State of the Thing, Month 2
This innaugurates a new tradition: a monthly "state of the state" for LibraryThing. I've added a checkbox in "edit profile" in case you want to get this by mail. The default is "off," of course!
Massive growth. What launched two months ago as a folly has become something of a hit. With no advertising and no coverage in the offline press*, LibraryThing has shot to 9,000 users and 665,000 books. It will surely hit a million before Christmas. Today it even nosed into the Alexa top 10,000.
Whether by luck or tireless improvement, LibraryThing has largely bested a surge of recent launches, none of which exceeds 50,000 books. (Veteran Bibliophil, online since December 2001, has 306,000 books.) Particularly gratifying has been the lack of significant damage from "Bookshelf," one of the two showcase aps launched with Ning, the hot, well-funded startup of Marc Andreesen, the founder of Netscape. Ning gave me sleepless nights, but now, as I joked to a friend, there are two people who've beat Andreesen—Bill Gates and me.**
In all, LibraryThing is now one of the top non-commercial book sites on the web. Here is Alexa's ranking chart, comparing it with BookCrossing, a much-loved and world-spanning project where you "read and release" books.
I mention this not because BookCrossing is a competitor—not at all—but because BookCrossing has received a huge amount of press. Won't someone write an article about LibraryThing? David Pogue, Xeni Jardin, Walter Mossberg, Hiyawatha Bray—where are you?*** There's something really cool going on here!
New features. In the last month I have added the following major features, and some minor ones.
An aside: I used to work on software that users mostly hated. We didn't solicit suggestions and a thick, outsourced layer of "tech support" kept complaints at bay. When we needed reactions we assembled paid focus groups and sat behind glass screens while some (outsourced) expert bumbled through our software. Developing LibraryThing has been a transformative experience. I will never EVER develop software like that again.
Conclusion. In conclusion, the state of the thing is strong! Thank for you using it, and happy cataloging.
*Excepting an article in Brazil and rumors of one in Italy, two countries for which LibraryThing has no library. I'm not sure if Andrew Brown's excellent piece in the Guardian's email digest "The Wrap" counts as mainstream media, but it was online mainstream media.
**Speaking of Bill Gates, don't imagine LibraryThing is making me rich. Far from it. The reward has been that, at least for now, I no longer feel guilty about working on it. That's good, as I basically work on it every waking hour.
***Maybe I can call up Randall Schwartz again—he must know one of them. Randall Schwartz! Randall L. Schwartz! Learning Perl! From the dark aether I call you! Ia Ia Cthulhu fhtagn!
Massive growth. What launched two months ago as a folly has become something of a hit. With no advertising and no coverage in the offline press*, LibraryThing has shot to 9,000 users and 665,000 books. It will surely hit a million before Christmas. Today it even nosed into the Alexa top 10,000.
Whether by luck or tireless improvement, LibraryThing has largely bested a surge of recent launches, none of which exceeds 50,000 books. (Veteran Bibliophil, online since December 2001, has 306,000 books.) Particularly gratifying has been the lack of significant damage from "Bookshelf," one of the two showcase aps launched with Ning, the hot, well-funded startup of Marc Andreesen, the founder of Netscape. Ning gave me sleepless nights, but now, as I joked to a friend, there are two people who've beat Andreesen—Bill Gates and me.**
In all, LibraryThing is now one of the top non-commercial book sites on the web. Here is Alexa's ranking chart, comparing it with BookCrossing, a much-loved and world-spanning project where you "read and release" books.
I mention this not because BookCrossing is a competitor—not at all—but because BookCrossing has received a huge amount of press. Won't someone write an article about LibraryThing? David Pogue, Xeni Jardin, Walter Mossberg, Hiyawatha Bray—where are you?*** There's something really cool going on here!
New features. In the last month I have added the following major features, and some minor ones.
