LibraryThing

August Early Reviewer Bonus Batch

2008-08-18T22:08:00.003-04:00

St. Martin's Press is responsible for this month's unprecedented and huge Early Reviewer bonus batch! They're giving out 1,000—yes, one thousand—copies of Any Given Doomsday by Lori Handeland.

The book is available to residents of the US and Canada, and the deadline to request a copy is Sunday, August 31st at 6pm EDT.

Request your copy here:
http://www.librarything.com/er/list

About the book: it's a brand new series featuring Elizabeth Phoenix, a cop with extraordinary psychic powers who's hot on the trail of a ruthless murderer- and whose life is about to change forever. Bestselling author Lori Handeland delivers and unforgettable heroine and a pulse-pounding series that you don't want to miss.

And, on their website, you can sign up to receive In The Beginning, the free prequel story to Any Given Doomsday.

August Early Reviewer books

2008-08-11T16:44:00.002-04:00

The August batch of Early Reviewer books is up! We've got 56 books this month, and a grand total 1,274 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

The deadline to request a copy is Sunday, August 17th at 6pm EDT.

Eligiblity:
Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to tons of new countires, including the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, France, Germany, and the Philippines! Make sure to check the flags by each book to see if it can be sent to your country.

Thanks to all the publishers, new and old!

Algonquin Books	Andrews McMeel Publishing	Ballantine Books
bluechrome Publishing	Cuneiform	Delacorte Press
Delta	F+W Publications	Faber and Faber
Loving Healing Press	McBooks Press	Modern History Press
Open Letter	Other Press	Picador
PublicAffairs	Raven Tree Press	Santa Fe Writer's Project
Solaris	South Dakota State Historical Society Press	Sparklight Press
St. Martin's Griffin	St. Martin's Minotaur	St. Martin's Press
Thomas Nelson	Tor Books	Unbridled Books
University of Illnois Press	W.W. Norton	WaterBrook Press
Willow Ridge Press	YMAA

LibraryThing Mobile upgrade for iPhone

2008-08-11T13:49:00.004-04:00

A number of users have noticed that LibraryThing mobile (http://www.librarything.com/m/) looked weird on iPhones. We made a few changes and it now looks right.

We are, of course looking at more consequential upgrades. The main issue right now is the lack of an ability to add items to LibraryThing. Anyway, that's what I want to do—add books while standing at a bookstore, for example.

Series, Awards, Characters, Places

2008-08-11T02:59:00.007-04:00

Some time ago we added pages for series. We've now added pages for three other Common Knowledge fields: Awards, Important Places and People/Characters.

All four page types, together with the author pages, now also sport extensive cross-linking, so you can get from Stephen King to the Bram Stoker Awards to Hannibal Lecter to the Marquis de Sade to Cornwall to Guenevere. (Bonus points if you can get back!)

Here are some observations on the various page types:

Awards. Awards are important to a lot of readers. Personally I have no use for them, but they're fun to browse through. And there are so many! Sure, we've all heard of the British Book Awards or the Hugo. But how about the Compton Crook Award, Macavity Award or Printz Award?

Places. Some of the most interesting places are the small ones. Paris is already too much, and even Philadelphia. But Antarctica is small enough to take in, and large enough to be interesting. So too Martha's Vineyard and Petra, Jordan (one part Left Behind, one part Indiana Jones and another academic).

But we need more for Faerie, Hell and particularly Moldova. As for Nuevo Rico, where are the Nuevo Ricans!

Speaking of odd, The Playboy Mansion is currently occupied by Shel Silverstein. What?

Series. Series pages aren't new. But I might as well drop that series are the most complete, best Common Knowledge data. It's not just Harry Potter, Star Wars or His Dark Materials, but also New American Nation, Time-Life: Mysteries of the Unknown and Hellenistic Culture and Society.

People/Characters. A lot of fun can be had here, particularly with characters that cross between fiction and non-fiction, like Lincoln and Alexander the Great and Pope Alexander VI. You will, of course, find familiar faces like Jack Aubrey, Gandalf and Sherlock Holmes.

