CoverGuess: The game that helps people find books...

I just released an amusing diversion called CoverGuess.

Check it out here, and talk about it here.

What is CoverGuess?

CoverGuess is a sort of game. We give you covers, and you describe them in words. If you guess the same things as other players, you get points.

Why are you doing this?

The goal is to have fun, but also to build up a database of cover descriptions, to answer questions like "Do you have that book with bride on the bicycle?"

What's the best way to do it?

Think about it how you'd describe the cover to someone—pick out the most significant elements. Does it have a car or a pair of shoes? Color terms are good, and so are terms like "blurry" or "sepia." Above all, pick terms other players will be using.

How do points work?

You get one point for every matched term, for each other member who had it. So, if you say "car" and "dog" and two other members said "car" and one said "dog," you get three points. Obviously, it's better if you're not the first member to tag the image, but the system randomizes that aspect. When you're the first to tag an item, you get 0.25 points for your effort.

Aren't you trying to use members' free labor to make money?

Yes and no. All the data here is released under a Creative-Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License, and will be available in feed form. That means any non-profit entity, like a library, can use it without charge. We also commit to license it on the same terms to any bookstore with less than $10 million in sales. That leaves huge companies. If any want it, we'll charge them!

Anything else?

It was partially inspired by Google's ImageLabeler. Our anti-spam engine does something similar too.

The whole thing was perhaps summed up best in a tweet to me:

Twitter your reviews

We've added a feature to make it easy to Twitter (or Tweet) your reviews.



You'll see the option—a tiny Twitter logo—on your reviews. When you click it, it takes you to Twitter and fills in the message box. You can, of course, edit it however you like.



You can spot most such tweets with this Twitter search.

This is our second Twitter-based feature. The other is an easy way to Twitter your books to LibraryThing, handy for making a note of a book when you're in a bookstore or library. Like that, the Twitter your review feature is all about restraint and options. We've rejected the idea—popular among book and non-book sites—of automating that process, of making it easy to machine-gun all your friends and followers with trivial updates.

Are you on Twitter? Follow us. Most LibraryThing-related news comes from my account, LibraryThingTim. The LThing account is for incoming messages mostly. John, Chris and Luke are also on, discussing LibraryThing's irrationally vague vacation policy.

Reviews in many languages

I've added a bunch of features around the language that members write reviews in.

Reviews by language. The result is to make LibraryThing more attractive for non-English users—they now get reviews in their own language by default. A few languages, especially our Dutch, French and German sites, already have a decent number of reviews, and this should make it more fun for all non-English users to review books.

For the English-only members, the feature is mostly negative—it's now easy to screen out the clutter of reviews in languages you don't understand.



Most popular works have reviews in other languages. Something like the Da Vinci Code has reviews in thirteen languages, including twelve in Dutch, three in Swedish, two in Catalan and one in Greek! ("Un dels millors llibres que he llegit mai", "Το λάτρεψα"—maybe it's better in translation!)

Reviews uClassified: Most reviews have already been assigned to a language. Rather than use the default language in LibraryThing profiles, which turns out to be very, very weakly related to the language members write their reviews in, I took advantage of the excellent language classification service offered by uClassify (uClassify.com). uClassify runs a Bayesian filter on a piece of text and sends back a list of languages, and confidence scores.

It isn't perfect, but it's pretty good. Only very high scores were accepted as definitive. Short reviews weren't sent for the same. As a result, about 1/8 of LibraryThing's 730,267 reviews remain as "not set."

Feature changes. A bunch.

• You can now edit your reviews language everywhere you can edit or enter a review. 
  
  
• Your library statistics page (link) now shows how many reviews you've written in every language. Mostly importantly this shows the number of reviews that haven't been assigned to a language.
  
• For reviews going forward your default language is set on your account page. 
  
• The catalog now has a "Reviews language" field and a special search for all your reviews in a given language (eg., reviews in English, language not set). These links are available from your stats page).
  
