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.