Fun can be had with minor characters. Take Reepicheep from the Chronicles of Narnia. Can you remember which books he appears in? (It's Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Last Battle; if you found that easy, how about Jill Pole?)

The "related" boxes can show up scarce data. For example, right now God is showing up related to 69 individuals. Jesus is number one, but he's followed by Bernice Summerfield, apparently a character in Doctor Who. (Incidentally, Jesus is somewhat split between Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus Christ, etc.)

Post here or discuss on Talk.

Tim is gone! Incidentally, I am now on an official "code holiday." I have at least three days without any obligations whatsoever, and I intend to stay in, order pizza, stop answering the door, stop answering the phone, stop writing on Talk, and even—gasp!—stop answering email. I may even put one of those "vacation auto-reply" messages up. After three days, I hope I have something.

First and last words

2008-08-11T02:38:00.002-04:00

"Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians."

Recognize that sentence? It is, of course, from Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. How about?

"Now, what I want is, Facts."

That's from Dickens, Hard Times.

We just introduced new work-based Common Knowledge fields for "First words" and "Last words." In the medium-to-long term, I'd love to work the data into a game—pick the sentence that goes with the work. If you're not comparing computer manuals to novels, it can be hard.

Find out more here.

A million free covers from LibraryThing

2008-08-07T12:37:00.007-04:00

A few days ago, just before hitting thirty million books, we hit one million user-uploaded covers. So, we've decided to give them away—to libraries, to bookstores, to everyone.

The basics. The process, patterned after the Amazon.com cover service, is simplicity itself:

Take an ISBN, like 0545010225
Put your Developer Key and the ISBN into a URL, like so:
http://covers.librarything.com/devkey/KEY
/medium/isbn/0545010225
Put that in an image tag, like so:
<img src="http://covers.librarything.com/devkey/KEY/medium/isbn/0545010225">
And your website, library catalog or bookstore has a cover.

Easy details. Each cover comes in three sizes. Just replace "medium" with "small" or "large."

As with Amazon, if we don't have a cover for the book, we return a transparent 1x1 pixel GIF image. So you can put the cover-image on OPAC pages without knowing if we have the image. If we have it, it shows; if we don't, it doesn't.

The Catch? To get covers, you'll need a LibraryThing Developer Key—any member can get one. This puts a top limit on the number of covers you can retrieve per day—currently 1,000 covers. In fact, we only count it when a cover is made from the original, o our actual limit will be much higher. We encourage you to cache the files locally.

You also agree to some very limited terms:

You do not make LibraryThing cover images available to others in bulk. But you may cache bulk quantities of covers.
Use does not involve or promote a LibraryThing competitor.
If covers are fetched through an automatic process (eg., not by people hitting a web page), you may not fetch more than one cover per second.

You will note that unlike the new API to our Common Knowledge data, you are not required to link back to LibraryThing. But we would certainly appreciate it.

Caveats. Some caveats:

At present only about 913,000 covers are accessible, the others being non-ISBN covers.
Accuracy isn't guaranteed--this is user data--and coverage varies.
Some covers are blurrier than we'd like, particularly at the "large" size. This is sometimes about original files and sometimes about our resizing routines. We're working on the latter.

Why are you doing this? The goal is half promotional and half humanitarian.

First, some background. This service "competes" with Amazons cover service, now part of Amazon Web Services. Amazon's service is, quite simply, better. They have far more covers, and no limit on the number of requests. By changing the URL you can do amazing things to Amazon covers.

The catch is that Amazon's Terms of Service require a link-back. If you're trying to make money from Amazon Affiliates, this is a good thing. But libraries and small bookstores have been understandably wary about linking to Amazon. Recent changes in Amazon's Terms of Service have deepened this worry.

Meanwhile, there are a number of commercial cover providers. They too are probably, on average, better. But they cost money. Not surprisingly many libraries and bookstores skip covers, or paste them in manually from publisher sites.