- Power editing, so you can tag a whole bunch of books at a time
- Book-by-book suggestions based on LibraryThing users data
- Detailed book suggestions based on your entire library's contents
- Five-star book rating, with a nifty AJAX implementation
- RSS feeds, presently restricted to recent additions
- Better search functionality
- "Groups" or "tribes," so book clubs, offices, clubs and others can create "virtual libraries"
- A way to handle "wishlists" and other non-owned books
- Giving every book full cataloging data (LC subjects, Deweys, etc.), even if the initial data came from Amazon
- RSS feeds for every catalog page and for a number of other pages
- Improved "folksonomy" support, including pages for tags
- Author pages
- A user forum
An aside: I used to work on software that users mostly hated. We didn't solicit suggestions and a thick, outsourced layer of "tech support" kept complaints at bay. When we needed reactions we assembled paid focus groups and sat behind glass screens while some (outsourced) expert bumbled through our software. Developing LibraryThing has been a transformative experience. I will never EVER develop software like that again.
Conclusion. In conclusion, the state of the thing is strong! Thank for you using it, and happy cataloging.
*Excepting an article in Brazil and rumors of one in Italy, two countries for which LibraryThing has no library. I'm not sure if Andrew Brown's excellent piece in the Guardian's email digest "The Wrap" counts as mainstream media, but it was online mainstream media.
**Speaking of Bill Gates, don't imagine LibraryThing is making me rich. Far from it. The reward has been that, at least for now, I no longer feel guilty about working on it. That's good, as I basically work on it every waking hour.
***Maybe I can call up Randall Schwartz again—he must know one of them. Randall Schwartz! Randall L. Schwartz! Learning Perl! From the dark aether I call you! Ia Ia Cthulhu fhtagn!
posted by Tim at 7:36 PM
39 Comments:
I just discovered LibraryThing last night and have already blogged about how cool it is! Keep up the good work!
Glennette
http://www.premiumwebdesign.com/
http://premiumweb.blogspot.com/
I saw 'a way to handle wishlists and other non-owned books' on the list of coming improvements, and nearly fell out of my chair, clapping!!!!!
Applause, applause! I can't wait!
And, incidentally - congratulations!
Got your reply on my blog. You are very welcome! Sorry, didn't think to post my username. It's premiumweb so the URL to my catalog is http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=premiumweb - There's not much there yet though cause my time is very limited and I'm too lazy to go in the other room and see what all books I have. Two bookshelves full!
P.S. Regarding the flash: I usually outsource it to my flash contractor. Send me more details from the quote request form on my site and I'll see what I can do!
Actually, I was alerted to your existence via a news search I've been working on at work (I'm a librarian - go figure!). The Dallas Morning News had a little piece on you on October 24th:
http://www.quickdfw.com/biz/stories/DN-biz--column24ick.ART.State.Edition1.9437806.html
Press! It's a lovely thing. :)
- a new user, meganlibrarian
Yipes, I didn't see that. I'll put it up on the buzz page.
It's amazing how the press doesn't impact the blogosphere. I monitor between 5 and 50 postings about LT every day. Not one has mentioned learning about it from the Dallas Morning News. Nor did I find it on Google news, because they put a space in the domain name. (I'm tied of reading pages where people talk about having to go to the "library thing" this weekend.)
Tim
Well, I finally got off the waiting list at Ning, but I don't think I could keep up with you even if I had time to keep up with you. So I guess I'll just wait and see what happens with LT next! :)
What were you wanting to make there? They started off with "bookshelf" and "superhero dating." They promoted how you could make your own Match.com, Flickr, Delicious, etc. But they copied LibraryThing instead...
Yeah, I have an alert on it. That article doesn't show up on Google news...
You seem to be getting some Libarythingers from the Stumbleupon blog www.stumbleupon.com . I found LibraryThing there recommended by EdwardLacy and it's getting plenty of thumbs up.
Best regards, Mark (Miro)
Ah, this is terribly addictive! "Where have you been all my life?"
