"The Book Guys" radio show does the LibraryThing
The Book Guys, Allan Stypeck and Mike Cuthbert, interviewed me about LibraryThing for their most recent radio show, airing around the country, mostly this weekend.Here's a station list, with times. Or you can just go to their web site. A Real Audio version is already posted on their shows list.
The show's headliner is the USPS's Gary Thuro, discussing Post Office publishing ventures. I am ushered in about 6/10 of the way through.
If you found the site because of The Book Guys, hello! Leave a note. I'm sure the "regulars" will be glad to welcome you too.
LibraryThing is currently weighed toward librarians and bloggers—eg., MARC records and RSS feeds. The "collecting" community—the Book Guy's core audience—isn't as well served. I'd be interested what we could do better there. A "condition" field?
posted by Tim at 9:58 PM
30 Comments:
I'm not a collector, but a field that I would like that collectors might use would be an "origin" or "source" field to note where the book came from: the name of a bookstore, a library, mom, whatever.
Right now I do that with a tag, but I suppose you might get interesting social data from that--how many LibraryThing volumes were purchased at Amazon vs. Powells?
condition would be wonderful.
what I really really want is an automated "price to replace" calculator.
which would somehow pull the lowest used/new price off amazon.
this is so I can have a discussion w/ my homeowners insurance about replacement costs. :D
A separate year field which showed when the book was first published would be very useful.
There's some authors I collect and as part of my collection, I'm more interested in the year the story was first published rather than when my edition was reprinted. ie, the non-librarian point of view.
I'd happily work with the extra year field rather than typing info into the comment field of each book I enter.
Does Blogger let you delete commentspam like 'sam', above? Just curious.
I've been wanting an "origin" or "where acquired" field. Condition would be nice, too.
I currently put information about autographs, inscriptions, binding, etc. in the "comments" field, and that works fine for me.
Now, about this radio program. Why does no station in Chicago carry it? Are there no collectors here? No Special Collections? No antiquarian bookstores? Jeez.
Another vote for origin field, and for some kind of replacement cost grabbing feature. I've been attempting to note 'price I paid', 'cover price', and 'where I bought it' in comments when I remember, but it's a huge undertaking! Some kind of 'your most used sources' list [e.g. pick one from Amazon/Borders/Waterstone's/Heffers/whoever] would be absolutely lovely, but at the least a text box or two for these bits of information (other than comments) would be invaluable.
And could we perhaps have something like the star system but for condition? Not everyone would use the same criteria but it would be a very useful piece of information for insurance/replacement purposes. For instance, if I were using the LT Mobile version, and happened to see a good/mint second-hand copy of something I already own, it would be great to know whether it would be worth picking up - i.e. if the currently owned copy was tatty or missing a dustjacket.
also...
sometimes you look up a book, and you can see the ISBN where someone has hand entered an edition, but b/c they hand entered it, you can't use that isbn in the add books page. If I add the work, it adds the wrong edition. if there's no cover for that edition, I can't set it to the correct edition. This could easily be fixed: an option for "search librarything" on the libraries along w/ yale, etc would help my collection be correct
to clarify last one (argh, can't edit)... this is usually for books where the isbn is not listed on the work.
You need an editor field. We like to read anthologies. I'm tired of having it come up w/ VARIOUS for authors. I want to search by anthology editior!
An edition field beside a condition field would be phenomenal for collectors; for me that's one of the biggest holes in the system. And, it would be fantastic to search who else obsesses over obscure firsts. I don't know if this is possible to do with ISBNs, and I'm sure for older firsts it would be very difficult because of the lack of ISBNs or LoC numbers altogether.
I agree with Ryn_books as well; while it's a useful feature to see how many books you own based on when they were published, it would be infinitely more useful to see when the book was originally published.
1. additional fields for authors, editors, illustrators. The inability to identify/distinguish authors and editors is what keeps me from signing up. The LOC Authority source for authors would be a key addition, as well.
2. condition field (stars would work, but should be in addition to a field for comments)
3. date of original publication
4. provenance field
5. more than one image
As a collector I have no interest in the lowest price as indicated by Amazon. That figure is meaningless to me. A field that allows me to record estimated value with a date, that would be useful.
well, I used to enjoy Library Thing. Now, it is so complicated I can't understand anything you all are talking about.
A "wish list" feature would be great.
Happy Fathers Day Tim!
I still remember when you shared the picture of your new child.
I do not need archive.org to find it.
It is a pleasant memory in the HUMAN brain without a need for Puter Power
Condition :use standard descriptions, mint, etc
first - yes or no - sub field - where it's a first - possible sub field "in English" for translations
signed:
dedicated?
check some of the fields in Readerware (and can we please have a specific Readerware import ?)
