LibraryThing

Hobnob with Authors

2010-03-12T12:51:00.002-05:00

After much discussion, we've introduced the Hobnob with Authors group, a special place for authors and readers to mingle.

Of course, authors are welcome everywhere on LibraryThing. Authors can become LibraryThing Authors, which links their author and member pages and promotes them on their books and on the home page. Many authors participate in Early Reviewers and Member Giveaways. And authors also participate in our existing groups. We even have a special Author Chat group for organized author events.

But, encouraged as they are, we've also found a certain amount of static between some authors' desire to promote their work, and the tendency for that to seem one-way, non-conversational advertising or even spam, both of which are against the site's Terms of Service. Confronted with the request to avoid promotion, many authors expressed surprise that a book site would hinder their efforts to reach potential readers. Members were in turn divided on just how serious the problem was, the line between acceptable and unacceptable author posts, etc. The situation was sticky all around!

So, Hobnob with Authors was born, a "safe place" for authors to chat with readers, without fear of being accused of spamming. While some standards will be enforced, no reasonable author need worry. As a "Community Project" the group is prominent, and its posts will appear in Talk alongside other groups. But sensitive members will also be able to "ignore" the "Hobnob" group.

So, authors, you're now free to shout to the rooftops all about the book you write. Excited readers will be waiting to hear about it. Join, watch or just read Hobnob with Authors, and support authors who help make LibraryThing what it is.

March batch of Early Reviewer books is up!

2010-03-08T21:04:00.003-05:00

The March 2010 batch of Early Reviewer books is up! We've got 82 books this month, and a grand total of 2,477 copies to give out.

First, make sure to sign up for Early Reviewers. If you've already signed up, please check your mailing address and make sure it's correct.

Then request away! The list of available books is here:
http://www.librarything.com/er/list

Update: You can now opt to win more than one book per batch. Read the details, and how to opt in.

The deadline to request a copy is Friday, March 26th at 6PM EST.

Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to too many countries to list. Make sure to check each book to see if you're eligible.

Thanks to all the publishers participating this month!

B&H Publishing Group	North Atlantic Books	Hunter House
Ballantine Books	W.W. Norton	Doubleday Canada
St. Martin's Griffin	Tundra Books	Kregel Publications
Penguin	Bell Bridge Books	Putnam Books
Riverhead Books	Human Kinetics	BelleBooks
Bantam Dell	Cemetery Dance	John Wiley & Sons
Random House	Henry Holt and Company	Taylor Trade Publishing
Seven Stories Press	New Village Press	South Dakota State Historical Society Press
Gefen Publishing House	Dalkey Archive Press	QWERTY Publishers
HighBridge	McBooks Press	Rovira i Virgili University Press
McClelland & Stewart	Orca Book Publishers	Candlewick
Picador	The Permanent Press	HarperCollins
Doubleday Books	HarperStudio	Gotham Books
Quirk Books	Avon Books	Harper
Crossway	MIRA	HQN
100 Watt Press	LUNA	WaterBrook Press

CoverGuess: The game that helps people find books...

2010-03-02T11:07:00.001-05:00

I just released an amusing diversion called CoverGuess.

Check it out here, and talk about it here.

What is CoverGuess?

CoverGuess is a sort of game. We give you covers, and you describe them in words. If you guess the same things as other players, you get points.

Why are you doing this?

The goal is to have fun, but also to build up a database of cover descriptions, to answer questions like "Do you have that book with bride on the bicycle?"

What's the best way to do it?

Think about it how you'd describe the cover to someone—pick out the most significant elements. Does it have a car or a pair of shoes? Color terms are good, and so are terms like "blurry" or "sepia." Above all, pick terms other players will be using.

How do points work?

You get one point for every matched term, for each other member who had it. So, if you say "car" and "dog" and two other members said "car" and one said "dog," you get three points. Obviously, it's better if you're not the first member to tag the image, but the system randomizes that aspect. When you're the first to tag an item, you get 0.25 points for your effort.

