The Concord Free Press, Gregory Maguire, and "generosity-based publishing"

The Concord Free Press is a revolutionary new publisher, doing some fantastic things. They publish books and give them away. For free. All they ask is that the reader then makes a voluntary donation to a local charity or person in need. And then pass the book along to someone else (this is definitely the hard part), and ask that they too read, donate, and pass. I think it's fantastic. They just hit their one-year anniversary, released their third book, and have recorded more than $90,000 in donations so far (you can see a record of donations on their site).


Their third book, The Next Queen of Heaven by Gregory Maguire just came out last week, and the Concord Free Press (founded by novelist Stona Fitch) gave us 14 copies to circulate among LibraryThing members. The book is great—a departure from Maguire's typical writing (which I also love).

Book description from the Concord Free Press website:

Set in the grotty upstate town of Thebes, The Next Queen of Heaven is a Christmas tale gone horribly wrong. Clocked by a Catholic statuette, Mrs. Leontina Scales starts speaking in tongues. Tabitha Scales and her brothers scheme to save their mother or surrender her to Jesus—whatever comes first. Meanwhile, choir director Jeremy Carr, caught between lust and ambition, fumbles his way toward Y2K.

Only a modern master like Gregory Maguire can spin a tale this frantic, funny, and farcical. Novelist Ann Patchett calls it “an out-of-control carnival ride—terrifying, thrilling, a once-in-a-lifetime adventure.” And we agree.

I'm putting the copies in Member Giveaways, and we'll send them to anyone, anywhere around the world. Request a copy now, if you're interested! And remember, when you're done reading, you donate, and then pass the book along. We're hoping we can keep the books circulating among LibraryThing members—since the Concord Free Press only prints a limited run (2,500 copies), many people won't otherwise get a chance to read it.

As it says on the back of the book:

"This novel is free. By taking a copy, you agree to give away money to a local charity, someone who needs it, or a stranger on the street. Where the money goes and how much you give—that's your call. When you're done, pass this novel on to someone else (for free, of course), so they can give. It adds up."

So if you win a copy, please remember to read, donate, and then pass it along (maybe even put it back on Member Giveaways, so another LibraryThing member can have a chance to read it).

October State of the Thing

I just sent out October's State of the Thing, our monthly newsletter. Sign up to get it, or you can read a copy online.

This month's State of the Thing features 2 exclusive author interviews:

Allison Hoover Bartlett, is the author of The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession. Bartlett digs into the true-crime story of John Gilkey, the obsessed rare book thief and Ken Sanders, the self-appointed "bibliodick" driven to catch him.

Hope Edelman's newest book is The Possibility of Everything, a memoir about a week in 2000 when she traveled to Belize with her husband and three-year-old daughter to visit a shaman.

Both Hope and Allison are also participating in chats with LibraryThing members right now—stop by and ask them questions here.

Next month, one of the interviewees we have lined up is Gregory Maguire. Got a question for him? Post it here and we might use it in the upcoming interview.

October Early Reviewer Books

The October 2009 batch of Early Reviewer books is up! We've got 55 books this month, and a grand total of 1590 copies to give out.

First, make sure to sign up for Early Reviewers. If you've already signed up, please check your mailing address and make sure it's correct.

Then request away! The list of available books is here:
http://www.librarything.com/er/list

The deadline to request a copy is Friday, October 23rd at 6PM EST.


Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to the US, Canada, the UK, Israel, Australia, France, Germany, Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden. Make sure to check the flags by each book to see if it can be sent to your country.

Catalan books. A special treat this month–we have a Catalan publisher (Rovira i Virgili University Press) participating, who is offering a few books in Catalan! There are only 5 copies available for each of the books from Rovira i Virgili University Press, since they're testing the waters to see what kind of audience there will be for Catalan books.

And of course, thanks to all the publishers participating this month!

