Friday, July 23, 2010
LibraryThing
As I've been working on our book club web site, I've been exploring online book-related tools and resources. LibraryThing is one of my favorites.
At its core, LibraryThing is a digital card catalog for your library. You establish an account and then add your books to your virtual "bookshelves". It's easy to add books; you just start typing a title, and it'll bring up matching books that you select. These are really data files that include the book's ISBN number and other meta data. You can also pick from the cover images available. You can rate your books and write notes or reviews of them. LT analyzes your library and returns statistics about your books, such as the breakdown between male/female authors or living/dead authors, settings for your books, and awards won by your books.
LibraryThing also generates html code for widgets that display your books on websites or blogs. Here's an example:
But LibraryThing isn't simply a personal book database. It also aggregates book information across all its member accounts and facilitates online community. Here are a few examples of what you can do with LibraryThing:
At its core, LibraryThing is a digital card catalog for your library. You establish an account and then add your books to your virtual "bookshelves". It's easy to add books; you just start typing a title, and it'll bring up matching books that you select. These are really data files that include the book's ISBN number and other meta data. You can also pick from the cover images available. You can rate your books and write notes or reviews of them. LT analyzes your library and returns statistics about your books, such as the breakdown between male/female authors or living/dead authors, settings for your books, and awards won by your books.
LibraryThing also generates html code for widgets that display your books on websites or blogs. Here's an example:
But LibraryThing isn't simply a personal book database. It also aggregates book information across all its member accounts and facilitates online community. Here are a few examples of what you can do with LibraryThing:
- See community-wide ratings
- View other people's libraries
- Get suggestions from LT about other users with libraries similar to yours and then view their libraries
- Read others' reviews
- "Follow" or "friend" other members
- Get personalized reading recommendations generated by analyzing your taste
- Swap books with other members
- Get free copies of books from other members or from being an early reviewer
- Participate in online chats with authors
- Buy LT merchandise, such as the LibraryThong
- Public, shared “Work” pages, allow users to fill in info about book, like quotes, setting, characters, awards, descriptions
- See community-wide statistics for all the books on all member shelves, like word clouds showing where authors went to college and where they live
- See a feed of upcoming book-related events (e.g. signings, readings) in your geographic area
Amazon Associates Program
Blogger is offering a new feature in conjunction with Amazon. You can register your blog/site with Amazon to be an "Amazon Associate", whereby if your blog/site drives a customer to Amazon (via clickable cover images that are linked to Amazon) and results in a book sale, you get a little kickback.
Seemed completely harmless, so I signed my book club web site up to be an Amazon Associate. I figured that at worst, I'd have a license to the cover images (for absolute sure) and a super-easy way to add the images. Also, Amazon provides code for a nifty widget that shows 10 book covers in a rotatable carousel GUI, and I have been hunting for just that sort of thing for both our book club site and for SSJ but haven't been able to find one that I can make work. At best, our book club might make 30-40 cents a year in kickbacks; our book club tends more toward borrowing books from our libraries.
I got an email from Amazon yesterday (emphasis added):
Seemed completely harmless, so I signed my book club web site up to be an Amazon Associate. I figured that at worst, I'd have a license to the cover images (for absolute sure) and a super-easy way to add the images. Also, Amazon provides code for a nifty widget that shows 10 book covers in a rotatable carousel GUI, and I have been hunting for just that sort of thing for both our book club site and for SSJ but haven't been able to find one that I can make work. At best, our book club might make 30-40 cents a year in kickbacks; our book club tends more toward borrowing books from our libraries.
I got an email from Amazon yesterday (emphasis added):
Hello Associate,Oh, Amazon, you crack me up.
We noticed that you were accepted to the Amazon.com Associate Program several weeks ago but have yet to refer a sale.
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