Happy birthday to us!

Today (we think) marks LibraryThing's second birthday. We're now officially in the terrible twos.*

A year ago we had just hit five million books on our birthday, today we're just a few hours away from 18 million books.

Birthday feature [Tim] : You begged for us to release one of the top-requested features for the birthday, so we came up with setting your display style for visitors to your library. Yes, wish lists and collections are on the way!

Numbers and factoids:

• We have 261,481 registered members. If we were a city, we'd be the 68th largest in the United States (Wikipedia), just above Plano, TX. We are on par with French Polynesia (population 259,800—Wikipedia). Unlike French Polynesia, however, we do not have an anthem. Yet.
• LibraryThing members have applied over 23 million tags. If our tags were laid end-to-end, they would stretch to the moon.**
  
• There are 389 reviews of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on LibraryThing. The 1,000th-most popular book on LibraryThing is Le morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Mallory, which still has 1,247 copies. Author number 1,000 is Margaret Drabble. (You know, Margaret Drabble, don't you?)
  
• Nine libraries have signed up for LibraryThing for Libraries. Five have gone live with it. The first nine LTFL customers have uploaded over 1.75 million books.
• Our German site, LibraryThing.de, has 2,452 members. Our Dutch site, has the most active Talk. Finnish is our most-translated site, currently at 99.4% done.
  
• If LibraryThing were a library (not a city, keep up!), we'd still be the second largest in the nation, behind only the Library of Congress (ALA Fact Sheet).
  

Twelve things that you didn't know you could do on LibraryThing***

1. Find out what your friends are reading. Connection News lets you see what books your friends have recently added, rated, or reviewed.


2. Swap books. LibraryThing integrates with ten separate book swapping sites all over the world, so you can see at a glance which books are available or wanted, and move them back and forth. Check out the Swapping FAQ.


3. Unsuggestions. Get fantastic (and humorous) UnSuggestions. Did you know, for example, that Mason-Dixon Knitting is the top UnSuggestion for The Satanic Verses, Peter Pan, AND Paradise Lost?**** (Yeah, we've got Suggestions too.)


4. Organizations use LibraryThing. Browse the library catalog of The Uganda Revenue Authority (really!), the Weather Museum in Houston, Texas, The Cambodian American Heritage Museum and Memorial Library, The Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in NYC, and numerous churches, schools, businesses, and other institutions. Read more about Organizational accounts.
   
   

5. LT Authors. Browse through the library of Joe Hill, Elizabeth Bear, or one of the 562 other authors who showcase their personal books on LibraryThing. The 20th-most popular LibraryThing author is Tim's wife, Lisa Carey, author of Every Visible Thing. If she ever loses that spot, the Zeitgeist will magically start showing the top 21. Check out all LT Authors.
   


6. Photomosaics. See all your covers to make a photomosaic or a poster of them.
   
   
7. Blog widgets. You can show off your library on your blog with our blog widgets. Or make a search widget, and people can search your library right on your blog.
   
   
8. Author gallery. Your author gallery displays pictures of all the authors in your collection. LibraryThing members have uploaded more than 12,645 pictures so far.


9. LibraryThing in your language. LibraryThing is available in 30 different languages; the translation is done entirely by members.
   


10. Statistics. Check out your stats page for a list of books that you share with exactly and only one other member.***** Ah, your soulmates.


11. Helpers log. Watch other members as they combine works, authors, and tags, add author pictures and links, and more. In the past 24 hours, the Helpers log recorded 1,860 different actions.
    
    
12. Buy Swag. Cafe Press has a LibraryThing Store, with t-shirts and so forth. We sell everything at our cost—even the thong.

Thanks and praise [Tim] : Social Software is 90% social, and 10% software: You guys made it. It has been an absolute blast for us to do the 10%, and a real honor to have been part of something so stuffed with passion, intelligence and humanity.

Next week Casey, Christopher and Abby are coming up to spend the week brainstorming, coding and playing miniature golf. We plan to tackle some big topics and make some big changes. We'll let you know how things are going, and move the conversation onto Talk as much as possible.

