Series authors and work info in your catalog

I've added two small-ish features that point the way to other features:

Series Authors: Series pages now show all series authors, with photos if there are any. (The example below is from Star Wars.) Mouse-over a picture to get the name. In general, I want to move in the direction of graphical representations like this. I dislike profile pictures, but this is something different. It's attractive, I think, and encourages people to add author photos.

Work info in you catalog: You can add the field "Work: Title and author" to your catalog display. In the example below you can see I have two copies of the work, the Histories and that my Penguin edition three Aeschyls play is otherwise known as the Oresteia. Incidentally, it cannot current sort by work title. If you sort by the "shared" column, however, it sorts by shared-copies which basically "groups" by work anyway.

Escaped Rhinos!

I just mis-posted here about our minimalist booth at the Public Library Association National Conference in Minneapolis. And, of course, as soon as I post it goes out to Google and all the RSS aggregators. So, my apologies for cluttering up your reader with rhinos.

I've posted it over on our ideas-and-libraries blog, Thingology instead.

Series improvements

Chris and I have added two small but important features to LibraryThing's amazing member-driven "series" feature (first blogged here).

First, authors now show series as well as works:



Second, I've added a page laying out all the series and series-books in your library. You can find it from your Profile tab under "statistics." Here's one from a user with many series, oakesspalding.



Oh, I forgot. FriendFeed, a fast-rising social-network aggregator I haven't played with, added LibraryThing support a couple days ago.

New JSON API

I've just blogged about a new Javascript/JSON API for work info over on Thingology, LibraryThing's blog for ideas, issues, libraries and labs.

It's mostly designed to make it easy for people to link to LibraryThing only when we have the book. You can also dress up the link with copy- and review-counts, and an average rating.

I think regular members will be more excited by a JSON API to your own books. This will allow us and members to write new widgets—widget for reviews, for example—and better widgets. I'm want to write them so that all the JavaScript code that comes out it is automatically shared between members, both legally and technically.

The work-info API is a first step. Let's talk about this and what should come.

Twenty-five million books!

Back when we had five million books

We just hit 25,000,000 books.

It's been a good week. LibraryThing and social cataloging were profiled on All Thing Considered and spent more than a day at the top of NPR's most-emailed list. I was named a "Mover and Shaker" of the library world, a rare thing for a non-librarian. LibraryThing Local, only a few weeks old, hit 20,000 venues (now 23,000). Our Redesign LibraryThing project has been going well too. We unveiled a Bonus batch of free Early Reviewer books. And we opened up the LibraryThing Authors program. We've been unusually busy--my statistics (a new feature)—show I've already written more words on Talk than any other month, but also happy. And did I mention Casey got to talk about LibraryThing in Taiwan? Good times!

Suggestion contest: We've been casting around for an appropriate contest to commemorate the event. We're going to give the book-pile contests a rest for a while; I'm not sure past winners can be topped. And although the LibraryThing haikus are one of my favorite parts of the site, many members find writing and poetry contests intimidating.

Instead, we're going to make the contest about LibraryThing itself. I've opened up a Talk post: Ten ways to make LibraryThing better.

The rules are:

• Post only once.
• Provide no more than ten suggestions.
• Keep the suggestions short--a few sentences at the most!
• Focus on your suggestions, not on others'.

The suggestions can be of any kind. Technical requests--feature requests and bug fixes--are fine. But so are tips for how to promote LibraryThing or partnership ideas. You can mix them up--tell us to change the whole design around and go open source, and correct one small spelling error.

This is NOT a vote! You are free to post whatever suggestions you want, but we aren't going to be tallying up how many times an idea is repeated. Instead, I see this as an opportunity to surface many ideas.

I'm asking that the main thread be kept clear of commentary; I've made a second thread for that.

At the end of our "Week of Twenty-Five Million Books" I'll announce 25 winners. Fifteen will be randomly selected from members who posted. Ten will be selected for one or more of their suggestions. We'll post our favorite suggestions on the blog, and get to work on at least some of them. Winners get a gift account, and their choice of:

• A CueCat barcode scanner
• A LibraryThing t-shirt.
• First dibs on a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book.*

The lucky member: The twenty-five millionth book was The Listerdale mystery, and other stories by Agatha Christie, added by LibraryThing member irkthepurist (Chris Browning). It was added at 2:47pm on Sunday. For his luck, irkthepurist gets a free membership, a CueCat barcode scanner and a t-shirt.

