Two million books!
LibraryThing has topped two million books!
The 2,000,000th book, Elizabeth Moon's Winning Colors, was added at at 10:19 pm. Congratulations to Kiesa, who takes home a free gift account for her luck.
Press: Cover this!
I hoping that this milestone gets some press attention. LibraryThing is one heck of a cool story—28,000 users adding two million books, finding people with similar interests, getting recommendations, doing crazy new Wikipedia-like things with cataloging, etc. Something is really going on here.
I recently read a story on lala.com, one of the new pay-for-swapping services. According to the AP, Lala has has "250 members trading some 12,000 CDs"! (It also, apparently, has four founders, as well as employees.) You can imagine my consternation, heightened by a WSJ article on other swapping sites. Maybe I should start pretending LibraryThing is venture backed.
Incidentally, as soon as I can swing it technically, LibraryThing will be adding:
The 2,000,000th book, Elizabeth Moon's Winning Colors, was added at at 10:19 pm. Congratulations to Kiesa, who takes home a free gift account for her luck.
Press: Cover this!
I hoping that this milestone gets some press attention. LibraryThing is one heck of a cool story—28,000 users adding two million books, finding people with similar interests, getting recommendations, doing crazy new Wikipedia-like things with cataloging, etc. Something is really going on here.
I recently read a story on lala.com, one of the new pay-for-swapping services. According to the AP, Lala has has "250 members trading some 12,000 CDs"! (It also, apparently, has four founders, as well as employees.) You can imagine my consternation, heightened by a WSJ article on other swapping sites. Maybe I should start pretending LibraryThing is venture backed.
Incidentally, as soon as I can swing it technically, LibraryThing will be adding:
- A FREE loan/swap service. Let's talk about how to do this on the discussion group.
- Cataloging of CDs, DVDs (at least). Don't worry, books will remain the center.
- According to the American Library Directory, LibraryThing is now larger than the public libraries of Atlanta, San Francisco, Sacramento and San Antonio. It tops state universities like Colorado State, Illinois State, New Hampshire, Arkansas and Maryland, and private universities like Fordham and William and Mary.
- According to the American Library Association, LibraryThing is 634,375 volumes away from being the 100th largest library in the United States.
- The American Library Directory lists 181 libraries larger than LibraryThing.
- The 2 millionth book makes LibraryThing far-and-away the largest of the 16(!) cataloging services that have sprung up since LibraryThing's launch, the largest of which has 249,000 "items."
- If laid end-to-end LibraryThing's collection would extend from Boston, MA to Pennsylvania, PA. (Maybe.)
- LibraryThing is now larger than the Boston College Library (an even 2 mil. according to the American Library Directory). And Boston College was founded in 1863! Those people don't read much, I guess. But as an alumnus of Georgetown—the original and better Jesuit university—I already knew that.
- OCLC, the world's largest library consortium, has 1 billion records in its database. But the OCLC adds only 8,640 books/day, whereas LibraryThing adds 10,152 books/day. This means that LibraryThing will come out ahead in 3815.
- LibraryThing has more than twice as many books by J. K. Rowling as Thomas Jefferson gave to the Library of Congress after the British destroyed the first collection by fire. There's a joke in here somewhere.
posted by Tim at 10:42 PM
26 Comments:
Cool!
how many JK Rowling books could Jefferson have had?
I am soooo freakin' proud to be here. This is the coolest place ever. EVER.
that was cold blooded. don't be bulldoggin' on boston u.
I know, I know. I need a good publicist. Trouble is, they are very expensive...
Oh wow! That's wonderful! I look forward to the loan service in particular.
Wow. I am so thrilled, I'm spilling over on people: 'do you realize how many books LibraryThing has amassed?!?' 'In how short a time???' It's fabulous!