Credits: Photo by Rachael (chamisa flower on Flickr), a runner up in last year's birthday book pile contest. More cakes appeared in this Talk post :)

*If "beta" gives us license to do whatever we want, this can only help. "We think" because Tim started this as a hobby, and didn't keep track of it. The first blog post was on the 29th, but the site itself may not have been opened until the next day. Some of the early blog posts are a hoot now. I didn't even think of "social features" for a week. [Tim]
**If each tag was 54 feet long.
***or saw once and forgot, or knew but don't care, or know and care, or...
****I had a hilarious common thread/yarn joke to go with that, which Tim gave a resounding "boooooo."
*****"Vous et nul autre" is one of the more debated phrases used on the site. (It is also one of the most unlikely to change! [Tim])

Some "Your library" changes

I've added two features to the Cover view in Your Library. You can resize your covers with handy plus and minus buttons. And you can sort your books within Cover view (before this you had to do it in List view).



The back story is that I'm rewriting* Your Library rather extensively, both because it needed to be done and to prepare the way for collections (which are finally going to happen!). Your library needs a good scrub before collections arrive. The changes are minor on the surface, but drastic underneath. If you see problems, let us know.**

*What programmers call "refactoring" for no good reason.
**Since there's been some speculation, we wil NOT be releasing collections today—although it's our second birthday—or, probably, this week.

Harry Potter Review Contest—57 Winners

UPDATED to include readafew*

The winners of the Harry Potter review contest, picked by you! The reviews for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came pouring in—there were 288 by August 6th (the day the contest ended), and 364 as of right now!

As we said, the top six seven winners get a $50 gift certificate to Amazon, Abebooks, Booksense, or any independent bookseller. These were choosen because they were the reviews that got the most thumbs-up, using our new rating reviews feature. We intended to award the top five, but of course, there was a tie for second, so we're giving out seven top prizes, total.

Without further ado, the winners:

LadyN's review was by far the top ranked, with 28 "thumbs-up" when the contest closed (it's even higher now!). LadyN captures the book perfectly, I think, when she writes:
"In Deathly Hallows, Harry gradually finds himself without several things he has previously believed he relied upon, the truth growing ever more apparent that his true magic is drawn from friendship, loyalty, protection, courage and the pursuit of what is right."

The next five were all tied, with 19 thumbs-up votes.

sinister_wombat's review was less glowing, rating the book only 2 stars.** sinister_wombat found fault with the consistency of Rowling's world, and notes that: "Harry's quest for the hallows feels like a clunky story haphazardly thrown into the main narrative with no real point or purpose."

xicanti's review appreciated the way the entire series built to this final book, saying, "Many, many times, I found myself crowing with glee as a long-running plot point was summed up, or when one of my theories proved correct."

ablueidol's review sums it up by saying, "Expect that the story and the consequences are darker. Discover that loose ends from the various stories are tied up. And that all that glitters is not gold."

invisiblelizard, it appears, read the book through the night (as many of us did). The review notes that the "ending ... timed to coincide with the first rays of sunlight after a long night, felt warmer to me. Even with several main characters left on the floor."

Kerian's review celebrates the Boy Who Lives—"Filled with surprises as well as chapters that had me crying all the way through them, this is a book I will reread for decades to come. J.K. Rowling has created a marvelous series, full of love, tears, and laughter. Without a doubt, the Muggle world will never forget the name Harry Potter."

readafew's review was a great (and spoiler free!) journalistic commentary: "What? You want to know about Harry Potter? Sorry, I can’t answer any questions about on-going investigations...."

The other fifty winners were pulled randomly from all the members who both wrote a review and voted for others' reviews. It's kind of neat to see how many people participated all around.