Kensington Publishing	Dafina	Citadel Press
B&H Publishing Group	Bleak House Books	South Dakota State Historical Society Press
Delacorte Press	New York Review Books	New American Library
Little, Brown and Company	Barbour Books	Rovira i Virgili University Press
Self-Counsel Press	5 Spot	The Permanent Press
Hunter House	Harper Paperbacks	Avon Books
Random House	Springer	Faber and Faber
Picador	Open Letter	York House Press
Bloomsbury	Orca Book Publishers	Timber Press
Bethany House	Bell Bridge Books	Doubleday Books
HarperCollins

Flash-mob cataloging party in Canton, OH

The Canton Museum of Art in Ohio (CantonArt.org, CantonArt on LT) is having a flash-mob catalog party. More about flash-mob cataloging.

Details:
Saturday October 3, 2009, 10:30am - 2:30pm and Sunday October 4, 2009, 1:30pm - 4:30pm

Canton Museum of Art
1001 Market Ave.
Canton, OH 44702

Space is somewhat limited, so please RSVP: Troy at talpeterkent.edu

Troy says: We will have tasty food and beverages. Participants should help us be “green” and bring your own mug (with your name and phone number on it). We will have valuable door-prizes throughout the day! Bring your Laptop, NetBook, iPhone/iPod Touch to help catalog, or just show up and help move things along.

The talk post.

Geeks vs. Nerds: Hard data

LibraryThing's systems administrator, John Dalton, came up with this—using LibraryThing's tagmash feature to demonstrate the difference between geeks and nerds:



See also:

• geek
• nerd
• geek, --nerds
• nerds, --geek

September State of the Thing

I just sent out September's State of the Thing, our monthly newsletter. Sign up to get it, or you can read a copy online.

This month's State of the Thing features 3 exclusive author interviews:

Audrey Niffenegger, author of the best-selling The Time Traveler's Wife, who has a new book coming out next week—Her Fearful Symmetry.

Christopher McDougall, author of Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, which has been on The New York Times best sellers list for 13 weeks now.

Dan Chaon, author of Await Your Reply which was called "ambitious, gripping and unrelentingly bleak" in The New York Times.

The interview with Audrey Niffenegger has a few questions that LibraryThing members came up with, in the Author interviews—you ask the questions group. We're trying that again for next month, when I'm interviewing Allison Hoover Barlett, author The Man Who Loved Books Too Much and Hope Edelman, author of The Possibility of Everything (both were Early Reviewer books, so you might have read an advance copy recently). Have a question for Bartlett or Edelman? Post it here for Allison Hoover Bartlett and here for Hope Edelman.

Arr! How LibraryThing went pirate

Talk Like A Pirate Day is over for us now. You can visit the translation at pir.librarything.com.

Chris and I decided to take pirate photos for our author pages. He's pretty convincing, apart from the inflatable parrot.*

At 5 pm on Friday we jumped the gun on International Talk Like a Pirate Day, sending the whole site into Pirate-talk. (We'll turn back off tomorrow evening, but click "Turn OFF pirate-speak" to turn it off sooner.)

"LibraryThing in Pirate" was a secret project of the Arr, me hearties! group. Members came up with all the translations. Some of my favorites are the little ones, like "enlarge" translated as "use yer spyglass", the month January being translated as "January (me britches be cold)" and "Terms of Use" changed to "Rules o' engagement." Some like "Finger to the Wind" (for Zeitgeist) take some thought, but it would take a genius to discern that "Wi' naw halp fram 'ny matey"—is that Glaswegian?—means "Automatic."

Arr, me hearties! was composed of volunteers from the Beta Group who spent the last week going string by string through LibraryThing's interface, using the same code we use for our non-English sites. We ended up translating some 2,400 bits and pieces, about 44.2% of the site, making it only the 19th most-translated language, just above Albanian. (That sheds some light on how much effort has gone into the near-complete Portuguese, Dutch, French, Catalan and other translations!)

Top translators included readafew, rastaphrog, lorax, Carnophile, sqdancer, conceptDawg and me.

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For posterity's sake, I took some screenshots:

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*All LibraryThing employees were originally going to take photos of ourselves eating cake, in honor of LibraryThing's fourth anniversary. (We're in eight different cities, so we can't just all eat cake together.) Anyway, Sonya had to miss the meeting where we cancelled this plan, and we forgot to tell her, so she dutifully sent her cake photo. Well, I hope she enjoyed the cake!