• You can Power Edit review languages, and when you're looking at all your reviews in a language, if it differs from your default language, you will get a link to make all unset reviews be in your default language. For example, here are all your unset reviews (link).

Statistics. The numbers turned out something like this.

English/Unset: 650,988
Dutch: 8,636
French: 4,666
German: 4,651
Spanish: 4,463
Italian: 2,876
Swedish: 2,329
Danish: 1,587
Norwegian: 1,231
Portuguese: 1,098
Finnish: 662
Catalan: 443
Etc.

To be done, talked about. As usual, there's more to do. So far, there's no good list of recent or top reviews by language. Come to discuss it on Talk and suggest other improvements.

Collections, at last

It's arrived. Members can organize their books into "collections."

The Motive. From the beginning, LibraryThing members have used the site for different things. Some used it to list only the books they own, others what they've read and a few even just the books they wanted. Meanwhile, people like me used it for everything—owned, read, lost, destroyed, wanted—using tagging as our sole way of keeping everything straight. But even tag-zealots like me had to admit there were times you wanted sharper distinctions—"buckets" or "sub-libraries"—and ways to tie those to how you connected with other members and with book recommendations. New members, whether familiar with tags or not, were regularly asking for some way to do wishlists and currently-reading lists.

The Feature. The feature, literally years in the making, gives members the ability to separate out categories of books, like "Wishlist" and "Currently reading" more definitely than could be accomplished with tags. Each collections works like a mini library and can be separately viewed, sorted and searched. Other members can see your collections, on your profile and elsewhere. Features like member-to-member connection and book recommendations react to the new system as well. (See below on integration progress.)

As we offer users new flexibility, we avoid forcing members into "our" way of thinking about books. We've provided a number of default collections—Your library, Wishlist, Currently reading, To read, Read but unowned and Favorites. Data from these collections can be aggregated across all users, and their names are even translated on LibraryThing's non-English sites. But you can also create your own collections, and remove ours. And you can ignore collections entirely, keeping everything in "Your library."

A Work in Progress. As members know, we play things pretty fast and lose here. Our motto is "beta, forevah!" But collections had to be different. Before public release we subjected it to a month of testing in our large (and non-exclusive) BETA Group. We cannot thank that group enough for all the work they did, and the passion they showed.

We hope we got most of the major bugs, but the feature is not "finished"—and this is hardly the last blog post you'll see about the feature! Most significantly, collections is now mostly a "cataloging" feature, with only limited reach to other areas of the site. Although you can specify how collections affects member connections and recommendations—so you can stop having your Wishlist or for that matter your husband's books running the social and recommendation parts of the site—implementation is basic and, in light of extraordinary collections-related load, there's a lot of caching in place. We left a few features out in order to get it the main features out now.*

We also think "unfinished" (we prefer not prematurely specified) features are the best way to engage users, and get the best for everyone. Come and contribute on Recommended Site Improvements and Bug Collectors. We also have a Announcement post in New Features.

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*We had spec'ed out a complex interaction between reading-dates and "Currently reading." But the system was probably more than most members wanted. And it certainly was taking a long time to finish, so, for now at least "Currently reading" is just a collection.

Credits: Chris (conceptDawg) headed up the project, doing most of the user interface and a majority of the back-end code. Chris and I (timspalding) designed the feature together, and I did some core back-end code. Abby (ablachly) didn't code, but she dogged us about it for years. (I'm not sure what she's going to do with herself now.) But the most important factor was the members. Members, particularly the BETA group, contributed to the effort as I've never seen it—not in any website or project, ever. Chris and I owe members an enormous amount. (I'll be blogging about this specifically soon. It needs telling.)

Top photo by radiant_guy" (Flickr, CC-SA).

Widgets get a lot better

We've just brought live new, improved widgets, available from the make widget page.

