Talk:LibraryThing

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merging[edit]

I did search "LibraryThing" and got no hits, so I mistakenly believed there was no entry yet. I'm happy to see the two merged.

Eh, I think this should be merged into the other... though there isn't much to merge here. The name of the site is LibraryThing, not LibraryThing.com. Slashdot's article is not Slashdot.org, it's Slashdot. Sykil 13:01, 28 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that LibraryThing.com should be merged into LibraryThing. -timrem 20:28, 28 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Greetings! This used to be talk:LibraryThing.com, but now it has been moved to talk:LibraryThing, as was suggested above. --LA2 01:32, 11 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Blogs/forum paragraph[edit]

Re the (current) last sentence of the article – "Since the introduction of the forum section of the site, called "Talk," the previously very active LibraryThing Google Group has become deprecated" – I don't know anything about this subject so I can't be sure that 'deprecated' is the wrong word to use here, but it doesn't sound right to me.Russ London 10:14, 29 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

In the process of adding outside references to justify the article's existence, I fixed the language regarding the google groups a little. Argyriou (talk) 00:54, 1 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Google Group[edit]

Is the link dead http://groups.google.com/group/Librarything ? Doesn't google groups archive its groups? -- 172.181.250.238 18:07, 9 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

That group no longer exists. Issues are discussed on the groups pages and blogs at LT. --zenohockey 02:22, 14 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

LibraryThing down for protracted period[edit]

We're now in the fifth consecutive day of LibraryThing.com either misbehaving or being completely down. This is a level of non-availability at odds with its status as a chargeable service (for any member who wants to catalogue more than 200 books). I believe this article should make some reference to this. At the moment the article reads as if the site is being run with the same degree of professionalism as say, Amazon.com. Which it clearly isn't. Thegn 06:03, 13 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

We'll have to see if the period of unavailability remains verifiable after it's finished. If it receives, say, a post on the LibraryThing blog, I'd say it can be mentioned. Obviously, this would have to be in accordance with WP:NPOV. EALacey 06:42, 13 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Whilst there is no doubt that the site was down and had problems for much of the a protracted period. I am unsure as to why it should belong as it is not of long-term importance. Should any significant down-time for any other web service on wiki be recorded? I can think of at least one other site (optional payment for support) which had a protracted (over 2 day) downtime without trying hard. Will it matter it a month's time, 6 month's time, a year? Is the downtime notable enough or is it of temporary interest?