That's too bad. Publishers and authors want libraries and bookstores to show their covers. Under U.S. law showing covers to show off books for sale, rental or commentary falls under Fair Use in most circumstances. (We are not lawyers and make no warrant that your use will be legal.) We've felt for years that selling covers was a fading business. Serving the files is cheap and getting cheaper. It was time for someone to step up.*

So we're stepping up. We're hoping that by encouraging caching and limiting requests, we can keep our bandwidth charges under control. (If it really spikes, we'll limit new developer keys for a while; if you submit this to Slashdot, we will be Slashdotted for sure!) And it will be good for LibraryThing—another example of our open approach to data. Although none of our competitors do anything like this—indeed our Facebook competitors don't even allow export although, of course, they import LibraryThing files!—we think LibraryThing has always grown, in part, because we were the good guys—more "Do occasional good" than "Do no evil."

If we build it, they will come. If the service really pick up, we're going to add a way for publishers, bookstores and authors to get in on it. We'd be happy to trade some bandwidth out for what publishers know—high-quality covers, author photos, release dates and so forth. We've already worked with some publisher data, but we'd love to do more with it.

*In the past, we had been talking to the Open Libary project about a joint effort. We even sent them all our covers and a key to the identifiers that linked them. But nothing came of it. To some extent that was our fault, and to some extent not. (I think them and us would differ on the blame here.) In any case, I was tired of the time and transactional friction, and wanted to try a different approach.

Thirty Million Books!

2008-08-06T14:57:00.002-04:00

LibraryThing has hit 30,000,000 books cataloged! We also recently hit 1,000,000 user-uploaded covers and 500,000 pieces of Common Knowledge data.* Tags stand just shy of 39 million.

Thirty million—more specifically 30,011,748—was the number of books in the Library of Congress, the largest "real" library in the world. Having passed two and three—Harvard and the Boston Public Library—our sights were on the LC. But the LC grew and the number changed (see ALA fact sheet), and now they have 32,124,001 books (the one at the end is priceless). So it'll be another month or so before we surpass them.**

The thirty-millionth book was The Making of a Surgeon by William A. Nolan (Wikipedia). It was entered by new member RobGillespie, and tagged "biography, medicine, surgery." Rob gets a free account.

The Making of a Surgeon, a landmark 1968 personal account, represents one of LibraryThing's strengths well. Amazon lists it at 393,843, but it's 74,730 on LibraryThing and in 1,300 WorldCat libraries. So, while it may not be selling well this year, it's on a lot of shelves and "in a lot of heads." If your surgeon went to school in the 1970s, there's a good chance he read it, much as doctor today might be reading Atul Gawande. One doctor-turned-novelist who read Nolen was Walker Percy, whose library members entered into LibraryThing. Small world.

The book is even more appropriate in light of the current publisher, Mid-List Press. Mid-List, a Minnesota non-profit publisher***, focuses on a segment of the book world, arguing:

"In the past, publishers built their reputations on midlist books. In recent years, however, such factors as the enormous prices paid for high-profile “frontlist” books and the growing domination of mass merchandisers have eaten away at the traditional support for the midlist."

My take is somewhat more optimistic—that the logic of the Long Tail is and will open up demand for mid-list and "bottom-of-list" titles. LibraryThing has a part in that too. One reason people read bestsellers is to talk about them with others. Sites like LibraryThing make it possible to have that sort of shared reading experience well down the Long Tail.

The hub of the Hub of the universe (Credit)

*In commemoration of the Common Knowledge milestone, we have released all the data VIA a free, creative-commons-licensed API. There's more free data coming soon—rhymes with "hovers." We're doing load-testing now.
**For the record, I am under no illusion LibraryThing is "as good" as the LC, or even as big in any real sense. For starters, we have a lot of duplicates—the unique count is more like five million. From a database and programming perspective, however, the number is fun.
***Among Mid-List's many books, I noticed The Writers' Brush (LT), a book of artwork by famous writers, which promises access to "the manuscript sketches that Fyodor Dostoevsky made of his characters, or the can-can dancers secretly drawn by Joseph Conrad."

Free Web Services API to Common Knowledge

2008-08-01T13:46:00.006-04:00

Introducing the LibraryThing Web Services API.

