Norway, Sweden and New Zealand!

We've gone and released eleven Norwegian, Swedish and New Zealand libraries.

Norway gets its first libraries, six in number, as does New Zealand, five. Sweden now has five, up from three. Of course, Norway and Sweden have their own, translated LibraryThings, no.LibraryThing.com and se.LibraryThing.com.

The libraries include The Royal Library of Sweden (LIBRIS), the Oslo Public Library (Deichmanske Bibliotek), the University of Auckland and the National Library of New Zealand. The new batch comes on top of twenty-five Danish and twenty-eight new Australian libraries, raising the new total to 132. Momentum is building. We'll release Finland next week, but just wait until we release new libraries from the USA, Canada and the Spanish-speaking world!

Getting people outside the US to join LibraryThing is all about making it easy for them to enter their books; this should make it a lot easier for Norwegians, Swedes and Kiwis to join the fun.

New features, Monday. We had planned to release some major improvments to book editing and cataloging quality today but at 5:30am last night Chris and I called it a night, frustrated with some Internet Explorer bugs. (Chris is still asleep. I got up at 9. Which one of us has a child, I wonder?) The screen-capture was taken at 3:30 from our video chat. Don't you wish you worked for LibraryThing?

Anyway, I don't like to release really major features late in the week. And we can improve things. So we're going to pile on some more goodness and release everything Sunday night/Monday morning.

Downtime. We're going to go down for much of Saturday morning, changing the database in important ways.

The Golden Compass

The folks at New Line are offering free tickets again, this time to California screenings of the ambaric extravaganza, The Golden Compass, adapted from Philip Pullman's novel (titled Northern Lights in the UK), and the first of the "His Dark Materials" series.

There are two screenings:

• Los Angeles – 12/4 – The Grove Stadium – 189 The Grove Dr. , Los Angeles , CA 90036 - 7:30 pm (pass)
• Orange County – 12/5 – AMC 30 @ The Block – 20 City Blvd West , Orange , CA 92868 – 7:30 pm (pass)

Click on the link to get a pass, print it out, and bring it to the screening (each pass admits two people). Both screenings start at 7:30pm, and admittance is on a first-come-first-served basis—so get there early! They'll start letting people in around 7pm.

If you don't know, the movie has aroused some controversy over its—or at least the book's—anti-Christian themes. This is more overt in the later books. Indeed—without giving anything away—in a literal sense, it's utterly overt!

As you might expect, boycotts have been called, angry letters written, etc. And, of course, LibraryThing members are talking about it. Check out the conversations page for The Golden Compass for Talk posts on the book. Some recent highlights:

• The Read YA Lit group is having a group read, already to 42 messages.
• There's a spoiler-free thread and another post-reading spoiler-ific thread in Green Dragon. Opinions are mixed, but polite.
• In Book Talk inkdrinker started a thread about efforts to oppose the movie on religious grounds. Hot and now rather far off-topic.
• There's a shorter thread in the Banned Books group.
• There are threads in both Happy Heathens and Christianity groups.

Opinion!* If you haven't read it, I recommend you do so straightaway, before the movie comes out. New Line doesn't pay us for the free promotion, so I'm happy to bite the hand here. If past adaptations of this sort are any guide, the chance that it will be any good is low, and the chance it will satisfy die-hard fans of the book virtually nil. Will I see it? Of course!

For whatever my opinion is worth, it's a great book. I started it a few weeks ago, when I had a lot of driving to do, so I got the audio version. I was immensely enjoyable. I find that listening to a book most closely resembles the reading experience of childhood, when you really lived the books you read. For about a week I lived that world. I went on to the second and third, again in the audio, and even avoiding a paper copy someone had because I didn't want to rush. (They're not as good, but I'll leave that topic aside.)

It's certainly anti-Christian in the litteral sense. The Catholic Church—in a parallel universe which also had a Pope John Calvin—and God himself are the villains of the series. Anyone who's looked at my catalog might think this a strike against it. It's not, and many others with the same opinions (and books?) are with me. (See the Wikipedia article or the review in First Things for a taste of that side of the argument.) For my part, I found it pitch-perfect in both language and underlying sentiment.**

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*And MY opinion, not anyone who works for LT, so far as I know. Abby said she's going to read it. I await her verdict.

**That's not my opinion of Pullman's criticism of Lewis, for sure.

Twenty-five Danish libraries added

If you're Danish and have books, we can help.

We've gone from one to twenty-five Danish libraries available as cataloging sources. They are available on the Danish-language LibraryThing, dk.librarything.com, and the English site.

Denmark is a small country, so it should be low on our agenda, down with the "Wisconsin push."* But it's a country of unusually passionate readers. Our Dutch experiment proved that catering to small, literate countries works.** Five million Danish readers? Come on in!

Libraries. Denmark is also a country of libraries and, as I learned when asked to speak before librarians in Aarhus (Århus), Danish libraries are way ahead when it comes to innovative uses of technology. Among other things, Danish libraries reach out. They certainly have more open Z39.50 connections—the connections LibraryThing needs—than anywhere else.