Aren't you trying to use members' free labor to make money?

Yes and no. All the data here is released under a Creative-Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License, and will be available in feed form. That means any non-profit entity, like a library, can use it without charge. We also commit to license it on the same terms to any bookstore with less than $10 million in sales. That leaves huge companies. If any want it, we'll charge them!

Anything else?

It was partially inspired by Google's ImageLabeler. Our anti-spam engine does something similar too.

The whole thing was perhaps summed up best in a tweet to me:

Beta: "Read Alike" recommendations

2010-03-01T09:40:00.004-05:00

I've pushed through a beta version of a new recommendation engine.

You can check it out here
Come talk about it here

The "Read Alikes" recommendations supplement our existing automatic and member recommendations. "Read Alikes" are based directly on the members who have your books—the people who "read alike" you, or whatever.

So far, opinion is divided. Some members love it, and are getting great recommendations. Others report a parade of things they already know about. Is it quite consciously, however, a beta feature. It may be improved, or it may go away. Most likely, it will go away and be replaced by a better overall algorithm, with better tools for managing your recommendations.

February State of the Thing

2010-02-25T09:00:00.005-05:00

On Tuesday I sent out February's State of the Thing, our monthly newsletter. Sign up to get it, or you can read a copy online.

This month's State of the Thing features a synopsis of site upgrades, and two exclusive author interviews:

Elizabeth Kostova's debut novel, The Historian was a hugely popular historical mystery. Switching gears from Dracula, it's an art mystery that drives Kostova's second novel The Swan Thieves, which is poised to follow in The Historian's bestselling path.

Holly Black is well-known for The Spiderwick Chronicles and the Modern Tales of Faerie series. The Poison Eaters is Holly's first short story collection. Filled with gritty scenes of magic enhantment and disenchantment, The Poison Eaters features previously published stories as well as new ones.

Next month our interviews will skew to the undead end of the spectrum, with Seth Grahame-Smith and Jonathan Maberry. Have a question for them? Post it here and we might use it in the upcoming interview.

Early Reviewers February batch is about to close

2010-02-24T12:55:00.004-05:00

If you enjoy reviewing books, and like getting free books in the mail, then this is the month to request an Early Reviewer title. There are 3,495 copies of 107 different books, all of which are either not published yet, or just recently published.

In previous months we had half this many copies available, which means this month twice as many members will win a book!

Points to note:

E-books are listed at the bottom. Each ebook says "This book is an eBook, not a physical book."
You never know what you may win, so only request books you're interested in reviewing yourself.

Cataloged: The 1963 White House Library (Socialist Books Included)

2010-02-23T14:03:00.003-05:00

Then and now photos of the White House Library. ("Now" photo by Flickr user Jay Tamboli).

Overnight, some twenty LibraryThing members(1) entered, or "flash mob cataloged" an entire, historic library—the White House Library of the early 1960s and, largely, today. We did it from a limited-edition "Short-Title List" printed by the White House Historical Society, using LibraryThing's 700-odd library data sources.(2)

The library, WHLibrary1963, contains some 1,700 books. It joins some 128 other "Legacy Libraries" cataloged or being cataloged by members. It's our second Kennedy-themed library, after the incomplete JohnFKennedy—or third, if you count Marilyn Monroe's (interesting) collection.

Why We Did It. An amusing train-wreck of blog outrage moved us to action. Rob Port, a conservative radio host and blogger took a White House tour and spotted some books on the wall that made him jump. Hearing or mis-hearing that the books had been picked by Michelle Obama, Port blogged Photo Evidence: Michelle Obama Keeps Socialist Books In The White House Library.

Port's picture included books like:

The Socialist Party of America by David A. Shannon (1955)
The American socialist movement, 1897-1912 by Ira Kipnis (1952)
The social basis of American communism by Nathan Glazer (1961)

And a number of other, not-so-socialist titles, like U.S. Senators and Their World, all from the 40s, 50s and 60s. (Needless to say it didn't apparently dawn on Port to look the books up, or wonder why they all seemed a tad old.)