LibraryThing, IndieBound and love

As Tim blogged last night, we needed some help from members to link LibraryThing data on bookstores to IndieBound data. We connected 1,200 automatically, but that left 1,362 that had to be done manually—checking exact names, addresses, sometimes even creating a new "venue" on LibraryThing Local.

Tim posted the plea for help at about 5:30 pm last night. By 11 am this morning, it was entirely done. That's right, in less than eighteen hours—most of which were in the middle of the night, in the US at least—LibraryThing members completed the task. That's incredible. Insane. Fantastic.

As Tim tweeted, "IndieBound/LT demonstrates what I believe: Independent bookstores can win online if they engage the community. Love is powerful." His sentiments were retweeted all over, and the IndieBound folks agreed. (See IndieBoundPaige, mattsupko, SarahABA on Twitter)

LibraryThing members are indeed an incredible community, and love indeed is powerful.* We're going to add a new helper badge to recognize these folks. Thank you, thank you.

*Anyone who hasn't seen Clay Shirky's "The Internet Runs on Love" talk, should (blogged here in 2007). From the talk:

In the past, we could do little things for love, but big things, big things required money. Now, we can do big things for love.

Connect IndieBound to LibraryThing

Summary: We need your help connecting LibraryThing to IndieBound. Like peanut butter and chocolate, we taste great together. Help us out.

Why IndieBound? To make the new "Get it Now," and the "Local" section, LibraryThing needs to update and improve our local data. We want to give members as many options as possible about where to get the book. And we've always supported independent bookstores.

We turned to IndieBound (formerly BookSense), the large and influential organization of independent bookstores in the US and Canada. After explaining ourselves, they gave us a feed of their store data—thank you IndieBound! But we need to connect their data to our data, the venues in LibraryThing Local. Store names and addresses are seldom exactly the same.

We were able to connect 1,200 automatically, but another 1,300 bookstores need connecting. In some cases, a new LibraryThing venue has to be created.

How can you help? We need your help. We're programmers and librarians, and we don't have the manpower to tackle a job like this. And, frankly, we think others can do it better than us.

We've made a "Help Put IndieBound on LibraryThing" page. It shows all the IndieBound data on the left, and LibraryThing data on the right. A simple interface helps you match up the data, and connect it. You can also improve the data—adding pictures, phone numbers and etc. Everything you do will raise the profile of independent booksellers on LibraryThing. Needless to say, IndieBound is getting a feed back. What LibraryThing knows can, we think, help them too.

Here's a New Features' talk thread to ask questions, ask for help and etc.

The Amazon policy change, and how we're responding.

"Amazon Cardboard Boxes" by Flickr member Akira Ohgaki (Attribution 2.0 Generic)

Summary: Amazon is requiring us remove links to other booksellers on work pages. We're creating a new "Get it Now" page, with links to other booksellers, especially local bookstores and libraries, and a host of new features. Talk about it here.

The challenge. We're days away from releasing a series of changes to our book pages, both forced and intentional. Amazon is requiring all websites, as a condition of getting any data from them, to have the primary page link to Amazon alone. Links to other booksellers are prohibited. Secondary pages—pages you go to from the primary page—can have non-Amazon links.

Everyone at LibraryThing disagrees with this decision. LibraryThing is not a social cataloging and social networking site for Amazon customers but for book lovers. Most of us are Amazon customers on Tuesday, and buy from a local bookstore or get from a library on Wednesday and Thursday! We recognize Amazon's value, but we certainly value options.

Importanly, the decision is probably not even good for Amazon. Together with a new request-monitoring system, banning iPhone applications that use Amazon data, and much of their work on the Kindle, Amazon is retreating from its historic commitment to simplicity, flexibility and openness. They won through openness. Their data is all over the web, and with it millions of links to Amazon. They won't benefit from a retreat here.