The API will eventually do many things.

For starters it includes all of the data in LibraryThing's Common Knowledge project, our groundbreaking "fielded wiki" for interesting book information (see original blog post). It includes fields like series, important characters, important places, author dates, author burial places, agents, edits, etc. If you're interested in building or enhancing book-data applications, this should be very interesting.

Common Knowledge is always in progress, but the results so far have been quite impressive. Members have made over 500,000 edits, and certain data types have become exceedingly useful and comprehensive. I'm particularly proud of our Series coverage (eg., Star Wars), better—we think—than any commercial series data.

Oh, and it's free! The data is made available under the highly permissive Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.

Architecturally, the Web Services API is a straightforward REST XML-based API. The back-end is modular, allowing us to easily expand the available methods in the future. It's request and response styles were modeled closely on Flickr's API—Chris is a big fan—so it should make it easier to find similar sample code. The documentation resembles theirs too.

Kudos to Chris for his work on this and let us know what you think (here).

Update: The other big announcement—another data release—won't be happening today. Too much to do!

Abebooks news: The scoop for LibraryThing

2008-08-01T09:20:00.005-04:00

Today Abebooks, the Canadian bookseller, announced that it was being acquired by Amazon, a company that needs little introduction. (See Amazon press release.)

Abebooks owns a minority stake in LibraryThing. This means that, after regulatory approval and finalization, Amazon will become, through Abebooks, a minority investor in LibraryThing.

I congratulate Amazon on a shrewd acquisition. Abebooks is a great company, full of wonderful people. They have accomplished great things (link). I have no inside info, but I can foresee Amazon's extraordinary technical infrastructure giving Abe a big lift.
Here's the scoop:

LibraryThing did not have any knowledge of or influence over this deal.
The majority of LibraryThing is in my hands. Abebooks holds a minority of the shares, with certain notable but limited rights. This situation does not change when Amazon acquires Abebooks.
Amazon will not get access to your data. The LibraryThing/Abebooks terms are specific. Abe gets only anonymized and aggregate data, like recommendations, and they can only use it on Abebooks sites (eg., Abebooks.com, Abebooks.de). Nothing has changed here.
Abebooks customers won't see much a difference. The name will survive and the Abebooks.com site will continue. Both employees and management will remain in Canada.
LibraryThing remains LibraryThing. We will continue to uphold and advance LibraryThing values, including open data, strict privacy rules and support for libraries and independent bookstores.

As always, I want your feedback on how to make LibraryThing the best book site on the web. I've started a Talk post to talk about all of this, or you can comment here.

Stay tuned for two more blog posts, both major. We have rushed two projects forward that demonstrate LibraryThing's commitment to open data and support for libraries and other book lovers.

Tim Spalding

Updates:

Check out the blog post of Boris Wertz, long-time COO of Abe and co-founder of JustBooks.
Local Victoria TV has a story with a good photo of Hannes, the CEO.
It's funny to watch the news fly by. 90% of the news stories rehash the press release without pointing to it, as if they are engaging in reporting. Odd

Twilight Review Contest

2008-07-31T14:02:00.003-04:00

In mere hours (at midnight on Friday night), the fourth book in the Twilight Saga, Breaking Dawn will be released. And I'm sure I won't be the only person up reading all weekend, and then waiting to talk about it as soon as I'm finished.

We figured it was a good time to have another review contest! We did this before when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out, and it was great fun.

The prizes:

Three reviewers will get a $50 gift certificate to Amazon, Abebooks, Booksense, or any independent bookseller of their choice, a LibraryThing t-shirt and a free membership (to keep or give away).
Seven reviewers will will win a LibraryThing t-shirt and a free membership (to keep or give away).
Forty reviewers will get a free membership

That's right, that's FIFTY winners.

How the winners will be chosen:

The top three reviews--with the most thumbs-up--will get the big prize. The next seven will get the next prize.
The remaining forty winners will be randomly picked from all members who both wrote a review and voted for others' reviews.

So, when you finish reading, get writing! When you're done writing, take some time to read other reviews, and give the thumbs-up to the ones you think deserve it.

