LibraryThing

THE ten millionth book

Abby — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 03:26:00 +0000

At long last (and after some intensive database searching), we are pleased to present LibraryThing's ten millionth book. Drumroll please...

The city in which I love you: poems, by Li-Young Lee was added just after noon last Saturday, by user vinodv.* We're giving Vinod a lifetime account for this honor. According to his profile, Vinod is in Cambridge, MA—Tim's hometown, and just across the river from Abby. Hey, we could be hand-delivering a CueCat to go with that membership!**

The celebration continues though—get your entries in for the biggest baddest book pile bonanza ever.

*This was also apparently the very first book Vindod added to his catalog. Quel distinction!
**Only half joking, I think.

Ten million books and contest extravaganza

Abby — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 05:29:00 +0000

In honor of hitting the big 10 million book mark this week, we're having a book pile contest bonanza. We're combining three contests into one here—Valentine's Day, President's Day, and of course, ten million books.

The challenge. Start taking pictures. Your book piles can be love themed, president themed, or just the coolest damn book photo you can create.

The prizes. We'll pick five winners, who will each receive a year's membership to LibraryThing. The grand prize winner will receive a $100 gift certificate. The catch? That hundred dollars must be spent entirely on one book. So start looking around Abe's Rare Book Room...* (Amazon is fine too.)

The rules. Post your photos to Flickr, as usual. Tag them "LibraryThing10mil".**

The deadline. The contest ends on February 16th, at midnight, EST. We'll announce all the winners on Monday, February 19th.

*This is harder than you might think. A signed and first edition copy of The Little Prince sold for $10,450 last year, and that was only the 7th most expensive book sold in 2006 on Abe. Sadly, we will not be buying you this $55,471 copy of The Tale of Peter Rabbit. So if you had the $100, what one book would you try to get?
**Users who already posted Valentine's or Presidents photos to Flickr after I said this, can you change and/or add the tag LibraryThing10mil? Sorry and thanks.

Black History Month bookpile

Abby — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 23:12:00 +0000

I don't want to knock John's cool all your covers toy off the top of the blog (quick, everyone who hasn't already, go read that post), but it is February 1st, so I have to announce the winner of the Black History Month book pile contest.

So, congratulations to lilithcat (mojosmom on Flickr) for this fantastic music themed pile, which wins in my eyes for having both Eartha Kitt's Confessions of a Sex Kitten and the Amistad opera libretto.* I mean, that's range.

I've also made up a page showing all the past book pile contests (an archive, if you will), so go take a peek at that. And as always, we're looking for suggestions for future contests.

The next one is going to be a presidents vs. lovers one—President's day? Valentine's day? All-in-one grand pile (lovers of presidents?)? You choose! As always, post your pictures to Flickr, and tag them "LibraryThingPresidents" and/or "LibraryThingLovers". Get them in by February 21st at 3pm EST.**

*My sister was a shipwright at Mystic Seaport when they rebuilt the Amistad, but I didn't know there was an opera until just now...
**UPDATE - deadline and contest has slightly changed. See this blog post for details. Basically, the prizes got better, and your photos have to be tagged LibraryThing10mil.

Better work combining

Tim — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 02:02:00 +0000

Until now, work combination was an author thing, if two works didn't share authors they couldn't be combined. This is good enough most of the time. But some works have multiple authors with different ones taking the "main author" spot in different catalogs. And it didn't work with authorless works.

For now, you can't combine any work, but only ones that share an ISBN. The list of potential combinations is available on each work's "book information" page (), at the bottom of the page. If it proves useful and popular, I may move it.

Here's a good example—three editions of (multi-author) Cluetrain Manifesto that weren't combined with the main one:

But not every suggestion is good. Here's The Rule of Four. I have no idea what that Babichev book is doing there. It might be member error, a source error, a publisher reusing ISBNs or a rogue publishing reusing a known number instead of paying for a new one. Anyway, I suggest you don't combine it!

Unfortunately, this doesn't fix authors generally. The Cluetrain Manifesto is still listed under a single "main" author. We hope to change that soon.

Never the Twain shall meet, um, Gibbon

Tim — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 19:40:00 +0000

Frustrated that Terry Prattchet and Neil Gaiman keep getting combined? Unforunately, the system makes a few bad combination suggestions, and now and then somebody takes it up on them. To solve this I've added a feature to the author pages:

I kicked things off by permanently divorcing Edward Gibbon from Mark Twain (!). But I'll let you guys tackle Gaiman. I've deputized the Combiners group (which, in the best LT tradition, sprang into being spontaneously) as the place to fight out whether Jack London and Emile Zola are really the same author.

