Five million books!
Liam's mom made the cupcakes.
The 5,000,000th book was Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family by Patricia Volk. It was entered at 4:02pm by cookingthebooks, "a theatre professional" and "Londoner by birth now living in rural Scotland." Cookingthebooks already has a lifetime account, so we've sent a gift account.
More statistics:
- The five million books fall under some 1,157,797 distinct "works." (All editions of the Odyssey are counted as a "work.") There are 1,282,535 distinct ISBNs.
- LibraryThing users have added 6,930,554 tags to their books.
- By coincidence, we also hit 70,000 users today. The 70,000th user, jean_luc_carpentier, only entered three books. We gave him a free account too. Why not?
- If LibraryThing were compared to a traditional library--let the lovin' begin!*--it would now be the 34th largest library in the United States, edging out the University of Virginia (source: ALA Fact Sheet 22).
- Less than 1% of the books in LibraryThing are by J. K. Rowling.
- More statistics here.
With apologies to all, we're going to be insufferable from now until August 29th, when LibraryThing turns one year old. Although the blogosphere made LibraryThing--which has never advertised** or hired a PR firm--we're still hoping for a New York Times article, or a mention on Slashdot or NPR. — Nancy Pearl! David Pogue! Where are you?! — We figure the confluence of five million books and our first anniversary might be the best shot we get.
ABBY SEZ: Remember the Birthday book pile contest!
*As has been pointed out, LibraryThing is not a "real" library. You can't borrow books from it, for starters. We do, however, think LibraryThing has something to contribute to discussions going on in the library world. We'll leave that for the Thingology blog, however, and to the handful of speaking events we're scheduled at.***
**We did do Google Adsense for a few weeks. Meh.
***Check out where the Wisconsin Library Association is having it's annual conference! Abby and I divvy up things so that she gets most of the library events, but nobody told me it was going to be at a water park!
posted by Tim at 5:41 PM
9 Comments:
Keep up the great work, guys! You've come a long way and have created quite an app here. I'm loving it.
And boy oh boy, I can't wait for that wishlist feature (might there also be a flag or something that can be set for books one has read -- like from a library -- but doesn't own?).
Congratulations!!!
Wow: I was so impressed with 1 million.
I hope it will be an incredibly happy birthday! (The cupcakes look great. I'm counting on a big cake, with the number one, too. ;) )
Not just a waterpark, but an indoor waterpark. It makes quite a bit of difference in early November. I'm tempted to join the WLA just to go. :)
wooo-hooo!
many, and much-deserved, congrats!
plus, in the 21 hours or so since you posted, 16,567 books have been added!
(alas, none of those are mine... I'm running out of books to catalog!)
Best wishes on reaching 5 million.
And... thanks for setting up such a useful and fun site for all of us to use. It's been great. Keep up the good work!
Seeing it is going so fast, maybe you can run a gift account contest, guess the day,hour,minute that you hit ten million!
:) ;)
Although the blogosphere made LibraryThing...
I just metioned LT over on Matt Cutts' Google blog in answer to "What's your fav Web 2.0 company?"
I must confess to being stunned that the site's birthday is August 29th.
You see I just discovered Librabry Thing today through a fellow blogger and immediately started trying it out. I live in New Orleans and if another big storm hits I can use it for my insurance to replace what I lose.
The odd thing about the site's BDay being the 29th is that the 29th is the day Katrina hit my city and decimated 80% of it. Now I'm starting to use a service with the same anniversary date in anticipation of another storm.
This is a great idea, and as you can tell from my comments it is useful in a way that I doubt the creators envisioned. Hopefully I will not need to use it in that fashion, but with New Orleans still in ruins a year later it makes me rest easier to know that my pride and joy (my library) is a bit safer ecasue of it.
I remember the early days like in early September when there was excitement everytime 10 thousand books were added. I am just wondering how big LT will be in one year!
kaykwilts
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