But agree or not, we have to follow their terms. We thought long and hard about giving up Amazon data entirely, converting to library data only, in concert with a commercial provider, like Bowker or Ingram, and with help from publishers and members. Unlike our competitors, who are exclusively based on Amazon and who don't "catalog" so much as keep track of which Amazon items you have, that option is available to us. But we'd lose a lot, particularly book covers. Ultimately, we've decided the disadvantages outweigh the benefits.

The Response. Most of all, we think we've found a way to give Amazon what they require, and continue to provide members with options: We're going cut back our primary-page links to Amazon alone, and give people the best, most diverse secondary pages we can make. We are allowed to link to other booksellers, like IndieBound and Barnes and Noble on secondary pages, and we're going to do it far better than we ever have. We're going to take something away, but also make something better—something that goes way past what we did before, in features and in diversity of options.

The upcoming "Get it Now" page will go far beyond our current "Buy, borrow, swap" links, with a live new and used price-comparison engine, as well as sections for ebooks, audiobooks and swap sites. The page will be edition-aware, and draw on feeds or live data (so the links work). Many members have wanted live pricing data for the books they already own and these features can be used for that purpose too. We'll also be doing some stuff with libraries nobody else has, or can, do.

Key to the upcoming Get it Now page is a "Local" module, drawing on LibraryThing Local, showing all the libraries and bookstores near you. Where possible, this list will incorporate holdings data and links to buy—the sort of information you never get from a Google search on a book. If not, we'll give you their telephone numbers and show you where they are on a map. We'll make the page customizable, and let members add sources to it.

We think the new page will make a lot of members happy. For one thing, LibraryThing has never been about buying books, so having all these links on a separate page won't be a great loss. And if the new format doesn't make members happy, we'll listen, and together we can plan to take LibraryThing on a truly independent course.

Post your comment here, or come talk about this on Site Talk.

Tagmash, redux: Tim's favorite feature

Tagmash. I've redone, improved and expanded my favorite feature, tagmashing.

Introduced back in 2007, tagmashes, allow you to investigate what books satisfy two or more tags. It's a great way to find books of a clear type, but for which no single tag really works.

For example, no one has yet used the tag "vegetarian Indian cooking" and there's no Library of Congress Subject Heading for it either. But combine three tags, like vegetarian, India and cooking into the tagmash vegetarian, India, cooking and you get over 50 good matches.

Simple two-tag combination can work wonders:

biography, Kennedy music, science adventure, Alaska medieval, mystery

time travel, romance cats, humor children's, glbt Renaissance, historical fiction

Some of my favorites are off-beat: all those books about knitting for your dog and—shiver—knitting with dog hair can be found at knitting, pets. erotic, zombies is 80% Laurell K. Hamilton. And who can say no to humor, pirates? (Did you know that this Saturday is Talk like a Pirate Day? You will.)

On the serious end, fairly complex topics also work:

fiction, young adult, leukemia

France, wwii, nonfiction

You can also use - (minus) or -- (double minus) to mean "demote" or "remove" a tag. For example:

• politics, -United States Politics books, demoting books with "United States" tags
• politics, --United States Politics books, removing every book tagged "United States"

An important feature of tagmash is that it's not just a "search." Once created, tagmash pages stay there, and it enters the "swirl of relatedness." Somtimes a tag page will suggest the perfect tagmash. Other times, a tagmash will suggest an unconsidered subject.

New Feature: Tagmash overlap. I've added a new feature that, I think, brings tagmash to a new level—the tagmash overlap.

It works something like tag mirrors. Instead of showing you how you tag things, it shows how others tag your stuff. Except instead of showing you Individual tags, it finds tagmashes.

The results is, I think, a good list of topics you're interested in—topics more complex than a single tag can express. In my case, it surfaces topics like Macedonia, history, Greek, divination, Ottoman Empire, travel and erotic, poetry (!). Abby is apparently interested in adventure, surreal, English, death, love and—what a winner—evil, love.

You can find the feature from your profile statistics page. If you're signed in, this link will take you to yours.

What do you think? Comment here or come over to the New Features Talk thread.