The contest ends on Friday, August 15th.

And then? Well, there are a ton of Twilight groups where you can stop by and join a discussion on Breaking Dawn, Bella, Edward, Jacob, and more. Here are a few:

LibraryThing for Libraries now found in FictionDB

2008-07-31T12:48:00.007-04:00

LibraryThing for Libraries, our library catalog enhancer, can now be found bulking up knowledge at the website FictionDB.

FictionDB, which has been around since 1999 (which is about 49 Internet years), started out as a romance fiction database, and has grown to include the suspense, western, and speculative genres.

LibraryThing for Libraries is a set of enhancements that can be added to an existing database to show tag clouds and recommended titles. (FictionDB calls it "Read These Yet?", which I love.)

Check out how the whole thing mashes up with the novel Dead Until Dark, and read more about our partnership at the FictionDB blog.

Legacy Libraries: Call for Volunteers

2008-07-28T06:07:00.003-04:00

As LT's Legacy Libraries project continues to expand in scope (21 libraries have now been completed, with 27 more underway) and visibility (see Tim's blog-post from Wednesday and this Talk thread), we're always looking for a few good volunteers to assist in the various cataloging efforts. One of the most impressive things about these projects is the way people have come together to bring these fascinating collections into LT, creating a vibrant bibliosphere by making connections between books and their readers across time and space in new and really exciting ways.

There are a wide variety of open projects that could use some assistance, which I've listed below with contact info for the applicable 'project managers.' If you'd like to help out with any project, drop them (or me) a profile-message and we'll provide you with all the necessary background and info. You can be as active as you like, there's no need for a major time commitment (unless you're so inclined, of course!).

Benjamin Franklin - See the LT group; contact Katya0133 or pdxwoman.
Carl Sandburg - Contact KCGordon.
Sir Walter Scott - Contact thorold.
B.H. Liddell-Hart - Contact jmnlman or donogh.
W.B. Yeats - See this Talk thread.
Theodore Dreiser - Contact brandonw.
John Dee - Contact jbd1.
Willa Cather - See the LT group.
William Congreve - See this Talk thread; contact prosfilaes.

Even beyond these, there are a small number of projects which are currently quiet; if you're interested in picking up where others left off, contact me and we'll get that set up.

Anyone should also feel free to add to the list of proposed libraries on the project wiki, and if you're interested in starting a project, just follow the steps outlined in the Cataloging Guide or contact me for additional info on getting underway.

Back in May, in preparation for writing an article about the Legacies projects, I asked the members of the ISDPB group "What's your motivation?" All of the responses were great, but my favorite came from jjlong, who said in part "I do feel like I'm contributing to something lasting.... sometime, somewhere, someone will want to know - out of scholarly, or personal, interest - what poets John Muir read, which Spanish Civil War books Hemingway owned, what Adams read in French. Used to be you'd have to trek to a library in Boston or Washington or London, or try to run down a copy of, say, Millicent Sowerby's book; we're making this information available to anyone, anywhere - and, more importantly, in an easily searchable and browsable form, filled with links, statistics, covers, author info (thanks to LT)."

Couldn't say it better myself. But don't take our word for it - jump in and see for yourself!

Book pile contest, redux

2008-07-24T01:53:00.001-04:00

Chris and I managed to bury the lead, too quickly. Check it out, there is a Book Pile Contest going on.

Recently tagged gets sexier

2008-07-24T01:41:00.004-04:00

Chris did some very elegant work, redoing the "recently tagged" section of tag pages.

The new version brings back the RSS feed, disabled for a time for performance reasons. But it also looks much better, and is more informative, using the code from the home page "Tag Watch."

Some examples: European history, Star Wars, chick lit, steampunk.

Discuss.

Who has a book?

2008-07-23T21:47:00.004-04:00

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.

Book pile contest

2008-07-23T17:17:00.002-04:00

It's been a while since we've had a bookpile contest, so we figure it's time to bring back that LibraryThing tradition. We're also nearing the 30 million books milestone as well as coming up on our third anniversary—time to start celebrating!

