Permanent links for books
Every day more bloggers are choosing LibraryThing as the place they link to when they mention a book, bypassing commercial sites and their product pages. They're doing this despite an arbitrary and unfriendly URL scheme accessible to only the most tech-savvy users.To help I've added permanent links at the bottom of the book- and social information pages. In the near future I'll be adding an ISBN-based URL scheme.
posted by Tim at 12:34 AM
12 Comments:
Can you PLEASE not anticipate features! Sheesh. Just because you're brighter than the others doesn't mean you have to show it all the time. :)
ISBNs, rah rah rah.
Can't wait.
Wait a minute! Brighter than the others!?!?! I'm one of the others...oh, ok, nevermind.
Tim:
I still have to say that LT is the best investment in a system for keeping track of my books that I've ever made! Just keeps getting better and better!
Speaking of which, now that this is so well developed and so advanced... any reason to keep the 'beta' tag in the name? This is a better package that 90% of the 'live' software out there of any shape, size, flavor, or purpose.
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I love this feature. It's a lot better option than linking to Open WorldCat, which is difficult. Thanks!
What about the issue of some ISBNs being reissued?
I know I have a book in LT with ISBN 0590137417 -- for me, that ISBN is for a childrens' book called "Hu is a Tiger", but that ISBN almost never refers to "Hu is a Tiger" -- it almost always means "Potty Politics". But I could still want to link to my copy of "Hu is a Tiger" under an ISBN system....
If that URL shows title, or title and author, I will love you forever. One of my web peeves is links where neither the text nor the URL gives any clue as to what book is being referenced, so I have to wait for some bookseller's graphics-laden page to load from their heavily used servers. I don't have slow connections, but pages don't always display quickly.
Nolly: Well, don't you think that an ISBN-based LibraryThing link will always be used in contexts where the link TEXT is the title or author? The idea here is to have a very simple URL, like
http://www.librarything.com/isbn/039304744X
Adding titles and authors would gum that up. For one thing, almost anything except for a letter will get "encoded" in a very unreadable way.
What do you think?
And what about books that don't have ISBNs?
Re: Without ISBNs, well, there IS a LibraryThing number for it--appearing in the "permanet link." In theory I could have a URL like
http://www.librarything.com/title/Middlesex
But book titles are a wiggly thing. Often, they would fail. You've had to *check it*. If you're doing that, you might as well pick up the permanent link.
This rocks the hizzouse. I'm not a librarything user personally, but this is clearly the best place to link for book information when I blog about a book, and this just makes it better. Thanks!
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