The White House Library.The Washington Post's Short Stack blog knocked down the story. Far from being picked by Michelle Obama, the library was in fact assembled at the request of another First Lady—Jacqueline Kennedy.

Kennedy, who also oversay the redecoration of the room itself, delegated the selection to Yale librarian James T. Babb, who convened a small committee, including the editors of the Jefferson and Adams papers and the Kennedy aide and historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. The work took about a year.

The book list was published in the New York Times in August 1963. A limited edition Short Title-List was printed in 1967. Between 1963 and 1967 a number of books were added to the list. From some Flickr pictures, it looks like a few more books may have been added—perhaps in the Johnson administration?—to the actual library.

What does it mean? While not a window into Obama's book tastes, still less his socialism, the library is a window into something. Browsing through it, I can't help feeling a sense of the time, and of the opinions and culture of the men who assembled it, and were intended to use it.

As I see it, Kennedy's administration was marked by a rare embrace of intellect, ideas and even scholarship, but was also constrained somewhat by the mental world of contemporary east-coast elites—the "Harvards" that irritated Johnson so much. Although flattened by politic initial choices—it includes no living authors of fiction, and few works by non-US citizens— the 1963 White House Library was, in a sense, the library of the "Best and Brightest," and it reflects their world view. As fun as it was to do, it's perhaps a shame we don't have similar collections for all the presidents since then. However interesting, it would be a shame if the White House Library forever remained a 1960s relic.

Come talk about the library here.

Continuing cataloging and cleanup progress here.

1. amba, ansate, bell7, bokai, carport, cbl_tn, ccc3579, clamairy, cpirmann, jbd1, jjlong, merry10, moibibliomaniac, momerath, SilentInAWay, spookykitten, theophila, timspalding, thornton37814, UtopianPessimist.
2. I kicked it off by driving from Portland down to the University of New Hampshire, which had the closest copy of the limited-edition Short-Title List. I love that my job periodically allows me to get in a car for the sole purpose of getting a book at some far-away library.

Legacy Library flash-mob tonight

2010-02-22T16:57:00.001-05:00

There's a minor tempest-in-a-teapot brewing over the White House library. Apparently a conservative blogger on a tour took a snapshot of some socialist-oriented books, misheard that Mrs. Obama had selected them, and blogged about it. They turned out to have been selected by Jackie Kennedy, or rather by a prominent Yale librarian she selected, and to have been there since the early 1960s.

I'm driving to the nearest copy of the library's list (published as a limited edition book), and we're going to use it as the basis for a Legacy Library. This is minor hot news, so I think we should try to do it fast. Any many hands make light work. Let's see what an insane pack of bibliophilic historians can do.

We're going to virtually flash-mob the library, by adding books from the list to a LibraryThing account at the same time.

Once I have pages, I'll start posting them, and anyone who wants to help, can help! Read more about the project and join us.

Dead horses to ponies...

2010-02-15T02:32:00.002-05:00

Borrowing a joke from Brightcopy, I've turned some dead-horses into ponies, bringing some long-requested features to life, and even improving on them.

Books You Share Preferences. Some members have long campaigned for sorting the profile-page "Books You Share" box by author, not title. But I held off—that's not the right choice for everyone. Instead I've added a preference for it, with a number of different sorting options.

Critically, I set the default to sorting by popularity from low to high, something nobody had ever requested. I thought members might pounce on me for it, but quite a few have said it was an unexpectedly good choice. It brings out the unusual books you share. And those are often the most interesting.

I also added a preference to change how many shared books are displayed.

See this topic for more about the feature.

Tag Combination. After a 16-month hiatus, new tag combinations and separations are back!

The idea is simple. LibraryThing allows members to combine tags that are highly similar in meaning and application. Classic examples are tags like "World War II" and "wwii" or "ww2." We discourage combining terms that don't entirely overlap, either in meaning or in usage. (If you're interested in the ideas behind tagging, check out my What's the Big Deal About Tagging? talk on YouTube.)