Some highlights:

• New "animated" style cycles through your covers in a oddly mesmerizing way.
• Widgets are extensively customizable, so you can fit them to your blog without any special knowledge.
• Power users can do more, with Javascript and CSS customization. Check out Chris' blog for stylish use.*
• The new widgets are shareable (an example) so members can show off and swap styles. (Yes, we'll be having a widget-creation contest soon.)
  
• Widget links don't go off somewhere, but open up a slick lightbox "mini-book" page, with your information and (optional) links, to LibraryThing and elsewhere. You can, of course, fill in your Amazon Associates code, if you want to make money off your widget.
• Widgets now include (optionally) tags, ratings and reviews. You can filter by reviews and tags too.
• The code is good—based on our improved JSON Books API and designed not to slow down your page (they're "lazy-loading"). Weirdly this can make the widget look slow. That's because it's not slowing down the rest of the page!
• Internationalized from the ground up.
• Orcas, baby!

Go ahead and make a widget.

Talk about it here, or on Talk.

Luke! Widgets were helmed by new employee Luke (member: LibraryThingLuke), who wrote most of the core code, all the styling options, the share system and so forth. Other LibraryThing people helped. Chris—hard at work on collections, we promise—chipped in some attractive styles. Mike wrote the crucial cover-animation code, something he's been working on for our upcoming Facebook application. I made sure Luke got a list of changes every morning, including at least one thing I wanted the other way the day before.

Luke offered the following thumbnail bio:

"Luke Stevens lives in Portland, Me with his wife and three kids. He enjoys single malt scotch and silver-age comic books. He rides a motorcycle from the early 80's that elicits laughter from his evil co-workers. Twitter: saintlukas; blog: sacremoo.com."

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*Chris swears by Colourlovers.com.

LibraryThing Mac Screensaver

At the end of our Week of Code, Chris and I put together the RSS feed and directions you need to turn the built-in Mac OS X screensaver into a LibraryThing Screen Saver.



To do it you'll need to grab the following URL: http://www.librarything.com/labs-screensaver.php?userid=timspalding and change "timspalding" to your user name (public users only, of course). Then watch the video.

Update: Does anyone know of an easy way to make a Windows one?

Male or Female?

I've added a new meme page for "Male of Female?" (see yours or mine).

The page is similar to Dead or Alive?. It's based on our Common Knowledge, an editable, fielded wiki for author and work information. So if someone shows up under "Uncertain" you can edit in the right gender.

This feature is, of course, frosting. The cake was released Saturday: Introducing Distinct Authors. Check that out.

Distinct authors, phase 1 / Steve Martin is funny again

Short version. I've added a mechanism to "split" distinct authors with the same name. You can find it on the right of any author page, under "Author Disambiguation." The feature is only partially rolled-out, without separate pages for distinct authors or other rammifications for the LibraryThing system.

Long version. Since its inception, LibraryThing has been plagued by the "Steve Martin" problem. We all know Steve Martin, the comic and author of Shop Girl. But what about Steve Martin the author of Britain's Slave Trade, Sold! How to Make it Easy for People to Buy from You or some book about Newfoundland ships. Why was the original wild-and-crazy-guy writing such evidently unfunny books—or who were these other people?

The problem is deep in the data. Libraries have a system for disambiguating authors, called Authority Control, based on coming up with authorized forms of a name and adding dates and other metadata to make them unique, and then applying these forms across the books. Authority control is a good idea—if often problematic to implement—but it falls down in the face of LibraryThing's data. Libraries don't coordinate their authority control as much as you'd think, and LibraryThing draws from almost 700 libraries. And even if authority control worked in libraries, 90% of LibraryThing content comes from other sources, mostly Amazon. This data has no concept of authority control. (See Steve Martin at Amazon, for example.)

In solving the problem, I decided to ignore how libraries solved the issue and concentrate on how LibraryThing could do it most easily. Authority control requires librarians to assemble data (eg., birth and death dates) about name variants before a split is made. (Thus was born librarians' unfortunate policy of putting out hits on individuals they could not otherwise distinguish.*) Although LibraryThing members have done an amazing job finding birth and death dates, it was still a lot of work. And a full authority-control solution would have members updating each other's records with the "authorized" forms of the names!