These 50 winners get a free membership to LibraryThing*** and a CueCat for entering their books.****

Fence	exa137	mummimamma	kconcannon	sulkyblue
Rhinoa	Aerodynamics	littorina	Merriwyn	sedelia
Sassm	prkcs	cnrenner	badgerthorazine	sarahthelibrarian
little_mrs	littlebookworm	jrepman	missylc	jbd1
lampbane	mystfromthesea	DaveFragments	CozyLover	yoyogod
zeitgeistxx	edfinn	feaelin	Anks	FrogPrincessuk
codyne	pratchettfan	PollyWannaBook	alisonsw	susiepie
MisterJJones	donutgirl	mrsradcliffe	ejp1082	szarka
capnk8	malisita	philosojerk	gaskella	gwoodrow
Phantasma	alchemia	hero120499	lewispike	teampoush

Congratulations to all, and thanks for writing. These were truly fun to read.

*So we pulled the top winners by calculating the number of votes minus the number of flags against that review, as of Aug 6, when the contest closed. But it mistakenly counted flags against the review that had been applied *after* the fact, which counted readafew out. So thanks to all for setting me straight, and thanks to the Hogwarts Express crew, who noted the correct winners, waited patiently for me to blog this, *and* wrote a fantastic song... :)
**I think this allayed a lot of concerns about the "thumbs up" review voting feature—that people would only give positive reviews a thumbs up. Good job, folks.
***You've already got one? Pass it along to a friend!
****We're sending you a profile comment if you won, but if you have comments disabled, or if we miss you somehow but you see yourself listed here, then send an email to info@librarything.com to claim your prize.

Tag Mirror: See your books the way others do

UPDATE: I'm really enjoying the Talk discussion of this feature. Also, at this point it's better to talk about the feature than to use it. Everyone using it at once has the server that handles it taxed rather seriously!

A major publisher recently asked us to show them a tag cloud of their books. It took a mental flip, but only a few lines of code to adapt this for individual use.

The result is Tag Mirror, available from your and everyone's profile—here's mine (and Abby's, Altay's, Giovanni's and Casey's*). If you're signed in, here's yours. (Please note: It takes serious processing power to analyze 22 million tags. Everyone is going to hit it at once, so be patient.)

Tag Mirror "holds a mirror" up to your books and to you. Instead of showing what you think about your books—what a regular tag cloud shows—it shows you what others think of them, in effect using LibraryThing's twenty-two million tags to organize and surface interesting topics from within your own collection.** As with other tag clouds, size equals importance. When you click on a tag, you get a relevancy-ranked list of books tagged that way.

I can't decide if it's just the sort of cherry-on-top feature that makes LibraryThing unique or if it's something genuinely new and interesting. I think it might be the latter. As Altay put it, it's the sort of idea that seems obvious in retrospect.

I didn't know I was interested in gender studies.

Here's a for-example. I don't use the tags gender studies, patristics or theory. They're just not terms I use. To some extent, that reflects who I am. But I have a fair number of books that, to others, fall under those categories. It's interesting to slice my books up in an alien way—to see them through other eyes. Maybe I'm more interested in gender studies than I thought.

More concretely, I do use the tag "alternate history," but browsing my tag mirror page called up some alternate histories that I hadn't tagged that way—useful stuff.***

Finally, Tag Mirror gives everyone a tag cloud, even those who don't bother to tag anything. It seems almost unfair.

As our recent discussion of what tagging does to knowledge brought out so well, tagging is a complex mixture of private purpose and public good. I agree with those who say that we tag best when we tag for ourselves. But when everyone does that, a rich web of meaning is created.

I've done my best to push tagging in some new directions, trying subjects and tags together statistically, making book recommendations based on tag patterns, and with the tagmash feature. You can add Tag Mirror to that list. Little things. But they keep getting more interesting.

UPDATE: It's 4:30am and, of course, I couldn't finish blogging it before someone else started a thread about it ("Just noticed this on my profile"). Come talk about it.

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*Casey has a surprising number of cookbooks! He's coming up here in a few weeks—it'll be the first time any of us have actually met him. We usually just order pizza. I think that plan's changed.
**It doesn't actually exclude your own tags. They still have an effect.
***It also brought up Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States. People tag unexpectedly, if humorously.

Fox 5 "Good Day NYC" does the LibraryThing

Teevee—we're on teevee!

International tags and more

We've had quite an upswing internationally, particularly among Dutch speakers. Dutch has surpassed French as our second-largest language community. (Next up: the Germans!) So I spent the evening adding some international features.

