers a number of different "connections" between members. Shared books are still primary, but we've added "Interesting Libraries," "Friends" and "Private Watchlist."*** Interesting libraries are a one-way thing, although the person you mark as interesting gets a heads-up notice. "Friends" is a mutual connection. "Private Watch Lists" are still private. You can edit your connections, and see who has you on their lists.

Previous "friend" proposals have caused some concern, so we took pains to overcome most objections. We made "interesting libraries" the first option, to keep focus on the books. Friends don't show up unless both sides consent. And you can disable "friending" and block users. The term "friends" itself rubbed a few people the wrong way—I've only just gotten over it myself—but it's success is clear. Since the changes went live 60% of connections ahve been "friend" connections.

2. Connection News. (On your profile.) You can now follow what your connections are doing on LibraryThing—the books they're adding, the reviews they write, the books they rate. You can choose any of the new categories (eg., "Friends") or the fifty users who share the most books with you. This is my favorite feature. It's something LibraryThing was missing. I think it adds a lot.

Members who share my favorite authors.

3. Shared Favorites (Introduced today). (On all profiles.) Some time ago, we started allowing members to list their favorite authors. Well, now you can find out who shares them with you. Here, for example, is Abby's list. Mine is too obscure still.

4. Rating Reviews (Introduced Wedensday). LibraryThing a supportive environment. We didn't want the "vote wars" that Amazon books can have. So, we are allowing members to vote for good reviews with a thumbs-up. But there's no thumbs-down.

We did add flags for Terms of Service abuse and for non-reviews. (Wherever reviews are found; the feature is being discussed here.)

5. "Also On" Connections. (On your profile.) This is the most technically interesting of the features. For some time, users have been able to record what other sites they belonged to, and their site handles there. "Also On" Connections parses your "Also Ons" to get your sites, and then checks public information from these sites to get your friends' lists. These lists are then cross-checked against LibraryThing's "Also On."

Basically, it help you to fill in the gaps in your social network on LibraryThing. We made it when we ran a test and discovered that lots of users were friends on Flickr or BookMooch, but not on LibraryThing. Probably many didn't even know their friend was on LibraryThing.

6. Invitations. (On your profile.) Altay made a nice, understated "Invitations" feature, that sends out invites to the people you select.

7. Search tweaks. (On search.) Search now allows "also on" searching.

Of course, we have more to do—a lot more, here, on the core cataloging features****, and with translation (one update there).

*Name discussed here.
**It's odd, but LibraryThing involves its "users" in its development more than most open-source projects. Open source projects have more focus on developer-to-developer conversations. We almost never talk about technology, but always about features.
***There was a brief period when we had "public" and "private" contacts. All public contacts became "interesting libraries".
****We should have some good announcements here soon.

Favorite authors, public contacts, other tweaks

Favorite authors. You can now "favorite" an author, and peek at other member's favorites. You favorite on author pages, and the results show up on your profile. This has been available for a couple of weeks, but I never announced it. I've also brought the feature to more of the site, including your author gallery, author cloud and the Author Zeitgeist (pictured to the right).

I think it adds a fun new dimension to the site, and one we should have had from the beginning. It's a good example of "unlearning the lessons of Amazon." Amazon is a great site, but it conditions everyone's thinking about what a book site should be and do. Marking books makes a lot of sense on a commercial site, but marking authors could distract people from the products. LibraryThing is about distraction, not commerce.

Jane Austen and J. R. R. Tolkien are currently in a no-holds-barred fight for first place. Not a pretty sight.

Public contacts. LibraryThing's original "watch list" was private. Members—with me at the head—found "friends" lists a little creepy, and too susceptible to—as BlueSalamander put it—"drama." (Worth quoting: "The drama [on LiveJournal] by "friends lists" borders on the ludicrous.")

But public lists have their uses. Sometimes you want people to know who your friends are, or whose libraries you find most interesting. And many people just don't feel the way I do. After a protracted—and not necessarily final—public discussion of terms, I've settled on "Contacts" (public) and "Watch list" (private). I think it's pretty clear in context.

So far, only a few people have public contacts. By default, all watch list entries stayed private. You can flip them to private on your profile.

I've tried to keep the drama low. "Contacts" is purposefully vague, and there is no automatic way to see who has added you on your "contacts" list. I wanted to make it possible to give someone's library a nod, without igniting a full-scale popularity contest. And you can be damn sure I'm not going to start automatically adding me or other LT people to everyone's "contacts" list when they sign up. (I've been thinking that my wife, Lisa Carey, might be added to everyone's favorite author list, however.)

Other features. I've finalized a couple of other small features and feature tweaks:

• Author and book Zeitgeists are now updating more frequently. It's all section-by-section, but everything should turn over roughly once per day.
• The Author Zeitgeist now has a "show more" link for all the categories. Go nuts.
• Talk topics have been partially de-Javascripted, for people who like to use tab browsing. Basically, if you click on the topic itself, it works. If you rely on clicking anywhere in the row, it's still using Javascript and tabbed-browsing unfriendly.
• Recently-tagged books now refresh more frequently. A security problem was also solved.
• Users with your books takes up less space on the screen. A full list—in twice the list—is available if you click "more."

New Feature Tip-Toe: "Early Reviewers"

We're introducing something new, called LibraryThing Early Reviewers. It's coming out officially on Tuesday, but assiduous blog readers get to start early.

The text at the top of the page sums it up:

"Random House has given us some advance copies of books soon to be published. We're sharing these with you to read and review. You get free books, and share your opinions with a wide audience. LibraryThing makes everyone happy and keeps everything free and fair."

So far, like much of what we do around here, this is something of a test. Kudos to Random House for being up to that.

Random has signed up for two batches of book. The first batch includes:

• The River Wife by Jonis Agee (LibraryThing | Random House)
• Forgive Me by Amanda Eyre Ward (LibraryThing | Random House)
• Peony in Love by Lisa See (LibraryThing | Random House)
• Keeping the House by Ellen Baker (LibraryThing | Ellen Baker's site)
• Away by Amy Bloom (LibraryThing | Random House)

Eventually, Early Reviewers will be open to other publishers.

Members should understand what this is, and what it isn't. We're going to talk about LibraryThing Early Reviewers, but won't be pushing Random House's or anyone else's books at you. Similarly, getting a free advanced readers copy comes with NO obligation. Under no circumstances will a bad review change your chance of getting another.

If more people want the books than we have copies, we'll have to ration them. The basic algorithm is randomness, but other factors come into play. We're going to try to spread the wealth around. And if you complete a review—good or bad!—you're more likely to get another. Finally, LibraryThing's matching algorithm will try to match up books with readers, based on the rest of your LibraryThing catalog. For publishers, that's the interesting part; we're anxious to see how it turns out.

I've set up a Early Reviewers group, to talk about Early Reviewers and Early Reviewer books. Let us know what you think!

Stars in reviews

Here's a low-hanging fruit. We finally put the review's star rating in the reviews. I think I'll call it a "mashup."

From The Da Vinci Code:

OttoBib links added

I've added links to OttoBib, a super-simple citation generator created by Jonathan Otto, an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse.

The feature is available on the work info page (card catalog page) for any specific book—yours or someone else's. Here's an example. At present, it only works for books, not for general works. (After all, a work may have 1,000 ISBNs under it.) We hope to extend this in the near future. The results aren't saved in any way, so if you're doing a bibliography, you'll have to do some cut-and-paste work.

We're linking to OttoBib because we think it was nicely done. But, down the road, LibraryThing may need a stronger solution—one that works with non-ISBN books and which saves and juggles citations, rather than just creating them. We have some ideas along these lines, but your suggestions are always apprecated.