As you know, we've been doing a lot of work on the home page lately. As we announced last month, every member now has a personalized, customizable home page. Next up is redesigning the home page that everyone sees when they first visit LibraryThing (the signed out home page). We're considering a new book pile (see the current one to the right)—that's where you come in. We're not guaranteeing we'll use it, but we figured we'd see what LibraryThing members can come up with!

So, the contest! We want book piles. Remember, your pile should represent LibraryThing itself, however you choose to interpret it (is it all about the cataloging for you? The talking about books? Connecting with other members?). Given the international flavor of LibraryThing, extra points if you include non-English books in the pile as well.

The rules

Post your photos to Flickr and tag them "LTbookpile" (also tag them "LibraryThing"). If you make a new account it can take a few days for your photos to be publicly accessible, so post a URL to them in the comments here.
Or, post your photos on WikiThing here.
Or, if all else fails, just email them to abby@librarything.com and I'll post them for you.

The deadline
Get your photos in by Friday, August 15th at noon EDT.

The prizes

One grand prize winner will receive a LibraryThing tshirt, a CueCat barcode scanner, and a gift membership.
One runner up will get a gift membership.

Bonus batch of Early Reviewer books

2008-07-21T13:26:00.001-04:00

We've got three books in July's bonus batch of Early Reviewer books this month, and a total of 200 copies! Two books are from Random House (thanks as always), and one is being given away by Miramax Films (see the blog post).

So, visit the Early Reviewer page to request your copy—the deadline for requests is this Friday, July 25th at 6pm EST.

Remember, bonus batches are treated as entirely separate from the regular batch of Early Reviewer books. That means it's possible to win a book from both the regular batch *and* the bonus batch. Good luck!

Brideshead Revisted giveaway

2008-07-21T13:18:00.003-04:00

Miramax Films is giving us 25 copies of Brideshead Revisted to give out as Early Reviewer books! The movie adaptation comes out in theaters July 25th, and I for one plan on going.*

Check out the Early Reviewers page to request a copy.

So, what's your stance - read the book before seeing them movie, or after? Ok, I realize the book was popular long before the movie ever was in the making, but for those who haven't read it yet, what's the plan? (Weigh in here, in "What's better: reading the book first before watching the movie, or vice versa?")

For more discussion on movies adapted from books, try the Made into a Movie group.

*The site for the movie has a link for advance screenings, which is always fun!

The Guardian on "I See Dead People's Books" / Wikimania

2008-07-15T07:22:00.004-04:00

Graeme Allister of The Guardian's Books blog did a sweet piece on the Legacy Library project, pointing out some wonderful incongruities:

"[I]t's a fascinating glimpse into a writer when an incongruous book appears; as the poet responsible for some of the 20th century's most heart-rending poems, a celebration of the Marx Brothers was a treat to see on W. H. Auden's shelves."

Legacy Libraries is a typical LibraryThing side-project—interesting, slightly off-kilter and stitched together by a cadre of passionate obsessives. (Its leader and most passionate cataloger is Jeremy Dibbell.) Like LibraryThing itself, it was laughed-off initially but is growing into something more than anyone expected.

I think I know why. On the web more is different and connected is different. Most—but not all—the Legacy Libraries were available in some offline form. You could, for example, find Sowerby's printed catalog of Thomas Jefferson's books in most research libraries. But something new happens on when anyone, from a high school student to you, whoever you are, can browse and search Jefferson's books, in his classification and with his notes, at any time of the day, stack your own books up against Jefferson's, or compare both to scores of other famous statesmen, writers, queens, pornographers and rappers.

In other news, I'm currently on a train to New York, from which I fly to Athens, with a day-long layover, and then Alexandria, Egypt, where I am due to talk at Wikimania 2008, the annual Wikipedia/Wikimedia conference. I'm talking on "LibraryThing and Social Cataloging."

I plan to center my talk on how LibraryThing's social production, or "Social Cataloging," stacks up against the Wikipedia model and similar projects. I think there are some interesting similarities, and more interesting departures.