Woohoo - both at 2 million and at the CD/DVD promise. Please please please please please... :D
The Bodleian Library, Oxford, was started in 1602 with 2000 volumes (replacing a dispersed library on the same site). John Selden's library of 8000 volumes was added fifty years later, and Bodley's estate (and quite a lot of his friends' money) went into building the library, but it took until the 21st century to reach 9 million volumes, even with the Stationers' Agreement (the forerunner of legal deposit, put into law in 1911). If we can hit two million in less than eight months, how long will it take to reach nine million? (Of course LibraryThing doesn't have to actually store or easily retrieve nine million physical volumes, tasks which have been exercising OULS and their equivalents around the world for some years...)
...Snap - Oh no, you didn't! As a BC alumna, I must protest your sneaky comment on the relative merit of certain Jesuit colleges... :) (sylphette)
Yay! it'd be awesome to have my CD's and DVD's included in my library. Kinda like a real library, right? I keep falling in love with LT over and over again!
I know you said something at one point about how you wouldn't want a forum but I would love having one in LT. I would love to real time talk to some of these people in LT in more than just a message fashion.
Anyone else having trouble combining authors? It's not working for me at all, in Firefox or IE.
The authors I'm trying to combine are Susan X Meagher and S.X. Meagher, but I can't get any other to combine either.
LibraryThing was launched on August 29, 2005. On the same historical day, Hurricane Katrina destroyed many personal librarys throughout the Gulf Coast of the United States of America.
Let us hope and pray that reconstruction is taking place on the bookshelfs of all of our fellow readers who never got a chance to use this outstanding virtual book sorting engine.
Great that you're implementing the CD and DVD cataloging. While they're adjuncts to my library, it'll be good to keep them all in one place...
...but can I suggest - software CDs/DVDs, too? I have a whole lot of them.
I'll see if I can't get something into the paper paper. And I'll do it for free.
How long was that from 1 million to 2 million books again then? 3 million in June then?
If you want to get a story out there you need to submit one on the wire that can then be syndicated. Otherwise, you gotta' wait...
Congrats. I gave you a plug on Newsvine.
Hate to nitpick but if you mean William and Mary in VA, it's public . . . http://www.wm.edu/about/index.php
I don't know if this is the right place to comment on this, but while you add new features like CDs and DVDs, I think it would be very nice, and even vital, if there where a possibility to state that book A is a translation of book B. E.g. I own a few books by Heinlein and Pratchett that are translations of the original works into Swedish, it would be nice if I in some way could point "Magins Färg" to "Colour of Magic". This might be a feature of the combine works feature but I think it then should be more clearly stated.
I combined a bunch of foreign-language Pratchetts in the first week of combinations - if you've added more recently it's not terribly hard work to link them to the correct works. (Much less effort than with other authors thanks to the wealth of AFP and other Pratchett resources out there! There's at least one lspace page with tons of translated titles on.)
I think you are refering to my site with the 249,000 items (?)
I just wanted to say that both sites actually launched on the same day (29th August 2005), I first heard about LibraryThing a few days later when it reached the del.icio.us popular list.
I share your frustrations with other companies getting so much press coverage, I am just one person as well and am only able to work part time on this.
So do we have a book running on whether 3,000,000 books or 1,000,000 unique works will be achieved first?
TCarter
Yeah, the only trouble there is that the definition of "unique works" depends on the works system, which isn't fully pinned down yet. And I need more tools to allow people to find and combine works.
Tags is another thing to watch—I should put it on the Zeitgeist. There are currently 2,867,992 tags in the system!
How about an article in an online news & review magazine that gets about 50,000 visitors every day?
Tim ... for what it's worth ... last week I sent an e-mail to one of the Chicago Tribune colunmists (Mary Schmich) that I felt might find the LibraryThing concept of interest. I pointed her specifically to this Blog posting about the 2,000,000th book, but talked up the site some too. I've not heard back, but that's not unusual. Like chicken soup for a cold, I figured "it couldn't hurt"!
- BTRIPP
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