Where do we stand?

So, where do we stand on the number of ULTBs?
I have 115 out of 1188 total books.
What about the rest of you?

I have 19 out of 1302 (not all are owned!).

Correction: after realizing these had to be OWNED (in my library), I went back to recalculate:

14 out of 641 owned (2%?)

159 out of 1937 (total books include read but unowned & wishlist, the ultb themselves are or were all owned)

Only 41 or the 2242 physical books I have in my possession are ULTB.

60 of my 133 eBooks are ULTB-E. Most of those are medical texts and histories from the early to mid 19th century that I have down loaded from various sources including the National Library of Medicine in the National Institute of Health.

After a bit of clean up, I still show 568 items with ULTB.

Per previous discussions, if I have the only two copies of a book on LT, I'm still using the ULTB tag unless there is a strong objection.

I have noticed a couple cases where some over-zealous combiners have grouped books they don't understand. This is especially the case for Jules Verne among my books. For example, highly abridged retellings should not be combined with the full works and yet one I have was, a From the Earth to the Moon.

Also among Verne there are non-English and non-French translation volumes with two or more stories that should not be combined with single-story books of the only one people can recognize.

A Pirates of the Caribbean book that was put out by Theme Park Adventure is not the same as the souvenir from Disneyland and Walt Disney World but it has been combined inappropriately.

It will take time to separate these that I don't care to spend this morning. I recognize that this mild rant is a topic for the Combiners group. However, I mention it here because it does impact ULTB counts.

James

555 out of 5485, about 10%.

keeline,

If you have knowledge about different editions like that you could put it in a disambiguation notice. This would help you keep your books seperate and might educate the rest of us.

On the question of "Where do we stand?", alone of course. Hard to be unique otherwise.

2396 of 12484

Not counting bookseller catalogues or having the only work in a certain language, 13 out of 910

In addition to the number of books that are unique to our individual library. the relitive obscurity of our collections can be found on our statistics page. My statistics are

77/818 Median/mean book obscurity

If I eliminated my wife's Harry Potter books or my murder mysteries and really concentrated on my obscure historical topics I could get it much lower.

My library stats are 6/19 Median/mean book obscurity. Seems easier and less fluctuating to track than UTLB's, plus I'm confused how to count unique books that one has that are either on someone else's watch list or in a legacy library. How do other's in this group handle those?

I am still in a quandary to find that Nela the Conjuror, a scarce Stratemeyer book under the Bonehill name, was also added to the Harry Houdini legacy library. This is a book someone believes was owned by him. However I think that it is reasonable to guess that the collection is now dispersed. As such, the other entry in LT there is not an owned book. Should this count the same as another copy actually owned and entered into LT?

Also, what if someone goes through a collection and adds interesting books they find there (some ULTB) to their wishlist? With the wishlists on LT treated like owned books, it's a little hard to run down each book demoted because of another listing.

Finally, some people choose to add print on demand books and ebooks. That's fine but what should it mean for ULTB stats?

James

#13 Finally, some people choose to add print on demand books and ebooks. A copy of the book is still a copy. Print on demand I can accept if they actually have it, I'm still not convinced about ebooks though.

459 ULTBs out of 4328 books. 10.6%.

I have no problem with POD books; they are physical, dead-tree books, with pages and covers, that occupy space on my bookshelf, and I can read them. How is this not a book?

I have not so far been entering my e-books, except as a comment where I have the same book in both media, but I may do it in the future, because one of the main reasons for cataloging my library on LT is to prevent spending money on duplicate copies. It seems to me that this is still a concern, whether the duplicate is electronic or physical. There are sometimes reasons to do this on purpose, but I would rather not do it accidentally.

My two cents.

I don't have a problem with cataloging PoD books. I own many and am even involved in producing some like Victor Horton's Idea. Some books are very hard to find in physical copies but because they have been digitized as scans or OCR from Google Books, Archive.org, HathiTrust, or Project Gutenberg, they are available electronically and some put out slap-dash no-edit upload and forget it PoD books.

My question about this came up when I was observing that The Building of a Book appeared to be available as a PoD with the generic covers so common for that variety of book.

Even if we cared to make a distinction between eBooks and PoD, it would be hard to tell when someone has cataloged either of them since there's no distinction on LT either from vintage books or even between each other. Even if LT added a format field (hardcover, paperback, PoD paperback, eBook, audio book, etc.) it is likely that most people would not go back and update. If this is important to people, they probably tag it accordingly as I do terms like pb (paperback) and DJ (dust jacket).