Tag combination only affects "global pages"; user tags are never changed.

So far as I know, we're the only website to experiment with this idea, something noted in Gene Smith's Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web. Tag-combination combines a new idea—tagging—with an older idea—what librarians call "authority control."

This time, however, we've given it a twist—democratic authority control. Any member can propose a combination or separation, but the matter is put up to a vote—with a supermajority needed for any action. We hope it will slow down the process and make it more deliberate.

It'll also save our servers from having to recalculate tags. With more than 60 million tags, and "science fiction" now at three million uses, instant, any-user combinations were really putting a strain on our system.

See more about it, and some examples here.

Favorite messages and marking last-read

2010-02-11T04:59:00.001-05:00

I've added a simple feature to "favorite" message. You can also mark a last-read, for those times when Thingamabrarian eloquence prevents a topic from being read in a single sitting.

More here.

Pictures get a lot better

2010-02-10T01:19:00.004-05:00

I've just released phase one of the new picture system—much better profile pictures:

The new system allows members to post multiple profile pictures, see pictures at large sizes, describe pictures, leave comments on them, and share them with other members. There's also a tagging feature, so members can organize their pictures and swarm around common tags, like my library.

The new system was designed to be used across the site. I am particularly anxious to get it working on books—so members can show multiple images, and separate out covers, title pages, spine images and so forth.

Read and talk more about it here.

Connections lists and other profile-page upgrades

2010-02-09T00:02:00.000-05:00

Mike has revamped LibraryThing's "connections" feature, changing the UI somewhat and allowing members to specify new types of contacts, like "best friends," "employees," "librarian peeps," etc. These categories show up everywhere connections do, such as work pages.

There were also significant changes under the surface, preparing us for better contact handling generally—both inside-LibraryThing contacts and reaching out to other social networks.

We've also added an area for "Groups you share."

Members are divided over this addition. There's a poll being held about it right now.

There were a host of smaller changes. Read more about it on Talk.

February Early Reviewer books up!

2010-02-08T00:20:00.001-05:00

The February 2010 batch of Early Reviewer books is up! We've got 107 books this month, and a grand total of… wait for it—3,495 copies to give out! That's a new high for us.

First, make sure to sign up for Early Reviewers. If you've already signed up, please check your mailing address and make sure it's correct.

Then request away! The list of available books is here:
http://www.librarything.com/er/list

The deadline to request a copy is Friday, February 26th at 6PM EST.

Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to too many countries to list. Make sure to check the flags by each book to see if it can be sent to your country.

Thanks to all the publishers participating this month!

Penguin	B&H Publishing Group	Delacorte Press
Hunter House	Henry Holt and Company	Hyperion Books
New York Review Books	Spiegel & Grau	Bell Bridge Books
O'Reilly	WaterBrook Press	Savvy Press
Ballantine Books	Peirene Press	Tundra Books
Bloomsbury	Little, Brown and Company	HCI Books
Avon Books	Bromera	BelleBooks
Hachette Book Group	The Overlook Press	Villard
Bantam	Random House Trade Paperbacks	W.W. Norton
Chosen Books	Bethany House	Doubleday Books
Kregel Publications	Sovereign	Picador
Perseverance Press	St. Martin's Press	St. Martin's Griffin
Tor Books	Random House	Bantam Dell
MIRA	Unbridled Books	International Publishers Marketing
Grand Central Publishing	PublicAffairs	Rovira i Virgili University Press
Harlequin Teen	Harlequin	Canongate Books

Our First New Zealand Legacy Library!

2010-02-01T14:42:00.002-05:00

We're very pleased to announce the first New Zealand-based Legacy Library, that of Pei te Hurinui Jones (1898-1976). Jones joins Alfred Deakin (the second Prime Minister of Australia) in our Antipodean Legacies collection. Mr. Jones was a leading Māori scholar and translator (he's known for translating three volumes of Māori chants and song-poetry into English, and three Shakespeare plays into Māori). You can read a more complete biographical sketch on his profile page.