I felt a better way could be found. Instead of establishing unique names and pushing them to records, members could split works arbitrarily, and the authors would come to be known by the name they share and the works that cluster under them. This is actually an old system—calling someone "the author of Ivanhoe" or "the one who wrote the Parthian history." And, as with other features of LibraryThing cataloging, it accords with how regular people talk about. In a real-world situation, like a meeting of Newfoundland commedians, you wouldn't refer to "Martin, Steve, 1945-" and "Martin, Steve, 1947-" but "Steve Martin, you know, the one who wrote Shopgirl" and "Steve Martin, the one who wrote that book about that boat."

How it works. To split an author, find the area on the right labelled "Author Disambiguation." It will take you to a splitting page; here's Steve Martin's. This page allows you to assign all the author's works to numbers. As you assign the works, LibraryThing assigns separate colors, making it easy to see at a glance how the thing is going.

More to do. This is just a first step. The "distinct authors" feature has to "go" all sorts of places on the site. First up will be separate pages for distinct authors--and a "disambiguation page" (a la Wikipedia) tying them together. Once that's done we can move to separate author metadata, such as Common Knowledge, bettween distinct authors.

Quite frankly, I'm going to do a few more things and then let this sit for a while. My main focus right now—and Chris'—is to see "collections" to the finish line. When I realized I could bang out the first phase of distinct authors in a long evening (it's after 5am now), I went ahead and did it. But now I need to refocus on collections.

Talk about it. I've set up a New features post to discuss the change, and its potential rammifications. I suspect that the Combiners! group will get in on the act quickly as well, working out various technical issues. They have a number of threads (here, here and here, at least), in which members have made lists of "identically named authors." They would be a good starting-point.

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*The hits are, of course, carried out by OCLC.

Member Giveaways: Early Reviewers for everyone

We've just introduced a major new feature: Member Giveaway, a simple but flexible way for authors to get review copies into readers' hands, and other members to clean out their attics!

Member Giveaway is built on top of our Early Reviewers program, which invites publishers to send LibraryThing members pre-publication copies of upcoming books. It has been a huge success, often giving out more than 1,500 books per month. But Early Reviewers has strict rules on participating, quantity and release dates, to keep up quality and encourage publishers to send out as many copies as they could spare.

Member Giveaway differs from Early Reviewers in a couple of ways:

• Any LibraryThing member can participate.
  
• There are no quantity restrictions. You can post a single book or a hundred.
  
• Books do not need to be pre-release or even new.
  
• Members are encouraged to review Giveaway books, but not reviewing them cannot hurt you.
  
• Giveaway selection is random, not based on a similar-books algorithm. To discourage sockpuppetry, requesting members must have cataloged at least fifty books or be a premium (ie., paid) member.
• Early Reviewers has a bird, but Member Giveaways uses squirrels. As you know, squirrels are lovely, sociable animals who share books readily.

Some other fun details:

• If you've signed up for Early Reviewers, you are ready for Member Giveaways. The two programs have the same sign-up.
  
• When you post a book you have a lot of options, including length of time it will last and where you're willing to send it.
  
• The sending member is responsible for all shipping. If you request and receive a book, the sending member will get your shipping address.
  

We made Member Giveaway for authors who couldn't get their publisher to sign on to Early Reviewers, couldn't get enough copies together or whose book was already out. (Early Reviewers also does not allow most self-published works, which has angered a few members, but both publishers and members reacted strongly when we included self-published books before.)

Publishers and authors aside we wanted to give regular members a chance to send good books to good homes. We have long pondered whether LibraryThing should enable book-swaps. But our friends at BookMooch do that so well already, and swapping is very hard to get right. But many members still wanted a simple way to get their old books to new homes. So, we set up a system to do that too.

We've started Member Giveaways off with seven great books.

Cancer is a Bitch and Beef were offered by my friend Larry Weissman, literary agent to both authors.