I've added special tag clouds to work pages on our non-English sites (LibraryThing.fr, LibraryThing.de, LibraryThing.nl, etc.) They show tags used by members of that site, or on books in that language.

It doesn't always "work" that well. Perhaps half the tags on our non-English sites are still in English, the site tending to appeal to English-language speakers first. But I imagine that will change as the membership broadens, and tools like this make tagging in your own language more attractive.

The example above is from the Dutch site (LibraryThing.nl) work page for Harry Mulisch's De ontdekking van de hemel (The Discovery of Heaven), the most popular work on the site. It's more than half English tags. A more Dutch example would be De kanonnen van Navarone (The guns of Navarone), tagged avontuur (journeys by airplane) and spionage (spinach) alongside thriller and world war two.*

I also added an indication of how many of your linguistic compatriots have the books. Here is the French page for Amélie Nothomb's Stupeur et Tremblements (Fear and Trembling)—the fourth-most popular book among French members, but not in the first 10,000 among English-language members. The text is yellow and in English because I just added it, so no kind French user has yet volunteered a translation.

Lastly, I thought I'd announce and explain a feature just before killing it. (As Hegel said, "the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk."**) That feature is tag-coloring, an experiment that recently went site-wide (with the change in caching systems). The idea was to color personal tags lighter than subject tags, algorithmically at first, with some hand work from the LibraryThing for Libraries program, and then moving to let users weigh in on what was and what wasn't personal.

I was never convinced either way, but I thought it worth a try. The reaction on Talk has, however, been pretty hostile, not helped by the fact I didn't talk about it after it went live). I think I agree with the criticism now too. Anyway, chime in there if you like it. Otherwise, it's going away... Sometimes beta means making mistakes.

*Hey, it's 3:35am here.
**Underused.

Introducing Casey Durfee (and the new search)

We just hired Casey Durfee (LibraryThing: caseydurfee), a crackerjack "Library 2.0" hacker. Casey's first project—faster, better search—debuts today (see below). It's a big win. We have a long queue of similar projects. Casey will also be heading up LibraryThing for Libraries, our project to get our data into library catalogs.

Casey will be working from Seattle, where he was recently left a job at the Seattle Public Library, managing their library system. Before that Casey worked at SirsiDynix*, so he has a lot of background in the arcane world of library systems—just what we needed for LibraryThing for Libraries. Casey is also responsible for L2, a handy Greasemonkey plug-in that adds Amazon content to library catalogs.

Perhaps the coolest thing Casey has done is a project called Helios, a "faceted" search on the Library of Congress records, done very simply and entirely with open-source software. It was a personal project, and although it's not a complete solution, it searches the LC better than the LC's million-dollar catalog. You can see Casey in action, talking about Helios, in this Code4Lib talk on Google Video.

Search. Check out the new work and author searches. They're based on Solr, a simple but powerful search engine, and the same one Casey used on the LC data. Until now, we were relying on MySQLs fulltext capabilities. We had outgrown it, and slow performance was causing frequent database glitches.

It's fast, accurate and searches all titles, not just the "leading" (mostly English) ones. But, as with everything we do, it's not "perfect." Casey has set up a Talk post about it. He has a variety of knobs he can turn, and is looking for feedback. I'm convinced it's overzealous on "stemming"—picking up "loves" and "lovely" for "love." That it even does stemming is quite an improvement from our previous solution. Once we've got it working the way we like, we'll also be adding it to touchstones and elsewhere on the site.

Other projects. Casey is a certified library programmer. (I just play one on TV.) He knows his MARC21 from his UNIMARC, and his "glyphs from his diacritics".** As time goes by we hope he can work on things like:

• Rewriting our library-data import, to get all the diacriticals right and squeeze more out of the MARC records.
• Adding more libraries. We've been avoiding UNIMARC libraries (eg., Italy libraries) and, until recently, most SRU/SRW-based ones. We can do better. We have also finagled access to British Library data, so look for us to add that too.
  