Look out LC! The next big milestone is going to be thirty and then thirty-two million books (specifically 32,124,001). The latter is the size of the Library of Congress, the largest library in the world. That'll going to be something, isn't it?

Update: I forgot Rosina Lippi's banners!

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*In case there's a rush, we'll allow no more than ten members to claim first dibs on an individual book. The individual must otherwise qualify. Unfortunately, we do not set the country restrictions, which are about who has publishing rights where.

Redesign update

A week ago, I invited LibraryThing members to redesign the site, opening up LibraryThing Zen Garden, a place to design and test new stylesheets for the site.

So far, some two dozen members have contributed CSS stylesheets and one, zanix, produced a highly original design, executed entirely in Photoshop. MarkBarnes, acting on a suggestion from Abby, produced a very attractive design, based on the design of Cork'd, "LibraryThing for wine." All told, there have been some really interesting ideas, and fetching new color palates. I'm still not sure where to take the design, but it's given me a lot to think about. (It's certainly poointed out some structural problems with our mark-up too.)

Check out the designs here and the group Redesign LibraryThing! where they are being discussed. Here are some samples:

New Member Stats

I've add two new sub-pages available from your Profile Stats page. They are "Overlap with Legacy Libraries" and "Talk and Group Statistics."

Overlap with Legacy Libraries is split from the main stats page. We're up to 13 complete "Legacy Libraries" now—W. H. Auden, Eza Pound and Walker Percy* were just addded. I can't link to yours directly, but here's mine.

"Talk and Group Statistics" provides way too much information about how you've used the Talk feature, including statistics like total messages, total messages by group and month and even a word count of all messages. (I have apparently written 336,449 words in Talk, which comes to some 1,121 typewritten pages!)

"Talk and Group Statistics" are private—other members can't see your stats. Privacy aside, we didn't want the stats to become, um, boasts. For demonstration purposes, however, all LibraryThing employees, however, are wide-open. Check out mine, Chris' and John's.

By popular demand, I have also included a nostalgia link to "Your first message." Let me know what other stats you want on Talk.

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*I was pleasantly surprised to find Walker Percy also read Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of scientific revolutions and Malinowski's Magic, science and religion.

All Things Considered does the LibraryThing

NPR's All Thing Considered did a story on LibraryThing and bookish social networking yesterday. It was a great story, and, I suspect, a perfect audience. Check it out.

Right now the story is number three on NPR's most-emailed list. (This is no doubt why traffic hasn't let up!) Abby promises she'll make me a (quinoa?)* cake if we beat out Obama's speech. So, send the story to all your friends! UPDATE: We're number one! Help me, I'm giddy.

They covered some other sites, but I think LibraryThing came off best. Besides talking to me--45 minutes of conversation reduced to ten seconds of tape!--they also interviewed Sean Flannagan of the blog Deeplinking. His blog post include "The Big List of Things I Like About LibraryThing" so I think the reporter got it from all sides.

*As Dan Pashman proved on the Bryant Park Project, we need a quinoa angle to really take off on the most-emailed list. How about the quinoa tag, or the book Quinoa, the supergrain? And neti pots? We got your neti pots right here, guys. Flush out your nose with LibraryThing!

LibraryThing Authors Opens Up

We're opening up and relaunching our LibraryThing Authors program—our way to connect authors to their fans.

Before, we required authors to have at least 50 books cataloged before joining LibraryThing Authors, and some 800 authors have done so. But some authors wanted to start right away or were more interested in reaching out—talking to members and listing their events—than cataloging their library. So we're dropping the 50 books requirement. Visit LibraryThing Authors for directions on joining.

There's more for authors to do on LibraryThing—now more than ever:

• Add your readings and other events to LibraryThing Local. Events now appear on author pages too (eg., Sarah Monette, Megan Abott, James Dashner and Elizabeth Bear).
  
• Add your photo to your author profile.
• Connect with readers on a more personal level, in groups and on-on-one.
  
• Showcase your favorite books on your catalog.
  