Released this Fall, both have already drawn great reviews from LibraryThing members and others. LibraryThing member skrishna wrote of Cancer Is a Bitch: "It’s funny, witty, sarcastic and will have you laughing out loud. Read this book. That’s all I really have left to say." Of Beef, a microhistory in the tradition of Salt, the Boston Globe praised its "bovine evolution is riveting stuff." Eats.com called it an "eloquent, poignant and influential account of man’s historical relationship with the cow."

The other five books all come from a single member, keigu, Robin D. Gill, of Paraverse Press, which promises bilingual books "at a monolingual price."

The books consist of Japanese text and English translations of hundreds or thousands of short Japanese poems—haiku and senryu on various topics. The publisher, who is also the author, sent LibraryThing a huge box some time ago, in anticipation of such a program. Abby and I, custodians of the books for so long never got around to reading them, but we will sorely miss people's reactions at finding tall stacks of The Woman Without a Hole and Rise Ye, Sea Slugs!.

Three cheers for Mike! Memeber Giveaways was developed by Mike Bannister (LTMike) after I rather blithly tossed out the idea of opening Early Reviewers to everyone on a separate page. It took a while, but i is a beautiful, and solid piece of code.

Its completion frees Mike up to concentrate on Facebook full time, while Chris and me (but my programming time is somewhat hobbled by everythin else I do) continue work on collections.

Come talk about it here.

Twitter your books to LibraryThing

We've added integration with Twitter, the popular SMS/microblogging site. Basically, it's an easy way to add a book to your LibraryThing while standing in a bookstore, library or friend's house.

Go to the new Edit your profile: Sites page to add your username. Once you follow LThing, you can direct message at any time to add a book to your library.

Example:
D LThing [ISBN or Title] #tag1, #tag2, etc.

Add my wife's novel, Every Visible Thing with the tag "wishlist":
D LThing 0066212898 #wishlist

Add Huckleberry Finn:
D LThing Huckleberry Finn

Search always goes off Amazon for now. It picks the first edition if you don't specify.

Coming soon: We'll be integrating deeper soon, so you can let your Twitter friends know when you add or review books on LibraryThing.

Follow us: The LThing account will only be used to send out Twitter/LibraryThing messages. If you want to follow what I'm doing my Twitter account is LibraryThingTim.

Brains! Brains!

New Feature. I just released a minor feature, a new meme "Dead or Alive?" which breaks down your LibraryThing authors by whether they're dead, alive or unknown. Check out mine or go to your profile and select "Memes" to find yours.

The information is based on the various authors' birth and death dates in Common Knowledge. It works pretty much as you suspect. People with death dates are dead. People with birth dates only are alive, unless they'd be over 100. The rest are unknown. The system tracks when you use it, so I can add some statistics on whether your authors are more or less dead than others' authors.

UPDATE: For clarity, you can change authors by going to their author page and editing in a birth or death date. For now, organizations are identified by being of the gender "n/a."

New Books. I need no segue to mention two books I recently discovered. The first is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies from Chronicle Books, due out in April. According to the description:

"Pride and Prejudice and Zombies -- Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she's soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen's classic novel to new legions of fans."

It's an amusing idea. Taking on classics from a different vantage point has been done many times—think Wide Sargasso Sea, whose heroine is the "madwoman in the attic" of Jane Eyre. Others have have done prequels and sequels to famous works; at a low-point of my youth I read the entirety of Heathcliff—The return to Wuthering Heights. But has anyone taken the full text of a classic and inserted scenes of an entirely different character? The possibilities are endless. It's the tragic story of star-crossed lovers set against the backdrop of 16th-century Verona—and an alien invasion! (Working title: Romeo and Juliet and Aliens).*

Another good titles is Jailbait Zombie by Mario Acevedo, picked up by Sonya at the recent American Library Association meeting in Denver. According to Sonya's friend, another zombie-lover (but not literally), Zombie Jailbait "isn't as good as the author's Undead Kama Sutra," an assessment that brings into high relief the problem with comparatives.