For more thoughts on Wikimania and Wikipedia see Thingology.

More Early Reviewers books and buzz

2008-07-09T14:39:00.001-04:00

We have two last-minute additions to July's batch of Early Reviewer books, and some scandalous book news to report.

The new books
The new additions are American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld, and Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg. So go run and request them!

The buzz
American Wife has been generating a lot of buzz lately (see Wonkette, Radar). It's a work of fiction, loosely based on Laura Bush's life. This morning, Maureen Dowd wrote about it in The New York Times, saying

"It's the sort of novel Laura Bush might curl up with in the White House solarium if it were not about Laura Bush. It would be interesting to hear how that lover of fiction feels about being the subject of fiction."

Another July Early Reviewer book, The Winds of Tara is also buzz-worthy. The Winds of Tara is the unauthorized sequel to Gone with the Wind—so unauthorized that (according to Wikipedia) copyright holders blocked US distribution of the book and bookstores had to pull it from the shelves. You'll note that it's being offered to Early Reviewers only to Australians, by an Australian publisher, Fontaine Press.

July Early Reviewers

2008-07-08T15:57:00.002-04:00

July's huge batch of Early Reviewer books is up! We've got 68 books this month, and a grand total 1,629 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

The deadline to request a copy is Friday, July 18th at 6pm EDT.

Eligiblity:
Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia, and Israel! Make sure to check the flags by each book to see if it can be sent to your country.

Thanks to all the publishers, new and old!

Andrews McMeel Publishing	B&H Publishing Group	Ballantine Books
Bantam	Bethany House	Candlewick
Delacorte Press	Fontaine Press	Frog Books
Gefen Publishing House	Harper	HarperLuxe
Hyperion Books	Leisure	Lifetime Media
Loving Healing Press	Modern History Press	New York Review Books
North Atlantic Books	Other Press	Picador
Picnic Publishing	PublicAffairs	Simon & Schuster
Solaris	Spellbinder Press	St. Martin's Griffin
St. Martin's Minotaur	Steerforth	The Dial Press
Thomas Dunne Books	Toby Press	University of Chicago Press
Vertical	Vertigo	William Morrow
Wizards of the Coast

Introducing the LibraryThing books API

2008-07-06T01:38:00.004-04:00

See bottom of post for updates...

I've just finished a first draft of a JSON-based API for book data, created a test page and typed up some basic documentation.

What is this for? The API gives you Javascript access to your book data. The most obvious use of this would be to create new, much better widgets. At first, we expect this to interest programmers, but as new widgets are developed, non-programmers will get cool things. I started by redoing our traditional widgets in a new way here. That's the base, not the ceiling!

How does it work? Every user can retrieve their data, in JSON format—basically as a ready-made JavaScript data structure. You control what is returned—books, tags, ratings, etc.—how it's sorted and so forth. By default we give you a standard library of functions to parse and display the data. You can use it, build on it or start from scratch. Find out more here.

What's great? All our code for processing the JSON API has been and will be released as open source—available for use, reuse and modification. Better—since we're not the best programmers, particularly in JavaScript!—we are requiring any software that builds upon the API to be released under similar terms, so everyone can take advantage of improvements and advances.

Does this make code look sexy?

What's the catch? The API is not intended for making backups or exporting your data to other programs. For that, use our CSV and TSV export functions, from the Tools tab. We are licensing the JSON API for browser-use only. This is about our data licenses. In-browser widgets have never drawn ire from our data providers.

Where can this go? This is just getting started. Everything can be expanded and improved. As members want new or different data, I will be only too happy to add it to the API. But the most interesting development will probably come from members, not LibraryThing employees.

I have created a LibraryThing API Development group to discuss the API, work through code and come up with new ideas.

At a minimum, I can see:

New widget types, like widgets showing your most recent reviews.
Widgets that take you to libraries, and other places other than LibraryThing. (Libraries have been clamoring for this for ages. Many use LibraryThing to feature new books on the website, and want the links to go to their catalog, not LibraryThing.)
New result sets, for your tags or authors (separate from our books), your book's works, series info, etc.
Integration with other JS-based APIs, like Google Book Search.