September Early Reviewer books

The September 2009 batch of Early Reviewer books is up! We've got 59 books this month, and a grand total of 1310 copies to give out.

First, make sure to sign up for Early Reviewers. If you've already signed up, please check your mailing address and make sure it's correct.

Then request away! The list of available books is here:
http://www.librarything.com/er/list

The deadline to request a copy is Friday, September 25th at 6PM EST.

Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to the US, Canada, the UK, Israel, Australia, France, Germany, Denmark, European Union, Hong Kong, Iceland, India, Ireland, Isle of Man, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. Make sure to check the flags by each book to see if it can be sent to your country.


Thanks to all the publishers participating this month!

Bloomberg Press	Weiser Books	The Permanent Press
Bell Bridge Books	Tilbury House	Kensington Publishing
Dafina	Citadel Press	Bloomsbury
B&H Publishing Group	New York Review Books	St. Martin's Minotaur
Faith Words	Hachette Book Group	St. Martin's Griffin
Orca Book Publishers	Random House	BelleBooks
Picador	Gefen Publishing House	Bleak House Books
HighBridge	University of Wisconsin Press	Barbour Books
Osprey Publishing	Beach Books	Doubleday Books
Kiwi Publishing	Henry Holt and Company	How To Books
HarperCollins	Brandeis University Press	University Press of New England
Bascom Hill Books

Chapters/Indigo adds LibraryThing tags to store kiosks

Update: INDEX // mb just took another look at the Indigo Kisoks, concluding "The addition of the Library Thing tags make a heap of difference."

Chapters/Indigo, the largest Canadian bookseller, just rolled out thousands of brand new in-store kiosks. (See the mostly positive review at Index//mb). Among other things the new search is enhanced by LibraryThing tags. The tags aren't shown on the page, but they're helping drive better search results.

For example, a search for "medieval murder mystery" turns up appropriate books, starting with the Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael books.



We wish we could link to the system, but kiosks are in-store only. So, if you're in Canada, check it out. (And try big ones like "chick lit" or "steampunk" for us, will you?)

Other users of LibraryThing tags include Random House (example), AquaBrowser and the more than 150 public and academic libraries using LibraryThing for Libraries, from Seattle to Utrecht.

Luke's bookbuying spree

Hiring good employees is tough. So we try to sweeten the pot a bit. Last fall we offered $1,000 worth of books to anyone who could find us a good employee. Luke, genius that he is, "found" himself.

Voila Luke, holding his gift cards to Porter Square Books in Cambridge, MA. Ironically, by the time we got to cashing in his prize, Luke had moved on (a new company and a new state! Now he's conveniently located near to the fantastic Porter Square Books and, of course, me.)

The bookstore wasn't quite sure how to handle our request for a $1,000 gift card. Apparently they'd never done that before, and the system couldn't handle it. So Luke wound up with five $200 gift cards. All the better for sharing.

Flash-mob Cataloging Party: UIllinois prof's folktale collection

Once upon a time, this hearty group of library students from the University of Illinois (my alma mater) came together to finish up flash-mob cataloging the folktales collection of storytelling professor Dan Keding. They had started in the spring by cataloging 600 books, which was less than half the collection.

The final count was 1,413 books, which you can see in Dan's LibraryThing catalog here. Dan is also a LibraryThing author, with several folktale books of his own.

In addition to cataloging the collection, the mobbers added Mylar covers to the dust jackets. The books in the collection are available to students taking the storytelling course. See more photos of the flash mob here.

While getting my library science degree I took this class, and used books like these for finding stories to perform, as well as information about the history of various stories and storytelling. I'm happy students will have an even larger collection – as it turns out, finding stories you want to tell isn't as easy as you'd think.

Dan's guitar case now boasts a LibraryThing sticker. LibraryThing now boasts a new member with a large folktale collection. Students can now see the collection online. We all lived happily ever after.

Early Reviewers - September bonus batch

We have a small bonus batch of Early Reviewers up right now. The September bonus batch (hey, we're *almost* to September!) has only 25 copies of one book from Riverhead Books in it, but we think it's pretty fitting book for LibraryThing...