Before this we drew from only one library, Det kongelige Bibliotek (The Royal Library). Our data import had character-set problems and, owing to some creative changes to the MARC standard—called DANMARC, I kid you not—author-name problems too. We've now added twenty-four other public, university and government libraries, from Aalborg Universitets Bibliotek to the Vejen Bibliotek.

Free accounts. Read this far? Have a Danish email address? Well, I'm going to give out free accounts to the first twenty-five Danish members who write to me from a Danish (dk) email address. You need to have made an account and entered at least fifty books. Send email to tim@librarything.com.

Help us out. So far, the Danish Zeitgeist and groups have not been very active. There aren't many Danish author photos either. No doubt many Danes are counted as members of the English-language site. But let's if we can't get this to take off!

Other news. Multiple authors and roles are being released tomorrow if it kills us!

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*I mean no disrespect for Wisconsin, of course. Denmark and Wisconsin are not only the same in population; they are the yin and yang of quality cheese.
**This goes against conventional "social networking" wisdom. MySpace, Facebook and the like are only now getting seriously into non-US markets, and none have a Dutch or Danish version. In theory, going after small markets is like lighting solitary candles in the sand when what you really need is roaring bonfire. But small networks can also more densely packed, allowing for faster spread, and the Netherlands and Denmark have exceedingly open and engaged societies, ideal for both social networking and literary ferment.

Photo credit: Danish flag photo by Flikr user Jacob Bøtter, of Copenhagen, used under a CC-Attribution license.

Which of your authors are on LibraryThing?

I'd added a feature to show you which of your authors—the authors of the books in your library—are also LibraryThing members. We call them LibraryThing Authors.

The impetus was an unfortunate event. Two LibraryThing Authors went hog-wild "friending" members. Some members were annoyed, and I stepped into create an upper limit of requests and comments per day (it's 70). But it did raise the fact that there was no adequate way for LibraryThing authors to connect with their readers.

LibraryThing Authors? If you don't know, LibraryThing Authors are authors who are members of LibraryThing and have put some or all of their personal books onto the site.

Wouldn't it be great to see what your favorite authors were reading? Well, that's the idea, and, so far, it's been quite a draw. We have 667 authors so far. We hope this makes it even more attractive for all concerned.

28 Australian libraries / The Book Show

UPDATED UPDATE: ABC's The Book Show aired the interview. It was fun to do. And today (Dec. 5 over there) we got a—admittedly syndicated—mention in Australia's national newspaper The Australian. Go Australia!

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We've jumped from 2 to 28 Australian libraries. This should make it a lot easier for Australians to add books to LibraryThing.

In related news, I'm appearing on Australian Broadcasting Corporation's The Book Show, at 10am today (Nov. 22 in Australia), to talk about LibraryThing. The show is repeated at midnight. You can listen in from their shows page or with their podcast.

The Book Show. The Book Show is a DAILY show! I listened to a half-dozen of them to prepare. I enjoyed the one on the PR industry, with Bob Burton (Nov. 19), the one on marginialia (Oct. 19). They did LT Early Reviewer's author Amy Bloom on October 9.

Libraries. The libraries include state libraries from Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales and universities like Canberra, Tasmania, Sydney, Flinder's University and Charles Darwin University. There are also some special collections, like the Australian Defence Force Academy and the Australian Graduate School of Management. And of course we still have the National Library of Australia and the Australian National University.

The new Australian libraries raises our total to 97. Over the coming weeks it's going to go much higher. But we figured it would be fun to unleash them in groups. Also, the new libraries introduce a host of new challenges, including new standards, like UNIMARC, and non-Latin character sets, and we wanted to make sure we got everything right.

Casey will go into much greater detail about the new libraries soon. But you should also see a substantial increase in cataloging quality, particularly with character sets. At first, this will just be for newly-added books, but we'll make an effort to improve older records too. We also have a new "author authors" and "roles" system. We were going to unveil it today, but a couple of minor bugs kept us from it. We'll get that out tomorrow.

Wish me luck on the radio. From listening to old ones, I determined that the show is very much up my alley, but very relaxed. I'm not. Maybe I should have a whiskey or two before I go on.

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The photo above come from the one to the left, this photo, by Johan Larson. It was the first commercially-usable and remixable Flickr result for "Australian flag."

Unfortunately, LibraryThing's Australian—Tasmanian!—systems guy, John Dalton (Felius), was unavailable for under-flag exuberance. The individual in question is almost certainly not excited about LibraryThing's new libraries. But, if he has any interest, how about a free account?

Boston Antiquarian Book Fair

Is anyone going to the Boston Antiquarian Book Fair at Boston's Hynes Convention Center tomorrow (Sunday)? Abby and I are going. If you see the two of us strolling around—with black (me) and canary (Abby) LibraryThing t-shirts—say hi.

We're obviously not allowed to sell anything on a regular ticket, but we'll bring a dozen of those CueCat barcode scanners to give out to Thingamabrarians, first-come, first-served.

While LibraryThing has done very well among book-nuts generally, it hasn't necessarily caught on as strong in the high-end antiquarian market. I can think of one of two things we could do, like trying to estimate prices, and allowing members to upload multiple photos. Any ideas?

Here are some of the covers I've received recently: