Your statistics: Ebooks and audiobooks

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

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

Check it out:

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

Better statistics, other improvements

I spent the weekend cooking up code, not sausages:

1. Series statistics. By popular demand, the member Series Statistics page can now show your series books you have in context of the complete series. (See talk post.)

2. Awards, characters and places. I've added similar statistics pages for three other "Common Knowledge" categories—Awards, Characters, Places. (See talk post.)

I also added series, awards, characters and places stats in your profile* and the "Your Zeitgeist" box on your home page (see talk post.)

3. More Green Checkmarks. Green check-marks, the mark that shows when you have a work, have spread further. They are now appearing on work-page recommendations, recommendation pages and in other members' catalogs. (See talk post.)

4. Power Edit gets better Previously, you could only Power Edit a page at a time (ie., no more than 100 books at a time). I added a feature to allow you to power-edit all the books in a given result set. So, you can do all your books, all the books that match a particular search, etc.



See the talk post.

5. Message Flagging. I've improved message-flagging in Talk, so that members can reverse their flagging, as well as counter-flag a message, if they think it was wrongly flagged. (See talk post.)

I also proposed making the Wikipedia policy "Assume good faith?" an official LibraryThing policy, triggering a lively debate about community norms, just what spam is and so forth. See the talk post.

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*Originally high, but I moved it down when members hollered.

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.

Harry Potter and the Period of Quiet

The LibraryThing groups feature turns one tomorrow, followed shortly by Talk. I thought it would be fun to share the news-messages statistics for the Harry Potter Group, Hogwarts Express.

Check out the little boom for the movie (released July 11) and the crazy boom-bust-boom around when the book itself was released. For 24 hours, LibraryThing Harry Potter fans were reading, dammit.



I can report from experience that the rest of the world is still reading it. I went down to New York on business yesterday (and got caught in LaGuardia overnight, but that's another story). The plane was like Harry Potter study hall.

REMINDER: We're giving away prizes to 50 Harry Potter reviewers.