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* I'm looking for other good titles. There is, of course, the moving story of two parents locked in a tragic custody battle over their young son—and stalked by a killer from another planet (Kramer versus Kramer versus Predator), but the movie is better known than the book.

UPDATE: A commentor points out All the World's a Grave by John Reed, piecing together Shakespearian lines into a new play. The granddaddy is Pingres of Halicarnassus' lost reworking of the Iliad, inserting a pentameter of his own creation between Homer's hexameters (here). Those aren't quite what I'm talking about.

Hat-tip to Lux Mentis for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Who has a book?

I've added a small section to work pages. The "Members" section shows who of your friends, interesting libraries and other connections have the work.

It also surveys the Legacy Libraries, a member project to catalog the libraries of famous dead people. So you can find out if Hemingway and Marie Antoinette owned, say, the Lusiads (Yes, they did). I think it gives this project—now growing quite impressive—a deserved boost

Discuss here.

New Feature: Find Friends

We've added a feature that makes it easy to connect to people you know.

These include people who may be using the site already, but you don't know their user name, and people you want to invite to the site. It can use contacts from your current email system, or manual entry.

Check out Find Friends, from your profile or here.

An excess of caution. Automatic email systems like this have come under much criticism, including my own. After the nastiness that has hit other companies' efforts, we've taken every precaution to avoid mess ups with our system.

The protections are quite extensive:

1. Members can only be found if they want to. We added the checkbox for that a few weeks ago. All older members were set to "false," unless they already had their email publically shown on their profile.
2. No emails or other data are stored by us.
3. Emails are only sent once, and can't be resent by you either.*
   
4. When your list of contacts comes back NONE are pre-checked. (The sites that helpfully pre-check 1,000 names are really flirting with disaster.)
5. We have removed any option to check all contacts, so you can't even do it by mistake. But we kept the option to un-check all contacts. If you do that by mistake, okay.
6. Instead of misleading you about what will happen in one direction, we slightly mislead you in the other. That is, the button marked "invite selected contacts" (above) does not actually go ahead and send the emails. Rather it shows you the invite list one last time and asks you to reconfirm the list.

We are confident these steps together make LibraryThing's invite feature the most conscientious of its kind.

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*To know whether you've emailed someone already we do store a "hash" of the email, a mathematical derivative of it that can't be used to reconstruct the original.

Recommendations, part 2

I've added a few improvements to the new member recommendations:

• You can now dismiss individual recommendations and never see them again.
• I've added a checkbox to make member book recommendations reciprocal--so both books recommend each other.
• The Recommendations Zeitgeist page is more complete.

LibraryThing recommendations!

LibraryThing Recommendations—called "the best feature on the site" by one user—are back and much better than before.

You can find recommendations at the top of your profile page. Or check out mine.

The new recommendations include:

• A large number of primary recommendations for ever member—usually 1,000—based on a single comprehensive algorithm.
  
• Individual recommendation lists for each member's tags.
• Filtering of recommendations by popular LibraryThing tags.
• Individual lists of other members' recommendations (member recommendations were added two weeks ago)
• Up to 500 so-bad-they're-good recommendations, building off the LibraryThing Unsuggester, and called "Your Unsuggester."* We hope "What I shouldn't read" has some meme legs.
  
• A "why" feature for each recommendation, laying out what the recommendation was based on.
• A pony.**

I let the recommendations themselves out early—see the original talk post, with over 140 messages!—and members had mostly positive reactions. Those who don't like them can perhaps be molified by the greater number and ways to filter and angle the recommendations.

Recommendations now change daily—faster if you are below 200 books and keep adding them. The system keeps track of all recommendations and when you received them. In the near future I plan to provide personalized recommendation emails based on new recommendations.

I've created a new Talk thread to discuss the changes, and suggest changes. My thanks to those who participated in the initial thread, influencing development in a number of important ways.

