Book suggestions, library suggestions, new membership structure
I've added library suggestions for everyone as well as book recommendations for all books with three or more owners. Both are based on the same "people who own this also own that" algorithm. The library suggestion beta testers are split between those who thought it amazing and those who found it useless; it seems particularly good at guessing the second half of a partially-entered library. As for the book recommendations, I find them randomly either much better or much worse than Amazon's.
Both features will get better as new books are added, but feedback is still much desired.
In other news, LibraryThing had graduated from the initial $10/lifetime plan. The new structure is $10 for a year's membership and $25 for a lifetime membership. Those who have already paid their $10 were, of course, converted to "lifetime" status—my thanks for getting LibraryThing off the ground! This change will guarantee LibraryThing stays around for years to come.
PS: I made some final tweaks to the suggestion algorithm, and erased all the old reports. Incidentally, you may regenerate the report one per day. That gives me 24 hours to add that feature...
Both features will get better as new books are added, but feedback is still much desired.
In other news, LibraryThing had graduated from the initial $10/lifetime plan. The new structure is $10 for a year's membership and $25 for a lifetime membership. Those who have already paid their $10 were, of course, converted to "lifetime" status—my thanks for getting LibraryThing off the ground! This change will guarantee LibraryThing stays around for years to come.
PS: I made some final tweaks to the suggestion algorithm, and erased all the old reports. Incidentally, you may regenerate the report one per day. That gives me 24 hours to add that feature...
posted by Tim at 7:46 AM
38 Comments:
OK, let me be the first to comment on this feature.
1. I like it.
2. It had several books I already own, including some I have already entered and some I haven't. Why does it suggest books already in my libary?
3. The suggestions were all very sensible. I am familiar with at least half but there are quite a few I will check out.
4. Sadly the Dutch poetry syndrome applies. I have a lot of books in foreign languages, nearly all modern, but it only suggested four - one already in my library and two 19th century French novels and one 15th century Italian poem. I assume that this is because few other users have many modern foreign langauge novels.
In conclusion, great idea and well exdcuted.
1. My first attempt generated a list of 75 null entries. Something about divide by zero errors.
2. There seems to be a weakness in the social data comparisons. People who own the same book (same ISBN) are not shown as sharing it if the title is not capitalized the same. For example, "Private Life in the Fifteenth Century: Illustrated Letters of the Paston Family" (from Amazon) is not the same as "Private life in the fifteenth century : illustrated letters of the Paston family." (from LOC) though they have the same ISBN. So one book owned by four people is shown as two books owned by two people.
If the comparison is on the title, suggest making it case-insensitive.
Correction: it was the extraneous space in the title, not capitalization. Any way to ignore spaces?
Sorry for the error, now corrected.
Your similarities problem is because Amazon's edition lacks an author. The similarities works on title and author, not ISBN, vary between hardback and softback, US and UK, not to mention between edition. See the FAQ.
No, I thought it might be the space too, but it ignores spaces. It's the author.
Ah, Amazon is sending the author, but differently. I'll get into it tomorrow. Should be fixable.
A little off topic here but when I click on the 'sort' categories at the top of the column, it doesn't do anything but move the little arrow to that column or switch it from up to down. The column order does not change. Used to work, thought ;)
In other news, the suggestion report seems pretty accurate to me (although it did suggest 1 book I already own) no big there though!
What sort are you clicking on? Any sort? That's mighty odd. Can you try adding www. to the domain? If it doesn't work, tell me your OS and browser. Thanks, Tim
Ditto on the suggestions of books I already own. I noticed at least one the first time through the list.
Thanks for this feature!
How do you turn out so many enhancements in such a short time? I'm impressed.
My experience is that the sort functions work normally when viewing your catalog, but does not work when trying to sort the results of search.
Just tried the suggestions feature. It was pretty accurate for me, although most of the books suggested are ones that I have not yet entered. There were a few that I may try to find as I would be interested in reading them. One benefit: I wondered why my all time favorite regency romance showed up, since I definitey own it. When I checked I discovered that the title came from Amazon wrong and was one of their mistakes I didn't catch. Now corrected so that I show as a User.
Only problem is that the other part [Non-fiction] of our library didn't show as the romance has temporarily overwhelmed it. Could the suggestions feature somehow pick up on this and give a few suggestions for the other areas as well as the biggest? Would ultimately be more useful if all areas with more than, perhaps, 50 or 100 entries got a suggestion.
What if you had a five-star system that weighted books to determine which you'd like in the future, a-la Netflix?
Just thought I'd throw that out.
I've had the 'not sorting' bug before, both on my ordinary catalogue and on search results. Frustrating when you're trying to put, say, a series of titles in publication order to see if you've missed any!
Further experimentation - I can get the 'sort' feature to work with every column in one or another layout (1-5 and custom fields) except for the Summary column. This doesn't work in any of the layouts.
I quite like that suggestion feature. Of course it isn't perfect, but it suggested both things I already know I ought to get and things I'd never heard of!
I'm so pleased with the whole thing: it's hard to get any regular work done because I just want to catalog books.
Question - is power tagging still in the offing?
Love the suggestions for books with three or more owners....the example I looked at was perfectly on target. Really fun to see that this morning, unexpectedly.
Echoing Ed: I'm impressed, too!
Fantastic job. This is one of the most useful online resources since Google and Dictionary.com. I'm kicking myself for not buying my daughters a lifetime membership before the changeover to the new sturcture. Ah, that's life. I'm looking forward to the Forum so I can get a chance to exchange info with other bibliophiles. Is there anyway to gather "unique titles" instead of overall books listed. I see many catalogs with multiple copies of, not only the same book, but also the same edition. I don't know if these are collectors with multiple copies of the same book or if these are just errors in cataloging. I know I have a few duplicate copies of the same book (different editions) but I would find it more informative about another persons library to differentiate the dups from the originals, at least as a reflection of the overall collection. Thanks for the great job, again.
Works rather well. Only a tenth of my library is currently catalogued, but I still decided to try it. Most of the suggestions are books that I actually have, but have not catalogued yet.
This indicates that the suggestions are good.
It does show some books I've already catalogued, though. Probably some subtle difference in the title.
I think I like the suggestion list. Since much of my library is not yet entered, many of the books suggested are books that I own, and it is also true that many are books that I have read and liked, but do not own. (I did notice that a couple of books were listed that I have entered, not sure why that would be.) This means, of course, that it is pretty accurate in figuring out my tastes (with the exception of Hardy and Eliot -- I'm not terribly fond of either).
Much of what I have entered into the system thus far is literature (mostly English and American), so the suggestions are heavy on that. It will be interesting to see how the list changes once I get more books entered from different subject areas.
Hey Laura, what's your user id?
A few comments:
Absolutely love librarything. I avoided cataloging my library for years because it was always so much work, until now. You have done a great job with a great idea, thanks!
The library suggestion feature works very well. It suggested 90 books to me, and almost thirty of them were books I have had in the past, or have right now but haven't loaded yet. Excellent.
A few feature suggestions:
(1) Would like to add my own picture for some books; I have about fifty old or antique books, would be cool to take my own snaps of those books and load them into my catalog.
(2) Would like to be able to add "price paid" for books, or fetch current prices from amazon.com. And export the price to the .csv file.
(3) This is out there: Amazon.com has a "search within the book" feature ... how cool it would be if I could search within the books in my library!
Regards,
Dale
Okay, here is a very dumb question, but I cannot find the "recommendations", only the "suggestions". To make matters worse I did stumble over the "recommendations" this morning, but I cannot now remember where they were. Right out in plain sight, if I recall, but I can't find anything that's labelled "recommendation" now. Where would I find them?
User X has two copies of a book. User Y has one copy of a book.
The system sees three copies. If you are user X, it joins against your second copy and shows you items from your own library.
Apropos the price increase, ISBN search against amazon.co.uk's still broken.
Last night I received this message:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 35 bytes) in /home/virtual/site8/fst/var/www/html/profile_suggestions.php on line 324
Since then, I keep getting the message, 'Your report is not yet ready. Check back in a few minutes.' I tried to generate the list about eighteen hours ago.
My id is millefleurs.
Thank you; this sounds like a wonderful idea!
(Also left as comments.)
afewgoodpens: Thanks for the suggestions. I am investigating all three of them.
klytaimnestra: Sorry. I think I need better names. The library-wide thing is called "suggestions" and can be found from your profile page. There are also book-by-book recommendations for most books. If anyone has better names for this, please let me know. I think I'm a bit close to things to see them right sometimes.
millefleurs: I regenerated it for you. Thanks.
I too initially received the error message and have been patiently checking every few minutes for suggestions. I assumed that with 8,000+ users it might take a while. Does this feature automatically regenerate from time to time, or do you have to reset all the broken ones manually?
Just another rave for "Recommendations based on the book". That's always been my favourite feature at Amazon (I recall spending several hours there, once, just filling in my wishlist). Thanks!
I am so happy that I found out about LibrayThing early and was able to get in on the lifetime fee of $10.00!
You may want to change your front page. It is still showing a lifetime membership at $10.00.
Off the wall question: the "social" icon sometimes shows a "speech baloon" above the heads. What does that signify?
linkmeister: It says "enter as many as you like for $10" You're right that $10 used to get you forever, whereas now it gets you a year. The wording used to say something about lifetime memberships. Most people expect a limited period. Compare "Get the domain you want for only $35!" (forever? no.)
One of my lonelies has the "talk balloon" and I haven't done a review of it...
Library Suggestions - great! An indication of its worth might be seen in the fact that it has recommended quite a few books I do have, but haven't yet catalogued. Keep up the good work.
I'm a bit puzzled by the suggestions list. As I noted in a separate thread, at least two-thirds are books that I owned previously. So in terms of anticipating what my tastes *have been*, the list is pretty accurate.
The thing is, these suggestions consist largely of fiction (particularly literary classics). Since I've catalogued relatively few of these (I think!), I'm not quite sure why so many of this genre are turning up in my suggestions list. I'm more of a non-fiction reader, these days. Unless the suggestions list is trying to "improve" me...? ;-)
So in terms of future usefulness, this feature is a bit "eh" - for now. But it *is* an interesting idea, and I like it a lot. Will return and refresh periodically to see if it changes!
Not only does the "recommendations" feature (the "People who own book X also own book Y" one) give me books that are in my library, it gives me suggestions BASED on my library (that is, where I am the only person to own both X and Y; and yes, I only have one copy of either!) I assume you're doing this so that you just need to generate one list of "recommendations associated with Book X", rather than "recommendations for User Z associated with Book X", (that must save a lot of processor time) but you may want to make it clear that's what you're doing.
LibraryThing,
Odd as this may sound, I'm quite glad you raised prices (though since I hadn't purchased the lifetime membership yet, this will involve coughing up a bit more). This is a wonderful tool you've put together, and my only fear has been that once you get swamped with all us bibliophiles you will not have enough resources for the money you're making and end up being driven under.
Awesome service.
Total number of suggestions ... 84
Hit (I own it but not yet on LT)..10
Not (yet) own it ...74
Intriguing ... 11
Interesting ... 21
So-so ... 32
OK except I dont like C/C++ ... 8
Rejected ... 2 (Dilbert, Harry Potter)
Conclusion
Pretty impressive
BUT - LibraryThing is still not able to find 168 of my books which I _know_ available at http://webservices.amazon.fr/onca/xml
Dang. Just a few days too late on getting the lifetime for $10. Oh, well! :)
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