• Add your home page, interviews and other links to your author page.
• Dress up your "Common Knowledge" section with where you went to school, your agent, where you're buried, etc.
• Get your publisher to put one of your books up for LibraryThing Early Reviewers. Or pick up a free book yourself. (Or wait a few weeks—we're going to open that up to authors too.)
  

In the next few week's we'll be unveiling a new "Author Chat" section on Talk, where authors can engage readers directly.

Bonus batch of Early Reviewer books

I love March. It's the beginning of Spring. It's my birth month, and Tim's as well. So, of course, it's time for a bonus batch of Early Reviewer books.

Much thanks to Random House for these two books, which both look amazing.

The March bonus batch from Random House includes Salman Rushdie's new novel, The Enchantress of Florence and Joseph E. Persico's history of FDR and the women in his life, Franklin and Lucy.



Request your advance copy here:
http://www.librarything.com/er/list

You have until Saturday, March 22nd at 6pm EDT to request a copy.

Change us! It's LibraryThing Zen Garden.

Introducing LibaryThing Zen Garden!

Have you heard of CSS Zen Garden? It's a legendary website (and popular book) devoted to showing the "power of CSS." Every page, from the home page to the the military "Zen Army" to the charming old-fashioned movie theater stage set, has the same content, but has been "styled" differently with CSS. For many web developers, the first time they saw CSS Zen Garden was like an effective Zen koan—instant enlightment!

Best of all, most of the designs were submitted by regular web developers, not the site's developers.

Well, why not let LibraryThing members change the site? Members have been agitating for a design redo for some time now. We've posted files for people to play with. Well, why not let them play with the site in real-time? We have been fooling with some designs too. Why not show them off?

Well, step on over to the LibraryThing Zen Garden. You can:

• Sample different styles.
• Set your preferred style and browse around the site with it.
• Create your own styles. Every design you make is available for others to look at.

As a demo, I set five styles under my name:

• timspalding-1. This is a design Abby, Sonya and I played with one afternoon. Set this to your style and browse around. The subnav on the profile page is different. You'll also notice the tabs are slightly curved on some browsers.
  
• timspalding-2. LibraryThing member existanai sent a few dozen alternate logos. Here's one. Note the CSS to hide the normal image and use a background image.
• timspalding-3. Another existanai logo.
• timspalding-4. Don't like the logo—kill it!
• timspalding-5. Screwing things up is funny! But I've done it, so it's not funny anymore. Bonus points for having a browser that displays the BLINK tag.*
  

Show us what you can do? We want comments on the designs we create, but we really want to see what members want. You don't need to make a complete design. If you can change a few characters, you can show us a new background color.

I've decided not to award any prizes or hold any votes. Design is a very personal thing, and I don't want anyone feeling left out. All ideas are good, even if they only demonstrate the terribleness of a particular style. Needless to say, if we end up using ideas from your design, we'll shower you with praise and free memberships.

I've made a group for people to talk about designs, swap bits of CSS and so forth. It's called Redesign LibraryThing.

Incidentally, has anyone ever heard of a site doing this?

Some weeds:

• I am not a CSS true believer. I use tables for positioning more than I ought. I use <b> when I should use <em>. I torture kittens for fun. Chris is better, but not without sin. This limits what you can do somewhat.
• Ones with changed logos will not work in IE6. This is about PNG24 transparency, if that means anything to you.
• The easiest way to work on a design is to modify one of ours. timspalding-1 has comments in it.
  
• The CSS you write is added onto our—very complex—CSS. (The main files are this and this, but we wish it were always so simple.) Something like Firebug will come in handy when editing
• Your default style will not carry throughout the site. Some pages, like catalog, require special tweaks. Other pages just don't have the code that adds custom CSS.

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*Update: Incidentally, I also anticipated that someone would replace the logo with that of a competitor. Ha ha. :)

Google Books in LibraryThing

The official Google Blog and the Inside Book Search Blog just announced the new Google Book Search API, with LibraryThing as one of the first implementors. (The others are libraries; I'll be posting about what they've done over on Thingology.)

In sum, LibraryThing now links to Google Books for book scans—full or partial—and book information.