What if I'm not a programmer? No problem. Come and LibraryThing API Developmenttell us what you want. We'll help you, or maybe someone else will.

UPDATE: I've made some changes to the programming, changing how the code is structured and adding result sets for reading dates. We also have the first outside use of the API, a very promising—if not perfect—cover flip test by MMcM (here). Follow what's going on in the LibraryThing API Development group.

Author Chat

2008-07-01T13:24:00.004-04:00

Our Author Chat feature is going strong! Stop by the Author Chat group right now to talk to a slew of authors:

Chat with Magdalena Ball, author of Sleep Before Evening
Chat with Nadia Brown, author of Unscrambled Eggs
Chat with Michael P. Naughton, author of Deathryde: Rebel Without a Corpse
Chat with Stephen Evans, author of The Marriage of True Minds
Chat with Ori Brafman, author of Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior
Chat with Meg Waite Clayton, author of The Wednesday Sisters
Chat with Kaui Hemmings, author of The Descendants

We also have a list of upcoming chats posted, so you can plan ahead (go read/borrow/buy the book in advance of the chat!)

Member home pages

2008-06-21T15:29:00.002-04:00

Chris and I have finished up a neat, possibly major new feature: home pages for each member. We think it's going to make LibraryThing a lot more dynamic, while not compromising our strong basis and roots in unchecked, unapologetic bibliophilia.

I made a short screencast about it if, you know, reading gets you down.

The basic idea was to give members a "center" from which to visit the rest of the site. Until now, sign-in threw you into your catalog. New members went to a special welcome page. And the profile also felt like a center.

The new profile centers you. It offers pieces or "windows" into the site—your library, your connections, your recommendations, Talk, hot books, hot reviews, Early Reviewers and so forth. It gives you an idea of how much LibraryThing has to offer. But, it's also editable, so you can control how much of each piece you want to see, and even remove the ones you don't care about. (Anyway, that's the theory. We haven't implemented reordering and removing the pieces yet, because we want members to tell us what the defaults should be.)

You can check out your Home by going here. Or check out my Home. (Normally you can't see other member's Home pages, but you can see mine!)

Some highlights. Home includes a summary of recent recommendations, so you can keep up-to-date on what LibraryThing has found for you, as well as a very handy Connection news piece. You can decide just what you want to see—new books, ratings, reviews. And you can decide whose news you want to see.

I'm also very taken with the Local events piece, based on LibraryThing Local. It should give Local more prominence. It's really a unique resource—driven by members and more comprehensive than anything out there.

In addition to the "Daily Me" stuff—news about you and your world—Home also provides snapshots of what's happening on the rest of LibraryThing, including a totally new "Popular This Month" list (The Host, of course), a weirdly fascinating up-to-the-second window into books being added to LibraryThing, an area for interesting reviews, a new "On this day" feature that sucks birth- and death-days from Common Knowledge, a peek into the current Early Reviewers batch and some featured LT authors.

In the near future we plan to make the order of pieces editable. For now, though, we'd love some thoughts about the best default order. After all, most users will never change the default.

Other planned improvements include:

Making it the homepage for non-signed-in members too (ie., the right stays the way it is, but the left is taken over with a description of the site).
Adding specialized pieces, like a Combiners! log, a wiki log—whatever you want, in theory.

When it comes to making LT more "current," the aching need, as everyone insists—Sonya has taken to closing every email with a plea—is for collections, particularly a "currently reading" feature. We know, and we're working on it. The Home page isn't complete without it.

Thanks for everyone's help critiquing early drafts of the page. Come talk about what we made in Talk.

UPDATE: The first thread is pushing 250 messages in eight hours. It also got sidetracked into tab issues. (I relented; the Profile tab is back.) So I've started a New Thread about the Home page.

New Feature: Find Friends

2008-06-17T04:01:00.003-04:00

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:

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.
No emails or other data are stored by us.
Emails are only sent once, and can't be resent by you either.*
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.)
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.
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.

*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.