This catalog is thanks to the efforts of David Friggens, Systems Librarian at the University of Waikato, which holds the book collection. Thanks to David for making it happen, and we hope you'll all find it useful.

On other Legacy fronts, user jcbrunner reports that work on Thomas Mann's library proceeds, with 2,000 records now in place (about 60% of the total). Almost 350 titles have been entered for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Robert Graves' LT library now contains nearly 500 titles. Don't forget, you can check out all the libraries-in-progress and volunteer your services here.

The Libraries of Early America subset continues to expand, with recent work focusing on the completion of the collection of Landon Carter (by staff at the Rockefeller Library, Colonial Williamsburg) and ongoing work on the libraries of the Thomas Shepards of early Massachusetts, balloonist-doctor John Jeffries, and continued additions to earlier collections. For any leads on those, as always, please drop me a note.

January State of the Thing

2010-01-25T22:21:00.004-05:00

Ring-a-ding-ding. I've just sent out the first State of the Thing (our monthly newsletter) of 2010. Sign up to get it, or you can read a copy online.

This month's State of the Thing features our iPhone app, site improvements and as always, free books.

We also have two exclusive author interviews:

Colum McCann won the 2009 National Book Award in fiction for Let the Great World Spin. The plot of the book follows a handful of characters who are witness to the 1974 tight-rope walk across the Twin Towers of New York, but this book is more than the sum of its plots. McCann lives in New York, with his family. His previous work includes Dancer and Zoli.

Joshua Ferris' new, just-released novel is The Unnamed. Like a wind-up toy, the main character's unknown medical condition will suddenly whisk him from wherever he is on a forced walk that ends only from exhaustion, miles from home. His family adjusts, as well as a family can, to an unexplainable disease. Joshua's previous novel, Then We Came to the End, was a 2007 National Book Award finalist. At the moment, Ferris is writing an essay on the work of the Norwegian painter Lars Elling, and according to Ferris "contemplating about six ways to kill myself on account of it. I want to do both the painter & his work justice but fear I simply lack the lexicon."

Next month, we'll be interviewing Elizabeth Kostova and Holly Black. Have a question for them? Post it here and we might use it in the upcoming interview.

24-hour Readathon wrap-up

2010-01-25T16:22:00.003-05:00

We may not have a logo yet, but the first LibraryThing Readathon was a success. A lot of the fun is reading the thread on Book Talk where participants described their hour of reading. It was interesting to find out where other people chose to read for their designated hour, and absolutely wonderful to hear about the books everyone's reading right now. You can read the whole thread here, which includes touchstones to the books read. Participants could also tag the book(s) they read. People also started including an excerpt from what they had read, which added a sense of nowness.

It was really fun helping in the creation of a new kind of event, which felt very community-oriented yet very easy to participate in. I myself woke up, grabbed my book, and started reading in bed. Sure, there wasn't any brie provided (unlike the Boston meetup), but it also didn't require getting out of bed.

We called it a beta test, because we weren't sure what would need changing during the event, or for future events. We'll talk about what to change, so know we're planning on another event sometime in the spring. If you'd like to join in the organizing conversation, jump in.

LibraryThing 24-hour Readathon (beta)

2010-01-21T22:20:00.002-05:00

Inspired by LibraryThingers participating in Do Nothing But Read Day, member squeakychu suggested we have our own event which doesn't limit a day's activity to just reading. (It was discovered that it's really hard to do nothing but read, when the doorbell rings, or pets/children need tending.)

Thus was born the LibraryThing 24-hour Readathon*. The idea is to have LibraryThing members from across the world reading continuously for 24 hours. Each member is committing to reading for one hour, at a designated time. We've built in a redundancy system, in case someone is trapped in their car in a snowstorm ... without a book. Some people will start on the hour, others on the half hour.