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*If Thomas Jefferson is in Hell, I am confident the Devil is torturing him with books from Jefferson's Unsuggester List—heavy on the chick- and tween-lit!
*With apologies to Last.fm.

Works, editions, ISBNs and cocktails

We got your Harry Potter and the Angus an Orchloch right here!

Short verson.I've just completed a major change in the "substructure" of LibraryThing's data, the "works system" that links different editions together. The system is better and will allow more betterness down the road. It was the reason we were down most of last night. We regret that, but think the change will prove worth it.

Long version—What are "Works?" LibraryThing's work system brings users together around the books they've read, not the peculiarities of publisher, format or even language. Works are created and tended by members, who "combine" editions together into works. Anyone can do it, but the die-hards created a large and active group—Combiners!—to trade tips, debate philosophy, muster effort—and complain about the system!

Combiners is a remarkable community, and one that has gone without a nod from me for some time. I hope these changes encourage them, and the prospect of future improvements built on surer footing.

The Combiners! know the stakes, as their group logo tells us.

Since the beginning I've promoted the idea of the "cocktail party" test.* This test answers whether two books belong to the same work by asking whether their readers would, in casual conversation, own up to reading the same book or not. So, for example, in such a context it wouldn't matter if you had read a book in its hardcover or paperback edition, or listened to it on CD. If the cute girl with the backless dress mentions she's fond of the Unbearable Lightness of Being, the edition is immaterial (but see this link). I also suspect that title differences occasioned by marketing considerations—eg., Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (UK) vs. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (US)—wouldn't matter. Nor should language itself matter; few would turn a cold shoulder to a Finnish Tolkien fan merely because he read Tolkien in Finnish.**

What's Changed? The core concept used to be that a work consisted of a discrete set of title-author pairs. We chose title-author to emphasize the loose, verbal nature of the cocktail party test, and because ISBNs are much less perfect than many believe.*** These title-author pairs we called "editions."

Unfortunately, there are a small number of works that can't be identified based on title and author alone. This happens particularly in science fiction and graphic novels. (Apparently the Fantasy Hall of Fame currently entombs two distinct works—same title, same authors but different contents and publisher. Someone should be punished for that.) My bête noire are Cliff's Notes filed in with the works they "interpret." No appletini for you "Great Expectations"!

The system still automatically assigns new editions based on author and title. But I've added ISBNs to the mix, so members can combine and separate editions looking at and according to their ISBNs.

Other changes:

• Title-author-ISBN bundles are now distiguished by the smallest details, so you can separate "Hard Times" from "Hard times" from "Hard times" with a period at the end. It has vastly increased the number of editions in the system. (There are now more than 1,200 editions of the Hobbit!) This is was mostly a technical decision.
• The original system produced a few "hash collisions," utterly different books thrown in together unhappily. This has been a long-running defect—and complaint. The new system will allow their separation, although existing ones will need to be separated.
• The Combination and Debris (renamed "Editions") pages should be faster. Some will start—and stall!—on a message about updating edition information. Once the editions have been calculated, the page will be faster.

As mentioned above, the new system was responsible for our extended downtime last night. Between a few mistakes and a database just shy of 27 million books, it took longer than we thought. I hope that the changes prove worthwhile in and of themselves.

Being much better designed, the new system should enable:

• Edition-level pages
• Edition-to-edition and work-to-work relationships
• Member and book matching that takes editions into account
• An end to the "dead languages" exception to the cocktail party test.
• More opportunities for me to discuss the Pop-Up Kama Sutra at library conferences.

I've created a Talk thread for members who want to discuss the changes.

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*Perhaps wishing I'd get invited to a few more cocktail parties! Speaking of which, are you going to Book Expo America 2008 in Los Angeles? We are.
**Whether you choose to avoid the Finnish Tolkien fan at cocktail parties is, of course, up to you.
***In fact, publishers recycle ISBNs, steal ISBNs, make up ISBNs, print wrong ISBNs, apply ISBNs to large sets of seemingly discrete items and otherwise abuse the system all the time. Most of the time they work in a bookstore context. They aren't really fit for a project of LibraryThing's size and scope.