More changes along these lines soon, including visible logs for combination action.

PS: I also cut down on the number of "Also known as" names visible, unless you click "see complete list." Nabokov was getting absurd...

10 million books and 303 LT Authors

Abby — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 15:44:00 +0000

In continuation with our celebration of 10 million books, today we've also hit 303 LibraryThing Authors.* Sara Ryan / sararyan just became our three hundred and third LibraryThing Author. The best part? Sara's also a librarian! Her first book, Empress of the World was excellent, so watch for her second novel, The Rules for Hearts, which comes out in April.

Keep watching for more of the 10 million books celebration blogging!

*I must not have been paying attention when number 300 must have breezed by me, but it's always good to celebrate a palindrome, I say. Who doesn't love a palindrome?

Ten million books!

Tim — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 06:19:00 +0000

On Saturday LibraryThing acquired its ten millionth book. Ten million is a bunch. Ten million means something. LibraryThing is no longer a "worthless jumble" of books and tags. It's, it's...

A meaningful jumble of books and tags
A hook to hang a bunch of pretty charts and graphs
An excuse for a book pile contest
A cause for celebration, and a party
A special cause for celebration for the guy who added number 10,000,000
An occasion to lay out future plans and goals

And probably a few other things. Anyway, it's big enough that it won't fit in one blog post, and with everything we have to do and all the vinho verde we need to drink this week, I'm expecting ten-million blog posts to drag on for days.

A meaningful jumble of books and tags. Ten million books translates into a piles of data, and piles of data means fun with statistics. And we've been having fun.

Today I added a new "combined" recommendation list. It draws on LibraryThing's five existing recommendation algorithms to come up with a "best" list. I've replaced the longer list of recommendations on the work pages, wth a link to the Suggester page, where you can see all the lists.* (I'd be interested to hear if people appreciate the simplification or still want the full lists on the work pages.) Combined recommendations are available for 230,000 works. Because of variable work popularity, this amounts to recommendations for 72% of all the books in people's libraries.

Alongside books, LibraryThing's tags have also been growing. Although we've rarely celebrated milestones, tags are the untold story of LibraryThing. LibraryThing members have added thirteen million of them--an unprecented web of meaning in the book world. Check out a tag like chick lit, cyberpunk or paranormal romance and tell me what you think. I think LibraryThing members have arrived at something close to the paradigmatic reading list for these hard-to-pin-down genres.

On the subjet of tags, I recently did a statistical sample of Amazon's book tagging. I estimate that since November 2005, Amazon customers have added about one-million book tags. When LibraryThing, a niche site, collects 13 times as many book tags as Amazon, one of the top-ten most visited sites, something is up. I'll blog about it soon, but I think the basic answer is clear. Letting people tag "their stuff" works like gangbusters. Asking customers to tag "your stuff" doesn't. People make their beds every day. But nobody goes down to the local Sheraton to fluff their pillows.

*Not quite. There are actually ten recommendation lists at play since, when the recommendations are sparse, we factor in a "flip-around" of the recommender-recommended relationship.

More Mosaics

john — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 08:25:00 +0000

"You are what you read" has turned into a bit of a mini-meme, with Chuck Close-style book cover portraits popping up all over. In addition to David Louis Edelman's post that started it all, we have Geoff Coupe's, followed by two excellent blog posts.

Mark Edon (that's him at right) posted a Mac-oriented tutorial, including a very useful method for using Safari to quickly download all the images from the "All Your Covers" page.

4:14 has posted an extensive PC-oriented tutorial, replete with screenshots, which also gives guidance on grabbing images, as well as AndreaMosaic tips. And in a new twist, it goes all postmodern by using book covers to make a mosaic of... a book cover.

We love these things. Send in more, and we'll start a gallery.

Boston meet-up

Abby — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 19:21:00 +0000

Anyone in the Boston area should head to the Boston Public Library tomorrow (Saturday Feb 3rd) for a LibraryThing meet-up. (Directions to the BPL are here). It's planned to coincide with the Friends of the Boston Public Library booksale.

We're planning on meeting by Novel restaurant (first floor of the McKim building) at 2pm.

Hope to see you there!

You are what you read

john — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 21:09:00 +0000

We've always pushed the idea that your books are you. Well, now you can see yourself on a single page.