Date: Saturday, January 23rd
Time: You choose

If you're interested, sign up here. You can read the development and ongoing rules of the Readathon on the Site Talk thread. You can direct any questions to that Talk thread as well. Once you've read for your hour, come describe it on the Book Talk thread.

This is an event for any LibraryThing member (and anyone you want to convince to read along with you), and the only requirement is that for the hour you sign up for, you read something (or listen to an audiobook).

This is the first of what we're hoping to be many readathons. Future events may include reading a specific genre, reading for different increments of time (15 minutes, out loud?) or reading for longer amounts of time than 24 hours (how long can LibraryThing members keep reading? Years?)

*Beta. We're using this first event as a kind of trial to figure it out.

Boston brie party

2010-01-21T09:59:00.004-05:00

Last Saturday, we threw a party in Boston. Since the American Library Association midwinter meeting was already drawing many librarians and publishers to the city, we jumped on the chance to bring together bookish sorts for an evening of talking books, eating cheese and tipping a pint.

If I had to guess, I'd say there were around 75 people over the 2.5 hours we were holding court at the Green Dragon.

The LibraryThing for Libraries crew announced two new features at the conference, so the booth was busy. Abby's recap is forthcoming on Thingology.

See all the pictures of the party and the LTFL booth here.

Apple highlights Local Books

2010-01-20T01:12:00.004-05:00

Apple's iTunes store has LibraryThing's Local Books app. (see blog post, direct link) given us a rare honor—a spot among their featured apps.(1)

The exposure has shot us up in the books category, such that we are now—unbelievably—running third in the free section.(2) No matter how long it lasts—and we have no idea of that—it's great news. The more people grab it, the more become invested in its success. We're already seeing a pick up in entries to LibraryThing Local. And it puts pressure on us to improve Local and the app too.

Most of all, we hope the success of Local Books can inspire physical bookstores and libraries to embrace the digital world more fully—to put their basic information, events and holdings data out there for us and others to use. Their customers and patrons are eager for it. Only by embracing what the digital world can do for the physical can they compete against the continual advance of ecommerce and ebooks.

So, thanks to Apple for highlighting us, to Chris and John for making the app.(3), and thanks to all the members who entered the data to make it possible.

1. To see it, go to iTunes and click "App Store." We're in the third row of apps., next to "Puppy Park" and "Roadside America." We only appear if the screen is wide enough to hold six icons. We go away if you're only showing five or fewer apps.
2. The only downside has been that wider exposure has put the app in the hands of people who were, I think, expecting something different. Our ratings have shot down. Fortunately, they're very much on par with other top apps. It seems iTunes reviewers are a finicky bunch!
3. They will be getting every dime the free app makes us!

PS: If you have an Android phone, check out our Layar app.

LibraryThing party in Boston

2010-01-12T15:24:00.008-05:00

If you'll be in Boston this Saturday, January 16th , come to our LibraryThing Meetup!

We're taking advantage of the American Library Assocation conference in Boston to pull together all our favorite bibliophiles, eat food, drink drinks, and talk about the state of books, the future of the book, and what you just finished reading.

We're having it at The Green Dragon Tavern—a nice fit, as "The Green Dragon" is one of the most active groups on LibraryThing.

In true LibraryThing tradition we'll be providing ALL THE BAKED BRIE YOU CAN HANDLE, along with other light fare, perhaps including some that don't revolve around cheese. Since we're not doing ConferenceThing,* we've got some money to burn, and can offer a snack-y dinner instead. You buy the beer.

Date: January 16th, 2010
Time: 5:30-8:00 pm
Location: The Green Dragon (see Local event) – 11 Marshall St Boston, MA 02108
Updates: Follow @conferencething or @librarythingtim on Twitter

Directly after our event there's a tweetup for ALA conference-goers at the same location. We like to keep our 2.0 events convenient!

*Our original plan was to have ConferenceThing, a mini-conference giving librarians and bibliophiles a chance to talk about books in all their forms, and the book world. That didn't work out, as we couldn't find speakers and in a choice between hearing Tim speak in front of a projector and watching Tim and Abby shovel brie...