LibraryThing for Libraries. Right now, we have more than 350 libraries asking us about LibraryThing for Libraries. Altay and I have been going through at a snail's pace. Casey should be able to crank that up a bit. We also think his SirsiDynix experience will come in handy. He's already written a handy LTFL export script for HIP. He's well-known in the HIP ILS community, and should move us past our current success among Innovative Interfaces catalogs.

That's it. Welcome on board, Casey!

*When it was Dynix.
**Whatever that means; suggested by Casey.

LibraryThing party photos

Sometimes I get behind. We have at least four announcements racked up—a major hire with another this close to being hired, two new features and a contest. Before we do any of them, however, we need to get this out: the long-awaited pictures from LibraryThing pizza party in Cambridge, MA.

Turn-out was good. Freak downpours discouraged some , but at least 25 members showed up. If we had all brought our LibraryThing libraries, it would have come to some 28,000 books. No kidding.

Our thanks to everyone who came. It was great fun to put some names to faces* and find out something about who people were outside the site. I'll post the rest of the photos on Flickr soon.


Munching.


Eager to start munching.


Conversational groupings.


Inside was less fevered.


Knitters knitting.


Reader reading.


Harvard alumni plotting.


7,000(?) books between them.


Children everywhere!


Altay's after-party. We had an astounding amount of pizza left over.**


It seems unfair to expose others and not myself. But nobody took a picture of me at the party. So, here I am the next morning, feeding Liam wineberries.***

*Oh, except for one person—not shown—nobody objected to being on film and online. But I left off names to protect the innocent. No such policy prevented Flickr: herzogbr from identifying Altay and the back of my head.
**Not to mention alcohol. We actually gained there, and came back to Portland with a small trash barrel full of beer. We have had exactly one left—a Sam Adams. I think this means adding Dutch books was some sort of drunken dare.
***No photos of Abby either. But here she is presenting at Readercon, and here she is with the inestimable Kate Sheehan of the Danbury, CT library, at Library Camp in NYC.

Widgets in musth

For about three hours this afternoon some of our blog widgets went crazy, inserting very large covers where small ones were supposed to be. I was fixing a long-standing problem, in which some books never showed up in the widget.* In the course of fixing that problem I created another. Some users were amused, some dumbfounded and some pissed off. All good reations, I think.

Anyway, a few users emailed us, and Christopher stepped in to fix the problem. The widgets are okay now.

To the bloggers affected, my sincere apologies. I should have checked the code more before it went live. The change I made didn't affect widgets of the type I have on the blog or one of the users with the problem I was fixing, so I missed it. It was a dumb mistake, and I wish I had caught it in ten minutes, not three hours.

By way of making it up, if you had one of these blogs and felt inconvenienced, please write me a note with your blog URL and your address, and I'll ship you off a CueCat barode scanner. Please take me up on this. It's the least we an do.

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*Basically, LibraryThing had imperfect knowledge of what covers Amazon had available, so we weren't showing everything we could.

Dutch-ness resumed

I manage to speed up the Dutch Royal Library (Koninklijke Bibliotheek) with some help from their technical staff. I'm very pleased how welcoming Dutch libraries have been. We were also invited to add data from another library, this time a public. I'm nearly cross-eyed from all the varieties of data I've been parsing.

We're going to be in a national newspaper, the NRC Handelsblad, tomorrow. I've seen a copy of the article; it looked very positive. Also, when run through Babel Fish (Google doesn't do Dutch), it looked insane. (Typical sentence: "Pubers, muziekliefhebbers, students, zakenlieden, homos, vips, jobseekers or singles: all they have their own network sites.")

UPDATE: Here it is. Very positive. (And it gave us a pretty big bounce. Let's hope we can hold it.)

Oh, we hit 250,000 users. But no big deal. We all know that registered users isn't the same thing as regular users or paid users. When we hit 250,000 paid users I'll blog about it, from my teak and platinum moon-yacht.

Harry Potter book pile contest winners

Thanks to everyone for entering the Harry Potter book pile contest, and providing me with yet another incredibly creative batch of entries (you certainly don't make judging easy!)*


The winner! j2.0 (janetmck on Flickr), with the aptly named "Parceltongue?" gets a $50 gift certificate to use at a bookstore of their choice.