I offer these questions so that I can tag ULTBs in a way that is consistent with others here. My goal is to find books that interest me in sufficient condition that I think they are worth owning. Anything else is a bonus or fun trivia.

James

Since I joined LT the focus of my library has shifted. I have gone from focusing on collectable contemporary fiction, completest for some authors and signed first editions of others first published works. Obviously that would not involve many ULTBs. Since then I have shifted my focus to the study of history and I am slowly narrowing that focus. To do that I really need to use my wish list to track title I have heard about but not yet found. I have 700+ titles in my wishlist 30 of them are tagged ULTB-W. Since my current research covers 1800 - 1852 I am looking at a lot of period title that have been turned into ebooks. I keep them in a collection called, obviously, eBooks and 60 of the 133 titles in that collection are tagged ULTB-E. I need to keep track of those titles.

I have another 5 books labeled ULTB-SF (for Set Free) in my Read but Unowned collection. Now I am not that attached to those books but I don't want to eliminate them from my library I have read them and they are in my head so I don't want to remove them from my library.

I don't think anybody should give a second thought to adding a title in any format, even to a wishlist, just because it might knock someone else out of a ULTB. I doubt that anyone anytime soon will be adding Nubian resettlement in the Sudan, or A Reply to the Attacks of Dr. Charles Cladwell, or The northern lakes a summer resort for invalids of the South.

Although as I was typing this I noticed that my ULTB-SF had to be reduced by one.

I don't have any of these problems as all of my LT catalog can be found in my home on a shelf somewhere.
Even the e-books will be found in my Kindle on the shelf next to my chair.
I never use wishlist.

If you are particularly interested in relative obscurity of your whole collection as opposed to pure ULTBs, there's a group called Too Obscure http://www.librarything.com/groups/tooobscure It's not very active, though (and since it was founded back in 2006, the medians and means mentioned in the earliest posts can be pretty impressively obscure). I don't know if some other group has picked up the theme.

I list my e-books in their own collection but don't include them in the 'your library' collection. I'm not at the point that i consider an e-book as something real, or even as mine, since they are merely licensed to me.

At the moment I count 11 out of 1275. I'm obviously not even trying. All are physical books, but I can't understand why ebooks do not count. Both have the words we read books for, after all.

You can count anything you want to count, spaceowl. (love your name, btw) The thing is, what's the chance that a book that has been made digital is not already listed on LT anyway? I know nothing about ebooks, so please tell me what I am missing.

#22 If you take a look at my catalog "e books" you will get an idea of what we have. Most of mine are PDFs of books from the 19th century and earlier. Of the 135 titles I think I have only paid for two or three. Some, Common Sense, Capital, and The Wealth of Nations are very popular but many, like Of the Epidemic Cholera, as it appeared in Cincinnati are very obscure. I try to put a link in the comments section to allow anyone interested to find them and so that if anything ever comes of my research I can document it.

Oh yeah, where do we stand...

60 ultb-e (e books)

30 ultb-w (wish list, most are less that 20 years old, just obscure although a few are microfilms that maybe I should think about a little harder.)

41 ultb, physical paper copies on my shelves.

Oh. I see now. Well, anyway, just want to assure spaceowl that no one is trying to prevent him from putting ULTB on his catalog entries.

I just pruned my ultb down to 220 out of 3866 - all physical books or magazines.

I'm at 113 out of 1529. That's 7.3%.

Also, aaaah, space owl... Good times

I'm at 224 out of 3339. 6.7%

#22: Millions--literally millions--of volumes have been scanned by Google and put online. Many of my ULTBs are digital, though they're all commercial RPG material born digital and likely never printed. My other accounts, prosfilaes-gutenberg*, has almost 30 ULTBs (in a sense) all of which are available from Project Gutenberg. (I only add them to my account if I've read them and want to record that, or if I own the physical book.)

* http://www.librarything.com/catalog/prosfilaes-gutenberg

I was at 459, but lost 5 and gained 1, so now at 455.

I am still at 48 out of 1721 (owned) titles, to my surprise. 8/497 on my wishlist. 198/1001 mean/median obscurity.

#29 - The more people who are introduced to the genius of John Allison the better.

For everyone else, thanks for the clarification. The total has risen to 12, BTW.

Is anyone aware of tags other than "Unique"? When I joined LT I had thought of using that, but rejected it as subject to misinterpretation. After a thorough soaking in the inadequacies of LT's software, I am glad I made that choice. Tiny example: last night I encountered a situation of a phantom-match for what I thought was a unique entry, only to find upon further investigation that the alleged match was a printed score as distinct from a sound-recording. From the beginning I have opted for "LibraryThing first appearance", and though cumbersome for my aging fingers, I am content with using that. PS: while we all take pride in one thi g or another, obscurity is in the eye of the beholder. I am perfectly content that some of my entries be First Appearances, but to call them "obscure" would to display a lamentable cultural narrowness. There -- I've said it. Forgive it if it seems arch, but you have to take me as I am.

#33 - When I've gone through and cleaned up my ULTB tags, I've been retagging those that now have 2+ owners as "former-ultb", which I think is conceptually kind of the same as "LibraryThing first appearance". I think it will be kind of nice to see the day when all of my ultbs will be former-ultbs. (I won't feel as special, but also won't feel as weird!)

Funnily enough, I went to your profile and the one item we supposedly have in common (Piano music by Louis Moreau Gottschalk) appears as a recording ... even though I haven't added any recordings here, just sheet music. I'll have to see if I can't clean that up.

Just did a check; took ULTB off 7 books and added it to 4. One of them won't be an ULTB for long: Harry Potter Film Wizardry Revised and Expanded! I'm surprised it's lasted as long as it has!

26 out of 711 3%

Some one else has How to Use Pickett Log Log Slide Rule Wow and its their only book!?!

That same thing happened to me, misericordia! I was so surprised to see that this user
http://www.librarything.com/profile/WilliamSloan
has only one book, and it's one of mine.
I have separated mine from his because someone went on a series binge and I don't want to be a part of that.
I already counted it as a ULTB anyway, though, because it is just too weird that a one-book-only person has it.
(???)

157 books out of 1976 listed, 7.9%

Already this month I have managed to move two books from my wish list to honest ultb status. The Northern Lakes and The History of the Negro in Medicine, both for an ongoing research project.

After a bit of cleanup, I have 186 ULTBs out of 5610 total cataloged, 4639 cataloged in Your Library (and thus physically owned) - 3% and 4%.

I also have two that I know dang well are not unique, since I cataloged them by using brightcopy's script to copy them from another user, but they refuse to combine; and one that I'm pretty sure is unique, both by what it is and because I'm the only member listed by name as having it (no "private member", either). But it says 2 members at the top of the page, so I'm not counting it... no ultb tag on any of these.

I also had to rescue a graphic novel, which does appear to be unique, from being combined with a novel. Same name, same author, very different content (even leaving the graphical element aside - it's a different story). I do have it marked with {GN}, but someone was combining too fast to read...

And two tags removed because I got rid of the books. No longer physically mine means no longer tagged ULTB, as far as I'm concerned.

I don't tag ebooks, either. I don't think the question has actually arisen - I don't add them until I read them, and while I have quite a few obscure ones (mostly from Gutenberg, so not likely unique, just obscure), I haven't read any yet. The new import from calibre, though, may change that - change me cataloging them, I mean, not tagging them. YMMV, but for me, tagging ultb on ebooks feels weird. Same kind of weird as including them in Your Library - I don't (except for a few that I have as both paper and ebooks - I "catalog" those ebooks by adding the records of the paper books to my ebook collection).

#40 by jjmcgaffey> I also had to rescue a graphic novel, which does appear to be unique, from being combined with a novel. Same name, same author, very different content (even leaving the graphical element aside - it's a different story). I do have it marked with {GN}, but someone was combining too fast to read...

Might I suggest that, to prevent it getting combined again, you A) add a disambiguation notice to the graphic novel, explaining why it's different from the work with the same title/author, and B) expand {GN} to {graphic novel}? I don't think I would have had a clue what {GN} means if I had seen it before now. I spotted another work in your catalog that has {ss} in it's title. No clue what that one means either. But I think the disambiguation notice would be the biggest help in preventing further combination. Even if {graphic novel} is spelled out, a combiner might assume that all the works with that same author/title are also graphic novels, but just haven't been marked as such by their other owners.

{short story}. And I'm annoyed enough about having extraneous stuff in my titles I don't really want to spell them out. Grrr...may have to, though (you're right). I hadn't thought about the disambiguation notice, that's a good idea.

230 ULTBs out of a collection of 1759... a few dozen of those are obscure periodicals, and periodical issues that belong with one of my themed collections, and another good portion is sheet music. A couple are comb-bound volumes of course readings from college. But then I've got stuff like the Linotype Maintenance Manual. Without the sheet music, it's 180 ULTBs out of 1672. I'm a little disappointed that nobody else has a copy of PVC Musical Instruments and How To Make Them!

#42 by jjmcgaffey>
Well, the disambiguation notice is more important, in my opinion, for preventing a wrongful combination, and if the disambiguation notice spells out "graphic novel" or "short story", then it should be easy enough for the almost-combiner to figure out what {GN} or {ss} means in the title. Of course, you can catalog it however you'd like, and in ideal world, even just a different ISBN should be enough of a distinction in this same title/author graphic novel case, but of course there are some LT issues with relying on ISBNs.

jjmcgaffey have you asked for help with the one that won't combine in the combiners group?

45> Not yet. Yeah, I should. But busy. It might magically work, and if not it will still be around and annoying me later when I have more time...

43> Heh. Does it count that I have a PVC digeridoo? A friend made it - he can play it, I can't. But now he has a real one and I have the PVC one...I keep meaning to take it to one of the places I go where people who like weird instruments gather - BayCon, for one - but haven't managed it yet.

My count is 1919 out of 4297 (45%). I just cleaned up and could eliminate 20 titles. Most of the uniques are scores, patterns and charts.

I finally figured out how to sort books by owned numbers and I seem to have an extraordinary 3129 books ULTBs out of 13 800 plus - seems very high, is it possible? I still have to do the marking up as ultb on the tag lines.

114 books out of 1085 listed, 10,5%
and 4 on my wishlist

#48 by Africansky1>
Welcome, Africansky1. It's certainly not impossible. My collection is also about 1/4 ULTB (used to be about 1/3 a year ago), and there are some members with even higher proportions. Some of the works might just be in need of combining (and some combiners specifically look at ULTBs for things to combine).

Though it is a bit crazy to think that your set of ULTBs is bigger than my entire collection of books, haha.

thank you Omargosh - I think I need to do some more sorting, checking and clearing up - but all that will take time. Yes my library is a large one - fills 3 rooms under our living part of the house and created 2 years ago, a great pleasure but just leads me to indulge in books. I read all the time but still more to go . Keeline thanks for your help in getting going on ULTB.

435 out of 4326 - pretty close to 10%. A lot of those are pamphlets and Sotheby auction catalogs; I'm sure they're ULTBs mainly because other people don't bother to catalog them.

86 (down from a peak of 101 after my last cleanup effort) out of 3202 for me . . . 2.7%.

Roughly 1/3 forgotten maritime history and aviation titles from the 1920s/30s, 1/3 recent scholarly books on pop culture, 1/6 other titles that make perfect sense (small-press poetry collections, a 1900 rhetoric textbook), and 1/6 titles that make no sense at all (am I really the only one who has Variety's Complete Science Fiction Reviews or Martin Harry Greenberg's anthology Hollywood Unreel?).

A lot of mine are obscure music books or 'zines. And cookbooks - the school or whatever kind, comb-bound collections of donated recipes. And various other oddities - computer manuals and the like that most people don't bother to catalog are another group. I have only 184/5628, or 3%. While I was checking, I found two that had been combined and had 23 and 35 total members (so I untagged them - I had 186 tagged at the beginning of my checking).

I have 9%, 118/1209.
This is something I did not expect

288 of 2236, 13%

Un-ULTB'd 20 books since last measurement.

176 out of 2099 (total books include read but unowned & wishlist, the ultb themselves are or were all owned), most of my latest ULTB additions seem to be non-fiction for juvenile readers in french (and originally written in that language).

Adjusting my gross total by subtracting Wish-List, Read but Unowned, and Wall of Shame (stuff I've read with revulsion), I have a base total of 1,600 titles, of which about 600 are First Appearances. Within that, roughly 500 are unique. I think that's a pretty alarming percentage: no wonder people often wonder what I'm talking-about! Peace to all -- G. PS: for the purists who scorn Recordings, the figure adjusts to about 350 out of about 1,100.

108/1322. I had to remove two just now because other people catalogued them. I still have a few with another member but they're private members and I don't consider them real. 8% ULTB in my library, which is all actually owned and in my house. Very few read, but I have looked at all the pictures. ;)

578 out of 5608, 10.3%.

Hi Guurtje,

I think I combined a few of your ULTB's, so you've dropped to 10% I guess. Sorry...

My total (until someone starts combining...) 296 of 2269, 12,9%

62 > Don't be sorry Sneuper. You are one of the many persons who does a lot of work for LT.

Anyway, I still can say that from the most of the former ULTB's I had, I'm the only one in our language.
I can't have them all! I removed them from my ULTB-collection. For me it's an easy way to keep track on them. Now and then I go through the collection and see right away which one is'nt an ULTB anymore.

112 books out of 1095 listed. (10 more books since april 21st)
And 2 left on my wishlist.
I dropped indeed; from 10.5 % to 10.2 %