Thanks to merelymel for the photo.

Local books, virality and Twitter

2010-01-11T11:58:00.004-05:00

Virality is an awesome thing. LibraryThing grew virally, and we're seeing the same patterns with our new Local Books iPhone application (blog post, iTunes), released last Wednesday.

Some highlights:

L.A. Times' Jacket Copy, "Can Local Books iPhone app be a literary UrbanSpoon?"
Huffington Post picked it up.
New Yorker: Book Bench (brief notice)
The Unquiet Librarian
Resource Shelf
The Proverbial Lone Wolf Librarian
TeleRead
A Bibliophile's Bookshelf
Public Library Association blog.
UBiT 2010 (Norwegian)

Most noticeable, though, has been the shift away from blogs, which were once the main way people found out about LibraryThing and its new features, toward Twitter and other services (see Twitter's list of tweets with my original URL). I think that, for smaller topics like this, Twitter has simply taken over.

Maybe I'll change my mind if someone at the New York Times notices the New Yorker or L.A. Times pieces, and decides to write their own!

Colored check marks

2010-01-11T11:50:00.004-05:00

I've change the green check marks to a palette of four colors, so you can distinguish at a glance books in your library, wish list, read-but-unowned list and other collections.

The check marks pop up on recommendations and statistics pages. So far, members have been particularly happy to see them on your Series Statistics page, which lists all the series in your library, and which books in the series you have in the various collections.

As should become immediately obvious, colors can't do justice to all the complexity of collections. Not every collection gets a color, and we aren't mixing up paint buckets when a book belongs to two collections. We may revisit this, allowing members to set colors for their collections, but it will depend on other priorities, and we'll never be able to squeeze all the information in collections into colors alone. For what they are, however, we hope they're useful.

See more information and discussion.

Local Books iPhone application!

2010-01-06T09:55:00.003-05:00

» Take me right to iTunes

Short version. We've just released our first foray into iPhone development, a free application called "Local Books."

Local Books resembles popular dining apps like LocalEats or UrbanSpoon—but for book lovers. It shows you local bookstores, libraries and bookish events wherever you are or plan to be.

I've been using beta versions on my trips for months already; it's the ideal travel companion. Even if you know your area well, you're almost certain to find new places. We hope it will be a shot in the arm for physical bookstores and libraries—a new way to see how much bookishness there is around you.

At present Local Books does not show inventory from local bookstores and libraries. But, well, isn't that a good idea?

Check it out on iTunes.

Features. Features include:

Search for venues (bookstores and libraries) as well as events near your current location using the iPhone's built-in location features.
Search for venues and events at any location or by name.
Venues can be sorted by distance, name, or type.
Venues are color coded, following the maps on LibraryThing Local (colors correspond to the colors used on maps in LibraryThing Local).
Each venue has a detail page with a map. Tap it to jump to the iPhone Maps application.
Venues often sport a description, clickable website and phone number links, events, and a photo.
You can favorite locations and events, and there's a "Favorites" list where you can find them.(1)

Powered by LibraryThing Local. Local Books is powered by LibraryThing Local, the LibraryThing member-created database of 51,000 bookstores and libraries around the world. Events too are drawn from LibraryThing Local. Notably, since last night we've had a four-fold increase in events, as we started pulling in events from Barnes and Noble, Borders, Waterstones and Indigo/Chapters, as well as IndieBound.

Why We Did It. Creating Local Books wasn't free. We hired an outside house to help us. (Well, semi-outside; half of ConceptHouse is our in-house programmer Chris/ConceptDawg.) There's no "monetization" at all.

We did it because, despite the dozens of dining, clubbing and other location applications, nobody had done a good book one before. True, IndieBound recently came out with an elegant iPhone app.(2) But indies are not the only bookstores. And libraries, which far exceed bookstores and are almost everywhere, are absolutely critical. We've always thought of the book world in the largest possible terms, and we wanted an iPhone application that did that too.