Second prize—and a lifetime gift membership—goes to ellen.w (et al.), with proof that reading is social :)



And because there were just too many great entries, I'm also giving annual memberships to 5** runners up—pictured below.***

amarie with the Weasley clock bookpile.

Sabrinanymph with
"McGonagall goes after the quill".

Jenglo with
"...he who shall not be named..."

Shadowtricker with a

Hogwarts student's desk

And lastly, playful, who reminds us that there is life (and indeed, books!) beyond Harry Potter...


Stay tuned, we'll announce the winners of the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows review contest soon.

You can see all of the entries under the LibraryThingHarryPotter tag on Flickr, and check out our own book pile archive for all the past contest winners.


*I blame the delay in posting the winners entirely on J.K. Rowling. After finishing book 7, I had to go back and re-read 1-7 again (thus cutting into my nightly work hours).
**For a total of seven winners—coincidence? I think not.
**Email me (abbylibrarything.com) to claim your prizes! Oh, and include your LT user names so I can update this post with the right attributions...

Good days and strange days

Today we had our best day since since we hit the New York Times back in March. Members entered 65,606 books. Fortunately, the system held up well. We hit 17 million books.

Weirdly, we have no idea what's going on! The numbers are way up for a Tuesday. We introduced a whole bunch of Dutch sources, but the word is only just starting to get out. Nor is it just a couple of users. Does someone know something we don't?

UPDATE: There will be no more Dutch news today.

Will the Dutch-ness ever stop?

We just inked a deal with AquaBrowser, an Amsterdam-based library catalog company. See the Thingology Post.

Rijksmuseum Research Library

After yesterday's announcement of four major Dutch-language sources, we got an email from someone at the Rijksmuseum Research Library, inviting us to add them too. We were happy to.

As anyone who's been to the Netherlands knows, the Rijksmuseum (site, Wikipedia) is Amsterdam's phenomenal art museum. The Research Library (site, Wikipedia) is apparently the largest art historical museum library in the Netherlands, housing some 140,000 monographs as well as serials and auction catalogs. It's also first art-history library in LibraryThing, and should be useful for bibliophiles with art interests.

Hallo! (Getting serious about Dutch books)

I've added four book sources for Dutch readers: the Dutch Royal Library (KB), the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) and booksellers Bol.com and Bruna.nl. With luck, they'll be a few more soon.*

This should be big boost for our Dutch site, LibraryThing.nl. Until now, there was only one Dutch-language source, TU Delft**. Between the four new sources LibraryThing now embraces virtually all in-print Dutch books, 70,000 cover images and millions of older books.

I hope this will make LibraryThing a much more attrative place for Dutch readers to catalog their books and do the other things LibraryThing is about.

Adding Dutch books required extensive work. Giovanni, LibraryThing's newest (fractional) employee, helped us track down Bol and Bruna data, our first non-Amazon retailer. On my side it involved dealing with five new formats. Fortunately, much of the work will contribute to adding other sources.

There were some wrinkles:

• Bol and Bruna are a single search on combined data. Neither feed was intended for personal cataloging, and I found holes in both sets that the other could improve. Even so, the data is thin by LibraryThing standards, lacking publication years and other important fields.*** The covers are great.
  
• The Bol/Bruna mash-up was an innovation. LibraryThing trusts that both retailers want to let their customers catalog the books they bought at their stores. But if either tells us to stop, we'll politely give up our affiliate accounts and withdraw their data. In appreciation for their service to Dutch-language readers, we have put Bol/Bruna links on all LibraryThing.nl work pages, not considering which contributed the data.
• KB was a tough addition, requiring us to parse two new formats, SRU and Dublin Core. Unfortunately, I have yet to figure out how to execute an ISBN search. The KB data is high quality, but slow to retrieve.
• KBR required the least attractive sort of data parsing, so-called "screen scraping." Only titles can be searched, and the result list is very basic. But, when a book is selected, the data is good, and retrieval is fast.