212.159.71.24 16:52, 18 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Sites in the "run by three guys in an office" bracket go down due to technical issues fairly often, in the grand scheme of things. Comparing it to amazon.com - which has a turnover with lots of zeroes in it, and an accordingly stupendous amount of technical staff - and expecting the same kind of responsiveness is a bit excessive.
There is nothing magical about a "chargeable service" that means downtime is in some way immoral - it's a bad thing, and one to be avoided, but it's a fact of life. Accidents happen. Even a passing mention of an outage, on the whole, is a silly idea; it gives it substantially more weight than it deserves, gives the impressin that we are somehow saying it's a vitally important thing that The Database Crashed That One Time. Shimgray | talk | 22:40, 18 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I agree, and am removing the downtime mention accordingly. Should LibraryThing continue to experience downtimes significantly longer and significantly more often than other, comparable sites, we can always revisit the issue. Michael Sidlofsky 20:38, 19 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I also agree with removing the downtime statement. We don't include every time the Cingular network stops working in the article on Cingular, or mention every blackout, unless it's particularly large and noteworthy. For users of LT right now, the downtime is notable. For everyone else, it's a non-issue. Αργυριου (talk) 21:43, 20 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I believe Wikipedia, like any encyclopedia, has an obligation to help readers identify the objects, entities, beliefs, theories etc that are likely to be long-lasting. If Wikipedia believed the lifespan of a Website was likely to be fleeting, then there would have to be strong reasons for referring to it. So I feel that Wikipedia's coverage of an online service gives a certain imprimatur to that service. I am particularly concerned that users may be assembling valuable bodies of work on a self-made wiki provided by one of the sites on Comparison of wiki farms, only to find suddenly that the site has been taken down ... permanently, without warning, and without having helped their users with back-up advice.
I believe Wikipedia has a certain responsibility to help readers distinguish the good from the bad, and with free Web 2.0 sites, that should mean distinguishing the well-supported from the poorly supported. If Wikipedia fails to mention the negative characteristics of a site, then it is shirking one of its responsibilities. Thegn 06:28, 25 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I disagree. Wikipedia is not a crystal ball - it's not our place here to say whether LibraryThing (or any other webiste) is likely to stick around or not. Wikipedia is also not a newspaper - while some current events are worth reporting, they are only worth reporting if a) there are outside independent sources reporting on the event, and b) if the current event indicates some major change in the subject of the article. If LT's downtime had been reported in some of the same sources which covered the launch or some milestone or another, then it might be worth covering in this article. Otherwise, not. Αργυριου (talk) 18:43, 25 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with Αργυριου. — Emiellaiendiay 19:50, 25 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I notice that when Tony Blair's 2003 trip to hospital over a heart condition gets a paragraph in Wikipedia. Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott also gets a paragraph for his June-2007 illness. In both instances, the UK government did not come to standstill. When LibraryThing.com site goes down, the whole operation (from a user viewpoint) grinds to a halt. I also notice that LibraryThing.com is down yet again, as I write. Thegn 07:27, 30 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Working for me currently. EALacey 08:04, 30 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia is not a soapbox. At the risk of not assuming good faith, I wonder whether there is a vested interest (say, a commercial/competitive one) in continuing to harp on this issue when the clear consensus (i.e. all but one person) is not to include such non-notable information. Please, just drop it. --Michael Sidlofsky 02:01, 2 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
A fair point, but my interest is not commercial. I am an occasional user of LibraryThing, but not a paid-up user. From a personal viewpoint, my principal concern is the continuing viability, not of LibraryThing.com, but of editthis.info, a Mediawiki-based site where I now have a large quantity of valuable data stored. I originally selected that site because of the recommendation in the Wikipedia article entitled Comparison of wiki farms. I think potential users deserve fair warning, otherwise Wikipedia bears some liability for not mentioning poor availiability, support, response times etc. I just want others to avoid making the same mistakes I have made. The 'list of features' of some of these sites reads like a sales catalogue on Wikipedia. Coverage of Websites is something that distinguishes Wikipedia from say, Britannica which, because of its relative sloth, is unlikely to cover any here-today-gone-tomorrow merchants. I think we need to be as objective as we can about Websites, which means covering their warts as well as their plus points. I have not asked how many of the contributors to the LibraryThing article are users of the site, but it would be possible to argue that they have an interest in the long-term survival of LibraryThing, and some would say this entails not listing its faults. It's very hard for any of us to be totally objective. Thegn 07:34, 2 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I think potential users deserve fair warning, otherwise Wikipedia bears some liability for not mentioning poor availiability, support, response times etc. Wikipedia is not a shopping guide - it has no responsibility to include detailed performance information on every single website or product is covers. User:Argyriou (talk) 21:53, 2 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
If we allow the entry on LibraryThing to include a list of all its positive features, but forbid any mention of its mis-steps, then we are infringing Wikipedia's NPOV, because we are aligning the article with Commercial interests. Thegn 07:12, 3 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I agree it shouldn't be included. "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia of everything" is a cliche, but it's true. (I should note here that my Firefox spell-checker suggested "cloche" in lieu of "cliche", in case one of its programmers happens to be reading this.) WP's value is attenuated significantly when an article devolves into a compilation of everyone's bitchings. A good criterion: If more than, say, one third-party source doesn't mention it, it's not significant enough to go in the article. (And in this specific case, how are we supposed to know when to take that paragraph out? Given that no one's written an article about LT's supposedly incessant downtime, I doubt anyone will write one saying, "I just realized: LT hasn't gone down in a while! Working great!") --zenohockey 04:09, 2 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