I tried the suggestions tool - very accurate, threw up lots of titles physically on my shelves but not added yet to my catalogue! (Am I thrilled or offended - too predictible??)
As a frantic Bookcrosser and Freecycler, I am rpoud to add Librarythinger to my list - would love a banner-type link to pop on my web pages to spread the word!
Thanks. It's funny. When people haven't finished their library it gives them lots of books they haven't entered yet. Then when they finish they say, "oh, I would never read that." Some sort of illogic there, I think.
Thanks for dropping by. Since I do it for every BookCrosser, let me beg for your opinion how the two could interoperate. Is adding a BCID enough? Anything else that would be of interest? How about Freecycle?
Banners and other promotional thingies coming up!
Thanks,
Tim
PS: Leave your username next time so I can reply directly?
I took Ning's Bookshelf for a test drive, and it doesn't hold a candle to LT. Thanks for letting us know what you're developing for the future. LT just keeps getting better and better!
Since I do it for every BookCrosser, let me beg for your opinion how the two could interoperate. Is adding a BCID enough?
I'm a BCer, too (mojosmom over there - I have to give the cats equal time!) and I'm happy to muse on the topic.
Herewith, my musings (others are free to, and probably will, disagree):
There is a fundamental difference in the way I use this site and the way I use BC. I see LibraryThing as a way to catalogue those books that I intend to keep. It gives me the ability to quickly and easily get a list of all my books with a certain author, illustrator(I list them under "other authors"), topic, etc.
BC, with some exceptions, is the place where I journal books that I will or may release in the wild or to other BCers, and books I've received from them. I say there are exceptions because, before LibraryThing, I had begun to list some of my permanent collection there, just to have a record. But it's not my primary, or even an important, use of that site.
That said, others use their BC shelves and their LibraryThing shelves differently, and that interoperationality (is that really a word? ~smile~) will be important as you develop uses for this site, such as wishlists or reviewing books read but not owned, that don't depend on ownership.
In that case, having the ability to indicate a BCID would be great. A big caveat: be sure not to do so in such a way that the full BCID is visible to anyone but the owner. Having the full BCID allows one to make a journal entry on BC, and those are intended to be restricted to people who have actually had the book. So you might want to do it in such a way that the person simply creates a link to their journal entries. I have done that for a few of my books here where I had a very long review in my BC journal entry, so I simply entered the URL in the "review" field (like this one: http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?book=531720&referpage=users.php&mode=social)
I've rambled enough, so I'll shut up now!
Wishlists *and* forums *and* tribes -- you read my mind. Bravo, and thank you!
A four-letter-minimum SQL search term blip I just found - Gas And Air (ISBN: 074755823X) doesn't show up as a shared book even though at least two of us have a copy of the same edition... presumably because all three words are three letters long! (I don't have an author listed on my copy, because it's an 'edited by' collaboration and I haven't got around to adding all the other authors yet, but searching on 'margo daly' brings up the other copy listed.)
Yes, it would be fun to be able to link over to a BC entry in conjunction with books of the kind "don't own". :) If there's an easy way to make a "hunt for this book via BC" link using the author/title, that would be a really cool way for LT to support BC, too. I imagine there has to be a huge overlap between the users of the two sites already.
About Ning, I'm mostly just interested in seeing how the whole collaborative process works there. It's an interesting idea, though I'm not sure what I think about the ownership issues. And I want to learn the OO side of PHP, so it would be a nice sandbox for that.
From the dark aether I call you! Ia Ia Cthulhu fhtagn!
/me wakes up in a stupor saying "Whuh? Huh? Somebody called me out of a sleep?"
"Developing LibraryThing has been a transformative experience. I will never EVER develop software like that again."
Believe me when I say that the library world could use more software developers with your newfound perspective!
Thank *you* for listening to your users, and thanks for your hard work.