Google Book Search links can be seen two places:

• In your catalog. Choose "edit styles" to add the column. The column reflects only the exact edition you have.
• On work pages. The "Buy, borrow, swap or view" box on the right now includes a Google Books section. Clicking on it opens up a "lightbox" showing all the editions LibraryThing can identify on Google Book Search.
  

Despite the screenshot, of Carroll's Through the looking glass and what Alice found there, relatively few works have "full" scans. "Partial view" and "book information" pages are more common. But the former generally include sthe cover and table of contents, and the whole text can be searched. The latter can also be useful for cataloging purposes. Members with extensive collections from before 1923—the copyright cutoff—will get relatively more out the feature.

Leave comments here, or come discuss the feature on Talk.

Limitations. The GBS API is a big step forward, but there are some technical limitations. Google data loads after the rest of the page, and may not be instant. Because the data loads in your web browser, with no data "passing through" LibraryThing servers, we can't sort or search by it, and all-library searching is impossible. You can get something like this if you create a Google Books account, which is, of course, the whole point.

LCCN and OCLC. To get the best results, we needed to add full access to two library standards, namely Library of Congress Control Numbers (LCCN) and OCLC Numbers. We did so, reparsing the original MARC records where necessary. You can see these columns in your catalog now—choose "edit styles" as above. The two columns are not yet editable, but will be so in a day or two.

The Back Story. The rest of the first batch are libraries, including a number of "friends"--Deschutes Public Library, the Waterford Institute of Technology, the University of Huddersfield and Plymouth State/Scriblio. Google wanted help finding potentials and if there's one thing I have it's a Rolodex of smoking-hot library programmers! Once I've taken in all the neat things they did, I'll be posting over on Thingology.

Some libraries have chosen to feature Google Book Search links only when Google has the full scan. This makes sense to me. Linking to a no scans or partial scan, when the library has the item on its shelves, seems weird to me.

LibraryThing and its members can also like to take credit for moving the API along in another way. Your help with the Google Book Search Search bookmarklet forced the issue of GBS data. The message to Google was clear: our members wanted to use GBS with LibraryThing, and if Google wouldn't provide the information, members would get it themselves. After some to-and-fro with Google, we voluntarily disabled the service. But I think it moved the openness ball a few feet, and that's something for members to be proud of.

We've added Paul Giamatti's library!

LibraryThing has added the library of John Adams, the second president of the United States, played by Paul Giamatti in the upcoming (March 16) HBO miniseries John Adams.*

We've also added a new team member, Jeremy Dibbell (jbd1), the motive force behind the I See Dead People['s Books] group, dedicated to answering the question "What books do I share with Marie Antoinette and Tupac Shakur?" Jeremy, who works at the Massachusetts Historical Society, has become a "historical consultant" to LibraryThing. It's an unpaid job, but signals our support for his work. If he can get some people to talk about topics like this, or needs airfare to deliver a talk on it, we'll help out. The rest of this blog post is by Jeremy...

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I am pleased to announce the LibraryThing debut of the library of John Adams, the second president of the United States. Thanks to the staff at the Boston Public Library we were able to batch-import** the books from John Adams' personal collection, now housed at the BPL.

I'm not quite finished enhancing the records ... with notes, reviews, tags, transcriptions of Adams' marginalia and links to digital scans of the Adams books*** ... but since this week is a big one for John Adams fans we wanted to announce the catalog even if it's not entirely operational yet. Call it the beta version.

In case you're not up on your Adams events calendar, this coming Sunday (16 March) is the premiere of the mini-series based on David McCullough's John Adams, with Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney starring as John and Abigail. HBO has arranged a tie-in marketing campaign with the US Postal Service which is highlighted at poweroftheletter.com: among other things, first class letters will be postmarked with a special cancellation in March containing a 1765 quote from JA: "Let us dare to read, think, speak and write." One of my favorite Adams lines, and entirely appropriate not only for the mail, but also for our efforts here.

Beyond the virtual, there are two upcoming two physical exhibits of Adams letters and other manuscript materials. At the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston****, "John Adams: A Life in Letters" will be open to the public from 8 March through 31 (Monday through Saturday, 1-4 p.m.). And at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY, "My Dearest Friend" will run from 5-30 April in the Frederick Ferris Thompson Memorial Library.