Most of all, Local Books is our contribution to keeping the book world interesting. Amazon and other online retailers are great. LibraryThing is great too. But book lovers can't be happy in a world with fewer and fewer physical bookstores, and a rising threat to libraries. The more we know about this physical book world, the better we can foster it, and the better we can use websites like LibraryThing and Amazon to improve our world, not replace it.

How You Can Help. Even with 51,000 venues, not every bookstore and library is in LibraryThing. If you know of one that's not in there, go ahead and add it. If you represent the bookstore or library in question, you can "claim" your venue page, and start using LibraryThing to connect to your customers or patrons.

Even if they're all there, most are still missing something—a photograph, a phone number, a good description, a Twitter handle. Events—especially indie bookstores and libraries—are a particular need.

It's a virtuous cycle. The better we can make the data, the more people will find the application useful, and the more people who will make it better

Oh, and vote up the application, will ya? :)

Links.

The talk thread, for discussion.
Our Twitter tweet. Won't you retweet?
More screen shots

1. The favorites feature in the app is not tied to your favorites list on LibraryThing.com. We didn't want to require sign-in and so forth.
2. The IndieBound application does allow you to search for books, but only off their online catalog. There's no tie-in to local holdings. Even if it had that, most Indie bookstores do not upload their inventory to IndieBound, and, again, neither bookstores or independent bookstores should be the only option for book lovers.

Special thanks to the "Board for Extreme Thing Advances," our beta group, who put the application through it's paces before release. We couldn't have done it without you.

January Early Reviewer books up!

2010-01-06T09:51:00.000-05:00

The January 2010 batch of Early Reviewer books is up! We've got 57 books this month, and a grand total of 1,438 copies to give out.

First, make sure to sign up for Early Reviewers. If you've already signed up, please check your mailing address and make sure it's correct.

A note: included in this batch are a couple of sex books, so I want to remind everyone that if you request it, and you win it, then you're expected to put it in your catalog and review it. If you find the book title or content embarrassing, please don't request it.

Then request away! The list of available books is here:
http://www.librarything.com/er/list

The deadline to request a copy is Friday, January 29th at 6PM EST.

Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to too many countries to list. Make sure to check the flags by each book to see if it can be sent to your country.

Thanks to all the publishers participating this month!

Penguin	The Permanent Press	Faber and Faber
Bell Bridge Books	B&H Publishing Group	Doubleday Books
Delacorte Press	Hachette Book Group	Putnam Books
Tundra Books	Spiegel & Grau	Random House
W.W. Norton	Candlewick	Doubleday Canada
Orbit Books	Hunter House	Sovereign
UnT2	Canongate Books	Avalon Press
Henry Holt and Company	Gauthier Publications	Eirini Press
Berkley Sensation	Signet	Avon Books
St. Martin's Griffin	Picador	Center Street
Grand Central Publishing	ArbeitenZeit Media	Harper
DargonFish Comics	Hungry Goat Press

Four times as many event listings

2010-01-05T23:51:00.005-05:00

Overnight I added 3,364 bookish events to LibraryThing Local.

That more-than quadruples the number of events in LibraryThing Local!

The new events were from Barnes and Noble, Borders, Waterstones UK and Indigo/Chapters stores. Together with IndieBound—already in the system—this covers the largest English-language bookstore chains that also have event listings.

We are, of course, looking for new event sources. Publishers are probably our next stop. But members have been the largest single source of events, and will always be critical, especially for libraries and independent bookstores that don't use IndieBound event listings.

It should also be said that none of this would be possible if members hadn't helped us to add LibraryThing venues for all the stores in question, and hook their numbers up to ours. This was critical for our innovative Local Book Search, and we plan to do even more with these linkages in the future.

To add a new event go to LibraryThing Local, or just start here.

PS: This isn't a coincidence. We're going to be releasing something related—and big—tomorrow! :)