Competitors / Bokhyllan.com
LibraryThing has a handful of competitors. I'm not too worried about them. LibraryThing wins on features, as many blog comparisons have shown (eg., the Powells blog). And LibraryThing certainly wins on size and traffic. The most frequent comparandum started the same week as LibraryThing but has 4% of the books. Another has 20% as many, but it's been going for more than four years; it hasn't broken the web's top 100,000 sites in six months.
I've written to most of LibraryThing's competitors, seeking a deal that would combine our sites, giving all their users lifetime accounts and bringing the developers on board as partners. So far, no dice. I guess it's more fun to do your own thing.
A few days ago I came across a new site, Bokhyllan.com, a sort of Swedish LibraryThing. Between guessing-in-context ("LOGGA IN"), bad German and a second-degree connection with someone who knows Swedish, I managed to get the jist of it.
What a perfect situation! They're just starting, and the site doesn't have all the features it needs. LibraryThing has those features—even integration with the Swedish library system! But I have no desire to develop a Swedish LibraryThing, and no ability even if it did. It seems silly to do all this development multiple times. Why not combine forces and write the code once? Take the code, keep the domain, charge for it or make it free—I don't care. But share your improvements and we all win.
I wrote. No answer so far. Maybe this plug will get their attention.
If anyone knows of any other non-English LibraryThings, let me know. If you want to start one, let me know. More generally, if you want to help LibraryThing grow, let me know.
There's a more general conversation here about open-sourcing LibraryThing. I guess I'm a sceptic that it could work. At a minimum, a whole separate site would need to be set up, with fake data. Security would also be a big issue. If it didn't work, it would be a big waste of energy. If it caught on, I feel like my job would become cat-herding programmers. In the worst case, LibraryThing would end up fragmented into a half-dozen forks.
Maybe we could discuss open sourcing on the LibraryThing Google Groups group. The group is growing in greatness—must keep using words starting with g. If possible, I'd like to keep blog comments on the blog.
I've written to most of LibraryThing's competitors, seeking a deal that would combine our sites, giving all their users lifetime accounts and bringing the developers on board as partners. So far, no dice. I guess it's more fun to do your own thing.
A few days ago I came across a new site, Bokhyllan.com, a sort of Swedish LibraryThing. Between guessing-in-context ("LOGGA IN"), bad German and a second-degree connection with someone who knows Swedish, I managed to get the jist of it.
What a perfect situation! They're just starting, and the site doesn't have all the features it needs. LibraryThing has those features—even integration with the Swedish library system! But I have no desire to develop a Swedish LibraryThing, and no ability even if it did. It seems silly to do all this development multiple times. Why not combine forces and write the code once? Take the code, keep the domain, charge for it or make it free—I don't care. But share your improvements and we all win.
I wrote. No answer so far. Maybe this plug will get their attention.
If anyone knows of any other non-English LibraryThings, let me know. If you want to start one, let me know. More generally, if you want to help LibraryThing grow, let me know.
There's a more general conversation here about open-sourcing LibraryThing. I guess I'm a sceptic that it could work. At a minimum, a whole separate site would need to be set up, with fake data. Security would also be a big issue. If it didn't work, it would be a big waste of energy. If it caught on, I feel like my job would become cat-herding programmers. In the worst case, LibraryThing would end up fragmented into a half-dozen forks.
Maybe we could discuss open sourcing on the LibraryThing Google Groups group. The group is growing in greatness—must keep using words starting with g. If possible, I'd like to keep blog comments on the blog.
posted by Tim at 2:20 PM
12 Comments:
Don't know about other copy cats :P I found LibraryThing easy to work with and could get the job done. Excellent! Just the book collection I got consists of mostly Chinese books and I am too lazy to manually add them... Would be great if I can import Chinese books from sites like http://www.joyo.com/ or http://www.booklover.com.hk/.
Anyway, importing from other sites is not a big deal for me. Personally I would like to have features like new standard fields for books I "own", "borrowed", "read", "reading", etc. Using the Tag is an option, but just sometimes I think a checkbox for Tag like "own" and "reading" could come in handy :)
Well, as a Chinese reader you should check out Douban.com (and let me know how it goes). They're pretty big—they show how big LibraryThing could be. They have an English-language (or what they believe is an English-language) version, Douban.net.
I'm going to add borrowing fields, and wishlists. I'm undecided about own vs. read.
Is the "one that's been going for 4 years" alexlit? I'm not sure why that never took off. After using it extensively, my guesses would be: not enough focus on ways to see/manage your catalog of rated books, too much emphasis on selling E-texts that were clearly never going to take off, too little benefit for entering more books once your basic recommendations had been made, no tags.
No, Bibliophil.org. I hadn't even seen AlexLit. Sort of a different thing.
I should just list all the comparanda (most aren't quite competitors) and invite people to compare them.
1. Reader2.com
2. ConnectViaBooks.com
3. Bibliophil.org
4. StuffWeLike.net (neé BooksWeLike.com)
5. Ning.com (bookshelf)
6. Stuffopolis.com
7. Mediachest.com
8. Douban.net (neé Beantal.com)
9. ChainReading.com
I track a few others with even less overlap, or that do the same thing in another media. For example, check out Popist.com. God, what attention-grabbing graphic design! But what's underneath is really not working for me. Nor it is a good model for what LibraryThing should be.
(Note the user with the strip-tease video, "jujubee," whom I rather suspect is a Potemkin user. That's ONE way to get people into a social software site! I'm thinking LibraryThing users should post videos where they stand naked behind a big pile of books and remove them off the top one by one, maybe reading off the titles and Dewey numbers. "And now we're down to Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, volume one... two... thr--" Fade to black.)
LOL - "I have a large book collection and a huge... (fades)" Or for the female set, "He said he loved me for my mind, but he was only interested in these... (holds two rare, first-edition volumes over chest area)."
It would be a great marketing gag. ;)
I'd like to put in my two cents as interested in some kind of owned/read-unowned checkbox, or some other standard ways to mark the distinction. I'm not quite comfortable entering non-owned books without them, but I'd love to see recs based on things I've read but haven't kept.
I agree with amphipodgirl. I've used Bibliophil, but it's dreadfully clunky compared to LibraryThing. I own plenty of books I haven't read, and have read plenty I don't own...it would make an even nicer similar libraries system.
I'd like to suggest that you could try getting in touch with national libraries around the world, so that speakers of other languages making use of librarything could possibly use the databases of their respective countries' national libraries (just like it does with LoC) to make it easier for them to add their books at librarything.
My site is http://www.scrive.it It's about pointers about Books, Movies and Albums... It's not very like LT, but kinda... Ah, it's an italian site.
I agree with amphipod about the owned/not owned option.
Currently I'm using the tag "wishlist" to indicate ones I'd _like_ to add to the collection, but don't own, but I don't like how that artificially inflates the book count for the catalog.
Other than that, I am still in love with the system, and very glad I signed up for a lifetime subscription! :)
H2O Playlists is vaaaaaguely similar:
http://h2obeta.law.harvard.edu/
There is also Books Well Read.
http://www.bookswellread.com
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