We were inspired by two very cool projects: LibraryThing author David Louis Edelman's post about creating photo mosaics of himself from his book covers, and a post by Adam of Tailors Today about creating a poster of every book he's ever read.

In both cases, one of the challenges was dealing with LibraryThing's 100-cover limit in "Cover view." So we made a special nothing-but-the-covers page.

The new page doesn't replace the "Cover view" in your catalog (which remains the easiest way to visually browse your library), but book cover arts and crafts projects like this will be a little easier with everything consolidated in one place.

Check it out, discuss it here and let us know if you do anything as cool as David and Adam.

Sci-Fi and Fantasy "Rooms" on Abe

Tim — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 20:45:00 +0000

Our friends over at Abe have created two new "rooms," one for Science Fiction and one for Fantasy. Both sport a modest but low-key and engaging grab-bag of content. Notable among them are an interview with Elizabeth Bear (also a LibraryThing author), info on Sci-Fi and Fantasy award winners—something LibraryThing should do—and a list of the most expensive Science Fiction and Fantasy Books Sold in 2006. A $8,258.40 copy of 1984 tops the list.

Classifying 1984 as Science Fiction rubs me the wrong way, but I shouldn't complain too hard. Three hundred thirty-eight LibraryThing users also see it that way, and tagged it so. Even so it falls low on the tag page for Science Fiction, because it has a relatively low "tag salience"—it's tagged Science Fiction a lot, but not compared to the book or the tag's popularity overall. By contrast, 1984 heads up the dystopia tag, which makes a lot of sense, I think.

Lastly, the pricey books page has a sidebar with the most expensive sci-fi and fantasy books listed on Abe. The winner is a $75,000 copy of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, inscribed to Tim Powers, "the warmest, the most witty, the most human & least android person I know, the best friend I have ever had." That does sound like a remarkably find (and no, we're not getting a cut for saying it).

BHM bookpile photos

Abby — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 04:36:00 +0000

I'm feeling generous, so I'm extending the deadline for the Black History Month bookpile contest photos by a day. You now have until Tuesday the 30th at 3pm (EST). Post 'em to Flickr, tag them "LibraryThingBHM", and we'll post the winner on the blog on the first of February.

LibraryThing Hires John McGrath (Wordie/Squirl)

Tim — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 15:36:00 +0000

The many faces of John

Abby and I have hired John McGrath (user: JohnMcGrath), the man behind Wordie and Squirl, as a full-time developer. LibraryThing isn't "eating" either site, both of which will remain independent, but we're getting their developer.

I've blogged about Squirl and Wordie before*. Squirl, which he co-founded with Steve de Brun, is "LibraryThing for collectibles." You can catalog things like scrimshaw and Pez dispensers. Someone entered their Hobo sculptures. You can do books too although—between you and me—LibraryThing does them better.

Squirl caught my eye when it came out. The guy lived in my town! (Portland, ME is not exactly a Web 2.0 mecca). More importantly, it was the rare (semi-)competitor that "didn't suck®." But Wordie is my favorite. Billed as "Flickr without the pictures," Wordie is basically LibraryThing for people who collect words. Here is my list of products named after their (purported) place of origin and another users' words that describe flow.**

John attempts to entertain Liam. Doesn't he look French?

I was impressed by the idea; it's silly in a good way. And I appreciate the way he put it together--quicky and guided by users. When MESDA asked me to talk about building web aps, I invited John to split my time. We ended up saying the same thing, differently. With Wordie especially, John had come to embrace playful, breakneck and user-guided development, but he was a little more careful about it.***

Over the next months with John, you can expect things to get smoother. Our code and databases, the core parts of which have been done by one person, has acquired a fair bit of "cruft." Cleaning this out may slow us down in the short run, but there are two of us now, and a cleaner, more orderly under-programming will provide a better platform to do what LibraryThing is known for--relentless, playful, creative and user-assisted innovation.

Incidentally, John did not replace Chris. Although John's got good Unix chops, he's not a database administrator. (This week, however, he's been playing one on TV.) A one-time Java developer, John developed Squirl and Wordie in Ruby on Rails****. In joining LibraryThing, John has been forced to cage his agile mind in the rubber prison of functional PHP programming. He's taking it like a man.

So, welcome to John. Although we've started out with a couple months' employment contract—there's a chance he'll have to take off—I expect him to be around a while, do some great work and make you guys happy.