Hi Tim,
I just want to say that I am happy to hear that LibraryThing is doing so well. Your future updates look good; I'm especially interested in the Authorpages and the Wishlist-idea. My suggestion page could become better since now it contains many books that I already read from the library. I would also like if I could connect translations to originals in some way. I am not going to read Crime & Punishment in English, because I already read it in Dutch.
Thanks. Good luck,
Bertil
Hello!
This is an excellent idea and an excellent work too. I will not enter in the details of the things I admire in this work, because English is not my mother tongue, and to write it it’s a bit demanding from me; and due to that, I still fear my text can be hard to understand fully.
I am using it now as free user with near 100 books entered.
I am typing this words just to ask a question I have been wondering about. It’s a simple question that I never found asked or answered in this blog. It’s a simple question, like a taboo.
Question is: How can this grow?
How many books people can register here, before the site become too slow, or too unstable (or both), or something like an implosion happens? At this rate, I see this going faster and faster. Can the site database handle 20 million books, with so many features? Or 200 million books?
Sorry if my question comes with the subtlety of a taboo breaker. I have not technically knowledge to get an answer by myself, that's why I ask.
Best Wishes for this project.
BookThing is beyond awesome. It's amazing and addictive. I have blogged about it a few times since I joined on the weekend and will look for opportunities to pitch it to my various editors.
Hi. Lots to answer here, but I've got a rare freelance job to work on.
I did want to respond about growing. There's no question it can grow as large as it needs to, it's just a question of doing it. At worst, I'd have to pay someone to help me out on some of the technical issues, but if we get to that point LibraryThing will make enough money to justify the expense.
The current database can hold ten times what it holds now and some tweaks could get it to hold more than that. At some point I get into replication, servers that only serve data (the current server does both data and page display), etc.
In fact, the main issue isn't database storage, but doing all the "complex stuff" quickly. It's only just starting to show up in the UI, but LibraryThing is doing some complex calculations and will be doing more and more as time goes by. Coming up with book and library suggestions involves looking at tens or hundreds of thousands of books. Some of the work is done at night when the load is lower. Some is cached. Probably my first split will be to have a second computer that does nothing but statistical juggling all day. I'm kinda psyched for that, actually.
You read Crime and Punishment in Dutch? It's so much better in the original English!
I'll look into it. Library MARC records try to know that sort of thing but the data isn't good enough to lean on 100%.
With authors I'm going to have LibraryThing guess, but allow users to disambiguate manually like you can at 43Things. There you can click something when you see that "Speak Italian fluently" is the same as "Speak fluent Italian." Computers can take you 90% of the way there. Passionate users will be glad to do the last 10%.
Perhaps I could extend this to books and translations.
Thanks,
Tim
Safari users: Mea culpa. I'll get on it soon.
Safari developers: Why won't onmouseout work? It's crazy. Don't bother answering, I must be doing something wrong.
Thanks for all the hard work you do on LT. I hope you are getting enough income from LT to justify the vast amount of time you spend on this site.
It's actually a perfect size business. It's enough for me for now. (I have some other web income and I do freelance.) But it's not enough for a big company to become interested in. I mean, there are probably 10 or even 25,000 people in the world who want to catalog their library, but there aren't a million If a big company wanted it, it would probably be cheaper to buy it.
On that note. If Google wants to pay me $10 million dollars, great... as long as they let me WORK for them. I attended a conference where Google's Chris Sacca spoke. He talked about how important it was that Google had an in-house chef so hackers didn't need to worry about making their own food. (I have yet to convince my wife on the applicability of this advice.) He ended with his email and a problem. Solve the problem, send him an email. It was something about how many colors combinations you could fit on an icosohedron if blah blah blah. About half the room immediately started scribbling notes. The other half (with me) resolved to see whether anyone else was hiring.
A giant carrot?!
Congratulations for this wonderful software and social/cultural project. Please, remember to add the "upload a scan cover of your book" feature!