In case you haven't already spotted it - I am getting
/* inc_bookrec_tag2 */ INSERT INTO rec_simlib (recsim_type , recsim_wcfrom, recsim_wcto, recsim_raw, recsim_weighted) VALUES ('tag', 1073507, 5480, 20, 37.713409769742), ('tag', 1073507, 23797, 42, 37.08715989723), ('tag', 1073507, 10691, 15, 35.335698300741), ('tag', 1073507, 28117, 19, 24.877700996103), ('tag', 1073507, 25681, 17, 9.5829037934466), ('tag', 1073507, 234810, 10, 9.1226496023965), ('tag', 1073507, 165589, 8, 7.2981196819172), ('tag', 1073507, 58314, 10, 6.6532431727404), ('tag', 1073507, 17319, 7, 6.1081293314452), ('tag', 1073507, 584473, 5, 4.7857307617059), ('tag', 1073507, 6632, 5, 4.5613248011982), ('tag', 1073507, 29754, 5, 4.5613248011982), ('tag', 1073507, 16598, 9, 4.3833735275754), ('tag', 1073507, 81305, 5, 4.3629495224609), ('tag', 1073507, 16582, 9, 4.1215369803061)Duplicate entry '8388607' for key 1 - fatal error (5)
In the similarly tagged part of http://www.librarything.com/catalog/1073507
I'd welcome a condition field and a provenance field as well. I always try to urge some kind of inter-compatibility between LT and MARC, so I'd propose that the provenance field somehow be recognized as the equivalent of a MARC note field 561, which is specifically for provenance data.
I don't know if there's a MARC field that exactly corresponds to "condition" as dealers and collectors would use the term, but there is a copy-specific field for binding information, MARC 563.
Another type of condition might have to do with presentation--e.g. a librarything view for kids.
On the fun statistics page it would be good if a breakdown of when books were accquired was available: so I can plan when another room is required on current collection rates.
Tim, I've been asking you for stuff like this since I first joined. I'm SO glad you're asking the general populace this question now! ::grin:: :-)
Er, that is to say, YES, I agree with a lot of the comments here about this.
I currently put in the comments field information like edition, printing, binding, whether it's autographed/inscribed, comments on its condition/sentimental value/etc. And that's fine so far.
My ideal choice, though, would be fields, or checkboxes, whatever where one can note things like:
Binding.
Condition.
Date of original publication.
Date of publication of your edition.
Signed/inscribed.
Illustrator/illustrators.
Other authors names, such as in anthologies.
Editors.
Alternate author names
Cost to replace/current marketplace value guesstimate?
Thanks!
Another vote here for "editor" and "illustrator" fields. Some of my books were bought specifically because of the illustrator.
"Year first published" would be useful, as would condition and insurance value, but would come behind editor/illustrator in my priorities.
I know I'm adding this very late...
As many books as I get for 'lowest price on Amazon' I think it's a useless field. It has no relationship to the condition of the book you'd be replacing. And they fluctuate quite a lot.
As for editors, other authors, and anything to do with anthologies - PLEASE!
Though not a serious collector (yet) either, many of the proposed fields sound excellent.
I agree with eurydice - it is almost impossible to get sensible prices automatically. Value will depend on edition and condition (and sometimes other stuff as well).
Of the suggested fields provenance, condition and date of original publication are probably best to add as simple fields.
I disagree with papalazarou's suggestion of a field for First. I think that is much better handled as a tag. The only reason why condition isn't as suitable for a tag is that people might want to search for Fine or better.
Illustrators, editors etc. really ought to be done with a flexible "role". So the "add book" page defaults to a "role" of "author", but could be changed to "editor". Also extra rows can be added so that for a novel I might also have "cover artist", "editor", "internal illustrations", one or more "additional author"s and "foreword written by". The LOC Authority source for authors has been discussed widely and we do need something to help disambiguate authors.
For anthologies a mere list of contributors is not good enough. If it contains Charles Stross, Cory Doctorow does that mean a short story by both or a collaboration? What is needed is to extend the cataloguing down to the short story level - each of these could have one or more authors, an original publication date, tags, comments and reviews.
Hi guys. Just so you know, I do real all these comments. I'm just so snowed in that I need to choose between developing and responding. I think LT users would prefer the former.
Second, let me make an ANNOUNCEMENT.
Prior to becoming one of the "noted" blogs on blogger I was VERY loathe to delete a comment. Since becoming a noted blog, this place has been flooded with "cool site, here's mine"-type comments. On the one hand, *some* of these may be real. But I doubt it. So, from now on, I'm deleting comments like that. If anyone does that, and concludes with some comment that shows they actually used the product, fine.
I'm having a lot of problems w/ books picked up off the barnes and noble or borders clearance shelves. Anything with a barnes and noble publisher has to be hand entered; ditto for the sale racks @ borders. :(
Really? Hand-entered? Amazon should have most of them. At least I've found them to in the past--absent covers usually. I could understand if they were missing from libraries, however. Many of those books are reprints, and libraries might only have the original, with a different ISBN (or none).
T
re: BN/Borders Reprints.
I guess I'm the only one who wants the correct *edition* not just the correct book?
Even though we don't have priceless first editions, I still want my collection to be accurate. If I do a title search, yeah, it's not going to match unless I hand enter my copy with the correct ISBN. Especially since I can't search the works other people have already entered, just those in Amazon or a big library. Yale, for example (and I worked at the Yale Cross Campus Library for several years) doesn't buy oh... "Complete Low Fat Cookbook"!
i wish this thing was threaded. :(
Oh, duh. I just realized that the comments about "condition" meant the physical quality of the item--not a condition as in "when field X is..."
Now that we have 3400+ plus books listed, I've discovered what I want.
I want an advanced sort tab -- think excel. Sort by Rating, Then by Shared, Then by Title, etc.
B/c when you have a few thousand books, the sort by rating doesn't show much, and there's an awful lot of books where it's just you... anyway. That's what I want. Since you asked.
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