Import upgrade

Mike—welcome Mike!*—has completed a major upgrade to the import system. The improvements are:

• Better user interface.
  
• Import now reads files from LibraryThing competitors, so you can move to us or synch your accounts.
  
• Depending on the site, we pick up tags, reviews, ratings and comments. If you already have the books in your library, you avoiding adding the books again, but synch your user data.
  
• The sites include Anobii, Shelfari and Goodreads. If you use someone else—there are more than 35 of them!—let us know. If the offer export—not all sites do—we can work it out.
• If your file is formatted properly—formatted like the LibraryThing export or any of our competitors'—we now import non-ISBN books.

Import is still based on the idea that—when possible—LibraryThing re-fetches the bibliographic data. This adds another step, an "import queue." But it also allows members to import full records, which no other site exports, and to get high-quality library data, if they want it.

Tell us what you think on Talk. It's probably going to take a while to spell out what it does and doesn't do and to update the old Adding and Importing FAQs.

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*Mike (member: notmydadslibrary) is a new intern up here in Portland. This was a doozy of a first project!

Member book recommendations

I've just added a small new feature, Member recommendations. You can check it out under "Recommendations" here or here.*

Basically, you can now add your own recommendations to LibraryThing's six (!) algorithmic recommendations. If you want, you can also leave a short explanation of your choice.

I'm throwing this one out pretty raw.** It's available from the primary page of a work, and from its recommendation page, and on a single Member Recommendations page.

To be done:

• A way to see all the recommendations you've given
• A way to see all the recommendations others have applied to your books
• Recommendation flagging
• Up/down voting on recommendations?

Come talk about the feature and where it could go on Talk here.

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*I hope to link to some better examples soon, one members start adding them. I find fiction recommendations very hard, so most of my recommendations so far have been off ancient history, which makes the feature seem much less interesting than it is!
**I've had this on ice for a while, while dealing with tags and scaling issues. I don't think I'm going to be making major changes until Chris comes back from paternity leave later this week or next.

BookSense Events!

We just added over six-hundred and fifty events to LibraryThing Local, LibraryThing's portal for local bookstores, libraries and events.

The events come direct from our friends at BookSense, the nationwide organization of over 1,200 independent bookstores. They made their complete events calendar available to us, and we were only to happy to add all the events we didn't already know about.

BookSense is the best; if you have a favorite local bookstore, chances are they're a BookSense store.* BookSense also gets the best authors. Upcoming events include David Sedaris at Vroman's in Pasadena and Salman Rushdie at Vroman's and at Caucer's in Santa Barbara. Of course, as happens with distributed data collection, not every BookSense store has their events in the feed. And some events had already been added by members. Be the total gain is some 660 upcoming events—a big leap. We'll be updating from th BookSense feed periodically from now on, which should take some of the data-entry load off of dedicated LibraryThing members.

So, thanks to the people at BookSense for working with us on this, and happy event-attending to the rest of us.

PS: There's a short article about this in the ABA's Bookselling this Week by David Grogan.

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*My favorites—Books, Etc., Longfellow Books and the Harvard Coop—are all BookSense stores. My wife spent much of her 20s working at another, Bookline Booksmith, together with her best friend, who went on to work at Booksense. So, I've wanted LibraryThing to do something BookSense since we started.

Top bar better, cuter

I made some changes to the look and functionality of the "top bar" in Your Library. They include new "pads," new icons, yellow and baby-blue colors and new tag functionality. Non-English users will also notice the labels can nw be translated--no more untranslateable "text as image."

List:


Covers:


Tags:


The tag bar includes a new new features. "Down" and "Across" control whether the tags are sorted "down" (like an index) or "across" (like some other things). You can also control the size of the text and the space between tags, and the number of columns to show.

Come talk about the change and suggest more on Talk.