First up, John, together with a superstar contractor, is going to be making everyone unhappy, taking the site down for a few hours. He will announce the time later on today. Don't kill the messenger. The action is necessary and will increase the system's underlying stability, which has not been very good in the last few days.

*According to John, the LT plug was actually a big factor in Wordie's success. Wordie eventually landed in the Wall Street Journal, but on Christmas Day. That's like making a hole-in-one when your best friend is looking the other way.
**Anyone who uses boustrophedon is a friend of mine, and lo and behold 15 other people have it on their lists!
***If John was Socrates, I was Diogenes, "the insane Socrates." Diogenes threw aside convention by living in a tub and defecating in the street. I don't use Subversion. The parallels are unmistakable.
****The Java link is Paul Graham's great talk on "Great Hackers," which is, inter alia, a savagely funny attack on Java developers. I was looking for similar pages about hating Ruby, to tweak John, and all I could find were pages like that one—"I hate it because it's spoiled me." Damn. Can something be so universally acclaimed and STILL be good? Note the blogger's sexist but not wrong comparison: "Coding in [Rails] is like talking to a intelligent, beautiful woman. Coding in PHP is like talking to a pretty but stupid girl. Coding in ASP.NET***** is like trying to explain quantum mechanics to a miserable failure."
*****Another of our competitors is in .NET, something Microsoft has started touting. Look, a site with 1-5% of LibraryThing's books, traffic and users runs on our software! Paul Graham's anecdote applies here:

"A couple years ago a venture capitalist friend told me about a new startup he was involved with. It sounded promising. But the next time I talked to him, he said they'd decided to build their software on Windows NT, and had just hired an eminent Windows NT developer to be their chief technical officer. When I heard this, I thought, these guys are doomed. One, the CTO couldn't be a first rate hacker, because to become an eminent Windows NT developer he would have had to use NT voluntarily, multiple times, and I couldn't imagine a great hacker doing that; and two, even if he was good, he'd have a hard time hiring anyone good to work for him if the project had to be built on NT."

Thanks to Chris

Tim — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 17:14:00 +0000

If there's one thing I hate it's "corporate HR" emails, those icky coded messages about comings and goings. Did that guy quit? Was he fired? Is he leaving for the competition? Was he caught behind a fica plant with the CFO's niece? Meet me in my cubicle and I'll give you the scoop!

The scoop is that Chris no longer works for LibraryThing. He wrote about it on his own blog, Aspiring CTO. I disagree with much said there, particularly the idea that I don't like him. But I can't stand up for users tagging however they like and deny that everyone sees things the way they see them.

As he writes, he loved LibraryThing, and did a lot for it. Most notably he architected and implemented the transition to a scalable server and database structure. The traffic data below, taken from our stats program, is a trophy of sorts to that:

Chris did everything from July on. And during that period, server problems actually went down. And Chris did a number of other valuable projects. When I finish the user-interface, I think he will be best remembered for his elegant LiveJournal-friendly widget.

So, my thanks to Chris for the work he did for LibraryThing. I wish him the best in his future plans. PillHelp in particular seems likely to take off. Since more people take pills than want to catalog their books, I suspect he'll have some even more challenging scaling issues to deal with.

Members saw his post and started thanking him on Talk. Go ahead and leave comments here or there.

*November is in some metrics higher than December because we got Slashdotted, producing a gigantic two-three-day wave that didn't last. The underlying fundamentals—users, books in system, money—have continued their accelerating acceleration.

City Lights Bookstore in North Carolina

Tim — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 16:59:00 +0000

City Lights in Sylva, North Carolina

We've just added City Lights Bookstore of Sylva, North Carolina (map) to our local bookstore program.

City Lights is a great illustration of what we're trying to do—help local, mostly (but not necessary) independent bookstores and the LibraryThing members who love them. City Lights describes Sylva as:

... a small Main Street town nestled between the Great Smokies and the Balsams, two mountain ranges in the highest part of the southern Appalachians. Our goal is to share the literature of the Appalachian region with the world and the world of good books with our community.

If you're in the area, go ahead and edit your profile to have availability and pricing information shown on all work pages.

Thanks to Chris Wilcox of City Lights for finding out about us and sending us a data file out of the blue. (We like it when the data comes to us! )

For more information on our bookstore program check out Thingology for the XML format. We are also now accepting standard Booksense data feeds, a simple tab-delimited format booksellers upload to Booksense.