First, make sure to sign up for Early Reviewers. If you've already signed up, please check your mailing address and make sure it's correct.

Then request away! The list of available books is here:
http://www.librarything.com/er/list

The deadline to request a copy is Monday, September 7th at 6PM EST.

Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to the US only. Make sure to check the flags by each book to see if it can be sent to your country.

Author interviews - you ask the questions

Each month, we conduct a few exclusive interviews with authors and then publish the interviews in LibraryThing's monthly State of the Thing newsletter. We're going to try something new—crowdsourcing part of the interview, and using questions from members in addition to our own questions.

How it will work
I've created a group: Author Interviews - you ask the questions

In the forum for that group, there's a topic for each author I have lined up for an interview. Got questions? Ask them in the thread for that author. Then I'll pick my favorites and send them to the author along with my own questions. The author will answer everything, and we'll publish the interview both in the State of the Thing and on the author's page on LibraryThing.

To start with, I need questions for Audrey Niffenegger! Add your questions for Audrey here.

Looking for inspiration? Past interviewees include Elizabeth Strout, Lisa See, David Ebershoff, Ayelet Waldman and more...

And an added twist
While I do have a slew of authors slated for upcoming interviews, there are many more out there we'd love to have. So, you can also add your own thread for an author we haven't signed up for an interview yet. Make the author's name the subject line, followed by "wanted". For example, the subject could be:

Neil Gaiman (wanted)

Then add questions you have for that author. When we have a bunch of questions, I'll write the author/publicist/publisher, begging for an interview.

Questions? Know an author who might want to be interviewed? Email abbylibrarything.com

Author chats upgraded

Author chat gets a makeover! In one of his last projects before he leaves us (goodbye!), Luke gave author chats a facelift. Previously, you could only find out about author chats (current and upcoming) by going to the Author chat group.

We now have a module for the homepage, which shows current and upcoming chats (you can customize how many you want to view at once).

You'll also see links to current, past, and future chats on all the relevant author and book pages.

Hugos for two LT Authors!

The 2009 Hugo Awards (LT page) included awards for two LibraryThing authors—authors who are also members, and in this case ones with really serious LibraryThing collections!

• Elizabeth Bear—member matociquala , with 1001 books cataloged—won "Best Novelette" for her “Shoggoths in Bloom." Bear won "Best Short Story" in 2008 for "Tideline."
• John Klima—member johnklima, with 1,601 books cataloged—won "Best Fanzine" for his Electric Velocipede.

Congratulations to all the winners. The others include the social-media-savy Neil Gaiman, whose The Graveyard Book, won "Best Novel." We'll get him one day!

August Early Reviewer Books

The August 2009 batch of Early Reviewer books is up! We've got 64 books this month, and a grand total of 1,585 copies to give out.

First, make sure to sign up for Early Reviewers. If you've already signed up, please check your mailing address and make sure it's correct.

Then request away! The list of available books is here:
http://www.librarything.com/er/list

The deadline to request a copy is Wednesday, August 26th at 6PM EST.

Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to the US, Canada, the UK, Israel, Australia, France and Germany. Make sure to check the flags by each book to see if it can be sent to your country.

Thanks to all the publishers participating this month!

Knopf Canada	HarperCollins	B&H Publishing Group
Conari Press	Weiser Books	The Permanent Press
Scribner	New American Library	Scholastic
St. Martin's Griffin	South Dakota State Historical Society Press	McBooks Press
Seren	Barbour Books	Bloomsbury
Delacorte Press	St. Martin's Minotaur	The Overlook Press
Broadway Books	Dorchester Publishing	Picador
Tilbury House	Random House	Kensington Publishing
Souls of My Sisters	Citadel Press	Dafina
Other Press	New York Review Books	Minted Prose
The Little Bookroom	Aquila Polonica	W.W. Norton
Little, Brown and Company	Candlewick	Spiegel & Grau
Chin Music Press	Henry Holt and Company	Hyperion Books