For comparison, the articles on Craigslist and Six Apart mention the recent outage (24 July 2007), but the articles on Typepad and LiveJournal don't. Argyriou (talk) 18:54, 26 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
It feels to me like outages are particularly relevant around they time they happen. As time goes by they lose importance. So we're not talking about the great Yahoo outage of 2005. Okay, I made that up, but if there was one, would any of us know or care? At the other end of the spectrum you have Friendster. They didn't have an outage, but their failure to scale right was a factor in their eclipse. 24.198.80.98

I think it important to mention (since the recent LibraryThing downtime has been discussed at such length) that the reason for some of the recent downtime was that there were some major updates to the site recently in the form of custom homepages for each user. while there was more downtime than usual leading up to the release of the homepages, it was a one-time thing and does not say anything about the dependability of the site at all other times. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.114.101.112 (talk) 06:25, 4 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Registered users ?[edit]

Does LibraryThing disclose figures about paying users ? If yes, it might be interesting to mention it. GL 12:01, 22 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

My rough calculation says at least five thousand or so must be paid users, as they have over 200 books :-) (taking the distribution of the top 500 and extrapolating backwards). I don't think any figures have been named, but you could always ask. Shimgray | talk | 01:01, 23 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from LibraryThing's founder[edit]

Obviously, I'm not going to get into changing substantive stuff here, but I thought I'd put my thoughts out there, in case someone wants to comment on them, or act on them.

  • To the above question, no, we don't disclose paying members. We disclose pretty much everything else, but not that. We statistically sample Shelfari, Goodreads, Anobii and so forth to figure out how they're growing. Someone could do that to us, if they cared.
  • Abe invested in May 2006, not June. See Abe's press release (http://www.abebooks.com/docs/CompanyInformation/PressRoom/library-thing.shtml). Citing a blurb from the Boston Globe is odd. Serious articles have been written on LibraryThing in newspapers and trade periodicals. That was a few column inches on a "what's happening" insert. (For press mentions, see http://www.librarything.com/press/)
  • Giving the importance of tagging, I would think a link to the tagging article would not be amiss.
  • The line "compared with social software such as the bookmark manager Del.icio.us,[2] the collaborative music service Last.fm,[3] and aNobii, another book cataloguing site.[4]" is really lopsided. Anobii is current number at best number 4 in the marketplace. LibraryThing is much more commonly compared to Shelfari and Goodreads. Anyway, the sentence mixes ideas. If the idea is to list real comparanda—things that do something different but *comparable*, it should stick to Delicious, Flickr, Last.fm and so forth. You can throw in other social catalogers like Squirl, WineLog, BoardGameGeek, etc. But if the idea is to mention some competitors, Anobii is an odd choice. Actually linking to an article about Anobii seems frankly promotional to me.
  • If you want to put competitors, it might be worth it to have a paragraph on the topic. I'd write it noting that there are more than 30 so far, but that the field has become increasingly hot, with Shelfari getting funded by Amazon, Goodreads doing well, some Facebook aps picking up, and so forth.
  • I think it's time to retire the mention of the Google group. It's been defunct for almost a year.
  • The "very short introduction" should say that it's by us, lest someone think it's an impartial thing.
  • In general, I think the page is very favorable to LibraryThing, maybe even over so, but it doesn't cover some of the most *interesting* things about the site, such as how it's inspired people in the library and information studies field. (I'd link to my talk at the Library of Congress.) A mention of our "LibraryThing for Libraries" product also seems consequential, as does our partnership with Random House. Since it's Wikipedia a link to how we parse Wikipedia looking for books, something nobody else has ever done, also would be cool.

Signed 24.198.80.98

-Wow. Catchy name I have! 24.198.80.98 -PS: Would it be wrong to post about this entry on LibraryThing, and ask people to come over and think about it? Obviously, I support everything Wikipedia stands for. If LT members said non-NPOV stuff, they should be stopped. 24.198.80.98 PPS: I am annoyed by the downtime statement, but it's probably fair to have. It's news. I regret that some of our competitors are not labeled as "perpetually slow." :)

The above has been posted by Tim Spalding. See also http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=17679. Noisy | Talk 18:48, 5 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

- I did the "easy" things, I'll leave it to someone else to add more than the May thingie, a link to press, etc. MikeBriggs 15:39, 28 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