John Adams read widely, and was famous for responding (sometimes quite sharply) to the texts as he read them (check out his "40 Most Heavily Annotated Books"). I'm really delighted that we've been able to work out a way (using WikiThing) to make his transcribed annotations available - they're wonderful to read, and complement the digital scans of the books very nicely.

Plus, as an added bonus, you can compare Jefferson and Adams' libraries (here) and see the impressive number of works our second and third presidents (also probably two of the best-read) had in common. Right now it's at 218, but that number is sure to creep upward as more combinations are made.

Much more to do, so I'm going to get back to editing. Stop by and browse awhile when you have a chance, and stay tuned: the BPL recently announced plans to take their excellent "John Adams Unbound" exhibit on the road, so in case you missed it in Boston you may still get a chance to see the show.

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*Giamatti as John Adams is growing on me. But nothing will beat his performance in Sideways. [Tim]
**Incidentally, we'll be offering batch-importing of MARC records to all members soon. [Tim]
*** You'll also see some books currently in the catalog published after President Adams died in 1826. Those were added by his descendants, and are in the process of being removed from his LT catalog. Records for those books will remain available through the BPL's John Adams Library site.
**** Where I am an Assistant Reference Librarian in "real life."

LibraryThing Local explodes

This morning, three days after its official launch, LibraryThing Local passed 9,000 venues. (UPDATE: 10,000 13,000 15,000 16,000.)

In this time some 700 members have entered more libraries, bookstores, fairs and other venues than our closest competitor in this space assembled in ten months of work, drawing mostly on chain bookstores and publicists.

Much remains to be done. New York City looks like it's been attacked by a swarm of smurf bees, but Athens, Greece is still pretty empty. And events—while over 1,100 now—aren't growing as fast as we'd like. (I blame a joyless, balky interface, which will soon be fixed.)

LibraryThing Local's success follows on LibraryThing's series project which, in two weeks assembled more book series data than the largest commercial supplier of this data.

Together, I think these suggest something important: The most powerful agents in the book world today are regular people.

LibraryThing is blessed with the most extraordinary members I have ever heard of. They'll hunker down for hours adding information for fun and to help out their fellow members. They'll engage in two- and even three-hundred message discussions over features. They make Facebook aps and browser enhancements on their own. They send us new logo designs. They send Abby postcards. They send us cookies.

They—and given the readership of this blog, probably YOU—are something else. It is a real surprise and honor to find myself developing software under these conditions. It's up to us to keep you interested and happy, and think of new things to do with what you create. It's up to you to tell us when we're falling short of that.

March Early Reviewers

This is, by far, our largest batch of Early Reviewer books yet. March's batch includes 46 different books from 23 different publishers, totaling 1,172 copies, available to residents in 4 different countries! There's poetry, literary fiction, chick lit, memoirs, mystery, historical fiction, travel books, cookbooks, history, biography, humor books, and non-fiction books ranging in topics from opera to crime to global warming to the Olympics!

Sign up to get a free advance copy, in exchange for writing a review. If you're already signed up, make sure to check that your name and mailing address are correct (here). More help available in the Early Reviewers Frequently Asked Questions.

Then just go ahead and request books to read and review! The list of available books is here:
http://www.librarything.com/er/list

The deadline to request a copy is Wednesday, March 12th at noon EDT*.

Make sure to check the flags to see whether you're eligible to receive each book. Most books are open to residents of the US and Canada, several are open to residents of the UK only, US only, Canada only, or US or Israel only. Only the flags will tell you which is which!

Thanks to all 23 publishers who contributed books this round.

Algonquin Books	Andrews McMeel Publishing	Ben Yehuda Press
Bloomberg Press	Canongate Books	Collins
Crown	Demos Medical Publishing	DK Publishing
Doubleday Books	Ester Republic Press	FT Press (Pearson)
Gefen Publishing House	Kent State University Press	King Tractor Press
LJW Publishing	New York Review Books	Profile Books
Shadow Mountain	Shaye Areheart Books (Crown)	Three Rivers Press (Crown)
University of Michigan Press	William Morrow

Remember, if your favorite publisher hasn't joined Early Reviewers yet, you can write them a letter and suggest it!



*Daylight Saving Time kicks in on Sunday. If that's not a sign that warm weather is en route to us in New England, I don't know what is...