Thanks
books4life (user)
I went for job interview at Borders Books today and mentioned LibraryThing to the person who was interviewing me. Borders is connected with Amazon.com right now. These corporate types just do not have the vision to see the power of LT. They want to sell sell sell books, not make cataloguing FUN.
Those corporate bookseller type's are into the Oprah book club "thang" not the Library THING.
Tim, there is no doubt that you must eventually sell something on your site one day. The foundation of this site is strong and needs a revenue stream to meet a wider market. I am sure that many book lovers would gladly pay for what is going on here without compromising their love of books.
Yeah, I should stop talking about this subject. Be assured, I am not getting into the business of selling anything (except memberships and maybe mugs or tshirts). Nor am I getting into advertising. Nor do I suspect Amazon will be buying me. Nor do I suspect I'm going to get rich of LT.
Nuff said!
My get rich quick scheme is to have my wife write a novel that's picked by Oprah....
Oh, sure, get someone else to do the work... :7)
Say, would you ever consider making outbound links from a given book's page that (for example) pull a user's local library URL from their Profile and costruct a search or request?
If so, can you list the technical information about the interfaces/standards you can work with? I would like to be well-informed when I ask my local library whether their system -- and it's actaully state-wde, which here in Rhode Island means, oh tens of libraries -- can accept incoming connection for searches or requests.
I have dealt with them in the past, and they are a flexible and curious group: I don't think that they'd necessarily be averse to someone wanting to direct more traffic at their web presence. They use the Dynix product "Horizon Information Portal" (c.f. www.dynix.com/about/vision/hiportal.asp#srw).
Tim, if it's not already on your list of future features I would dearly love to be able to sort on two columns, for instance title within author. That would help me keep my bookshelves straight!
Thanks for a great tool which is obviously a labor of love.
This is actually intended as a response to the star rating post, but it would recognize my word verification for some reason.
I don't suppose it would be possible to have half stars?
I like the idea of gray stars for no rating. Also, with regard to this:
Okay, Daniel gave me a dressing-down for it being unintuitive. He writes "There's a common, widely-known, widely-accepted metaphor here, so use it. You start with empty greyed out stars, and you click the first star for a 1 star rating, the 2nd star for a 2 star rating, etc..."
Is this so? I could see adding grayed-out stars as the initial state, but I rather like clicking through the stars one by one.
Netflix does it as Daniel describes. The practice of clicking through the stars is theoretically neat, but I just did it to five books in a row and it was already becoming tiresome. I prefer the Netflix method.
I, too, would prefer clicking on a given star to "activate" it, like I do for iTunes song ratings.
Given the size of some libraries, multiple clicks to rate could well lead to RSI! I know that most of my LT time is spent on a laptop, and my right wrist just won't let me indulge in as much tagging & rating & reviewing as I'd like.
I agree about how slick and easy-to-use the Netflix approach to ratings is.
Heck, I hardly watch DVDs anymore, but I hate to give up my Netflix profile. I should probably explore importing some of that data here...
The one feature I am dying to see is to have the "review" field included as part of the export. Otherwise, you are still holding a vital part of my precious data hostage, and I hesitate to spend the scores of hours I could easily spend typing in book reviews for all the books I own and have read.
Dan (@ paction d-o-t org)
Hi there! I don't see a way to just write to you, so I figured I'd use this. A friend told me about your site and it is possibly almost exactly what I'm looking for! See, I live in a rural area of Japan and the other English speakers here and I have been talking about sharing our limited supplies of reading materials. I'm really excited to see that the group function is coming, because I think that will make LibraryThing work for us. Yay! What I'd love to see in addition is a couple of fields that can be customized by each user (personally I'd like to enter who has the book currently in a field, or at least whether it's "out" or "in"). If other people could edit the "who has the book" field, all the better - then people could pass books around and update it themselves, and the book owner could just look online to see who has it.
In any case, thanks, and keep up the good work!
This so great!
Is there a music collection equivalent?
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