We have also been reaching out to other prominent Dutch-language book sites looking to forge relationships and pick up or link to interesting content. Your suggestions would be most welcome.

Lastly, as those who follow it know, LibraryThing.nl has seen some controversy. A lot of excellent work has gone into the translation, which is farther along than any other. But there have also been uncollegial disagreements. In response I have urged members to respect the collective nature of the endeavor and instituted a Three-Times Rule, similar to Wikipedia's Three Revert Rule. Except in very special circumstances, members may not translate a given phrase the same way more than three times.

Thanks to all. Comments, questions and criticisms wanted—as always.

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*We are waiting for approval to add Proxis.be and implementation and/or approval from a number of other libraries in the Netherlands and Belgium.
**For much of LibraryThing's existence we were also tying into the Catholic University of Leuven, but their Z39.50 server eventually went black.
***We had hoped to further supplement them with KR or KBR data, but we lack a working ISBN search for both.

Welcome Giovanni!

Everyone say hello to LibraryThing's newest employee, Giovanni Soltoggio—LibraryThing member Gio. Giovanni will be helping us expand outside the United States, tracking down data sources, talking about LibraryThing to Europeans, making important deals over small cups of coffee and so forth.

Giovanni hails from the Italian Alps—a valley called Valtellina—and now lives in Dusseldorf. He reads Italian, German and English. He speaks some Czech. His favorite authors are Haruki Murakami, Niccolò Ammaniti and Lorenzo Licalzi. He is sharp as a tack, but much nicer.

Strictly speaking, Giovanni is only 20% ours. Four days out of five he's the European Managing Director for BookFinder.com and its European sites JustBooks.co.uk, JustBooks.fr and JustBooks.de (for which he writes the blog). He helped BookFinder make the jump to Europe. We're very grateful to Bookfinder's Charlie and Anirvan for letting him moonlight a little.

In a few hours I'm going to blog one of Giovanni's first projects, finding us a decent store of Dutch bibliographic data and covers. He is working on an Italian one right now. We expect big things from him.

If you want to wish him well, or know of good stores in other languages, he'd love to hear from you.* Drop a message on his profile, or email him at giovannilibrarything.com.

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*Finding good data is strangely hard. There are some commercial providers although they largely overlap with what Amazon provides for free. Smaller languages are hard. A few weeks ago we had an Armenian-reader up for a week of Facebook work. I spent much of the last day with him, trying to get hold of a source—any source—of Armenian book data. We would have been happy to link to one bookseller on every page. From a search engine perspective alone, our links are gold to small sites. No luck, alas.

Amazon Vine and Early Reviewers

Amazon has just announced Amazon Vine. Basically, it's our LibraryThing Early Reviewers idea—a way to get publishers' pre-release books to interested and vocal reviewers. As they put it:

"Vine helps our vendors generate awareness for new and pre-release products by connecting them with the voice of the Amazon community: our reviewers. Vine members, called Voices, may request free copies of items enrolled in the program and have the ability to share their opinions before these products become generally available."

Apparently Amazon had experimented with sending-out ARCs before. But we suspect they were not unaware of LibraryThing's Early Reviewer program, which made Publishers Weekly, Pub Lunch and top publishing blogs. It makes a lot of sense for them to be doing.

So far the program is email invite only. They're apparently basing invitations on being among their top reviewers. By contrast, Early Reviewers program is based around similar libraries, although we favor "vocal" members too. Ultimately, we think LibraryThing is in a better position to give books to the best readers, but there's no denying Amazon's scale and, if they put their mind to it, they've done remarkable things with recommendations algorithms before.

Lastly, Amazon is to be congratulated for stating unequivocally that will not be editing negative reviews:

"As with all Amazon reviews, we want your honest opinion of the product. Amazon will not edit or modify any reviews beyond small tweaks to fit within existing guidelines..."

This is in line with how Amazon has always worked. As James Marcus writes in Amazonia, their decision to show bad reviews was a gutsy decision at the time—a reminder of the "bad old days" of marketing! I hope they follow this up with what we promise: that negative reviews will not impact whether you continue to get Amazon Vine books.