- I agree that the unique reference to Anobii felt like advertising. I found a better, more neutral source that also included Shelfari, Goodreads, and BookJetty, which is missing a Wikipedia page. I also broke the sentence into two to clarify the Web 2.0 concept versus these other similar sites. Lost puppies (talk) 01:55, 15 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Beta[edit]

Does anyone know when LibraryThing is going to be done its beta run? It's been around for several years but it's still beta. Thanks Kristamaranatha (talk) 23:02, 4 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

"I plan to keep LT in beta forever. Beta means a license to explore and expand--a notice to the user that things may chance, and that's okay--and we have a lot of that left to do..." —Tim, January 13, 2007. --zenohockey (talk) 16:49, 5 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Removing international URLs[edit]

(Warning: I'm the founder of LibraryThing.) I think it was right to remove the gratuitous URLs to foreign versions of LibraryThing. But I think a case could be made to keep mention of some of the languages. It's interesting and unusual that LibraryThing has translations into Welsh, for example. Anyway, just a thought. Lectiodifficilior (talk) 04:35, 31 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Book reviews?[edit]

Do people post reviews of their books? If so, that should be mentioned. Right now, as an outsider, I have a hard time figuring out what the point of the site is. After all, I already know what books I have. AxelBoldt (talk) 18:02, 13 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If you know what books you have without looking to a resource, clearly you don't have enough books.
Seriously, though; some people have far too many books to know which ones they have. Between my wife, my daughter, and me, we have over two thousand books in our house (we need a bigger place). To really catalogue them, we need more than just our memory, especially since we don't have shelf space for all of them. Furthermore, LibraryThing has social networking resources focused on literary tastes, which is useful to the bibliophiles out there. And yes, people post reviews of their books.
*Septegram*Talk*Contributions* 12:15, 28 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Ownership changed[edit]

Hi. This is the founder of LibraryThing, Tim Spalding. A change needs to happen and I *clearly* can't be the person who does it. LibraryThing acquired a new minority partner, Cambridge Information Group (CIG), and distributor to libraries (Bowker). The move itself is, I think, interesting enough to make the page. But whether it is or not the ownership list and percents is now factually incorrect. It was 60/40 me, Abebooks. The new numbers are not disclosed, but it is disclosed that I still have the majority.

Here are some links:

Tim —Preceding unsigned comment added by Lectiodifficilior (talk • contribs) 18:40, 13 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Suggested Notable Features[edit]

I've just come to realize that this article does not mention this sites possibly unique feature - Early Reviewers. Publishers can list books that they are willing to give away in exchange for a review posted on LibraryThing. Both currently released and occasionally pre-release books are offered. These occur in monthly batches. Members select which books they would like to receive and then the LibraryThing system uses some dark magic (i.e. users book data) to see which members who requested a book are most likely to enjoy it. The winners address is then passed to the publisher who sends out the book. I can't think of any other company that does this. Yet I can't think of a neutral tone to include it in - perhaps someone else could?

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.146.139.199 (talk) 20:27, 31 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Monika Goliszek /Anabek Margaret swiete imiona Goliszek (talk) 08:56, 1 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Can you check out / give / lend books through LibraryThing?[edit]

If yes, say how.

If not, say not. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.165.11.228 (talk) 01:35, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified[edit]

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Jedes Leben zählt — Al″l life matters[edit]

based on an authorgallery at LibraryThing

hi! this wikidata query should list wikidata items for persons with a link from Wikidata to LibraryThing. at this point in time there are 13,172 links between wikidata and LibraryThing (both persons and organisations). there will be soon more informations at m:Meta:Jedes Leben zählt — All life matters.
regards and greetings from munich, germany
gangleri aka lery raynhart aka no bias — קיין אומוויסנדיק פּרעפֿערענצן — keyn umvisndik preferentsn talk contribs

First Book?[edit]

Nominally or otherwise, what was the first book cataloged? kencf0618 (talk) 13:29, 31 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The first book was: https://librarything.com/work/book/1 (the book was deleted, but it was part of that work)
The first work number is: https://librarything.com/work/1 (the work has since been aliased; works were added much later, so it was just the first NUMBER, not the first work.) 67.244.32.133 (talk) 20:20, 31 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
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