Product Pipeline

Librarians have embraced LibraryThing [see “Chief Thingamabrarian,” LJ 1/07, p. 40], whether as a catalog for their personal collections, a collection development tool, an adornment to fancy up a blog or library web site, or even as a solid substitute for a traditional library catalog. The Librarians Who LibraryThing group has nearly 1500 members. LibraryThing has a number of up-and-coming competitors, including aNobii, Listal, AllConsuming, Shelfari, GuruLib, Squirl, and others.

LibraryThing is seen to be the most powerful of the book-sharing sites, which have also been called social media, social cataloging, social libraries, and content communities. It incorporates dozens of data sources to provide rich detail for its book records like MARC data, including Library of Congress (LC) subject headings (LCSH) and call numbers and author images.

Importing and exporting functionality is available for users wanting to backup their data or use multiple services. You can import data from Vox (a newer social networking site from Six Apart that combines blogging and networking with book, video, and photo sharing and cataloging) or from practically any other web site or file (Delicious Library , Listal , Amazon's wish lists, or even a spreadsheet) that has ISBN data.

Creating an account takes a few seconds at most since it only requires a user name and password—unusually simple for a sign-up process. To get started, search by title, author, or ISBN in Amazon, LC, or one of 60 other catalogs; select the appropriate book from the results and then it's part of your collection. If you are lucky enough to have a barcode scanner (you can buy a CueCat scanner from LibraryThing for $15), entering books is even easier. There is also a bookmarklet available for adding books directly from Amazon.

For each book, add your own tags (keywords), a personal review, ratings, and more. Your collection displays via a bookshelf-type feature where you can see all your book jackets or a browsable list that looks much like a library catalog.

LibraryThing is a highly social service: find similar users, join groups, subscribe to watch lists or RSS feeds of your favorite LibraryThing catalogers, discuss books, and comment on others' collections. To find book recommendations, browse through the popular tag cloud, search, or use the special recommendations feature, which helps find books either tagged similarly to the book(s) you've entered in your collection or that people with similar collections own or uses “special sauce” (its proprietary algorithm).

LibraryThing and Amazon book recommendations are listed for each title when available, giving you even more ways to find that next book to read or to buy for the library's collection.

In addition to personal and book-specific tag clouds and data, LibraryThing has a fun Zeitgeist page with statistics like most highly and poorly rated authors; largest collections; most popular authors, books, and tags; and the largest groups (Librarians Who LibraryThing is overwhelmingly the largest group). Additional features include blog widgets (book or tag displays with a number of options and a collection search), several application program interfaces (APIs), and the easy linking tool. The APIs are especially notable as they allow users to find all ISBNs associated with a particular title or ISBN, similar to OCLC's xISBN service. A lifetime account is $25, or free for 200 books or less.

aNobii has some interesting features. You can log when you've finished reading a book or track a borrowed book—record the date loaned and the “due” date and even send email reminders to your friend directly from aNobii. Since everyone has probably had a book go missing from their personal collection, this could be a very valuable feature.

GuruLib, which was designed to facilitate such sharing among friends, takes this a step further with a “borrowed” shelf view that will show you what you've borrowed and whether you're “overdue.” You can send friends a request to borrow something listed in their GuruLib, as well.

GuruLib is a free service that can check 530 library catalogs for data in addition to Amazon and import text and XML files with UPC or ISBN codes. Not only are books tracked in GuruLib but also movies, music, software, and games. For insurance purposes or maybe just bragging rights, GuruLib displays the monetary value of each user's collection, comparing each title to the new and used prices in Amazon. Prices for items are also tracked, so if you're waiting for the price of a DVD to drop on Amazon, you can set up a notification when your target price is reached. GuruLib is one of these tools (aNobii is another) that makes a wish list a major part of its services, though only if the material is in Amazon.

Like GuruLib, Listal is a multimedia sharing tool for book, movie, game, and music collections. Listal competes with LibraryThing in features though perhaps not in data quality or flexibility. Like aNobii and GuruLib, Listal includes a tracking feature of borrowed books. The Listal profile feature is similar to major social networking tools like Facebook and MySpace, allowing users to post information on favorite films, music, and interests; start and track discussion threads; and display collection statistics. Listal also has a number of Flash-based widgets for blogs and MySpace profiles; each widget is a morphing display of book jackets, movie posters, or album covers from your collections. In an interesting twist, Listal tries to encourage users to review items, create lists of favorites, and rate items by giving points to participants. Starting with 100 points, users can work their way up the ranks, tracking where they stand amongst Listal's other users.

All Consuming is a product developed by Robot Co-op, an Amazon company and the makers of 43 Things. Aptly named, All Consuming catalogs food in addition to other consumed products: books, movies, music, and practically anything else. It's more about recording when you've done what and what you should do next than about cataloging collections or tracking who's borrowed books. Built in is a “should” list where others can suggest what you should read, watch, eat, or listen to next. An active community contributes to these suggestions, making it another good place to find reviews and ideas.

Shelfari is a newer competitor in the social media arena for book collections. Its stylish and easy-to-use interface has already gained some fans, though it lacks several features like data exporting and groups. Blog and social networking widgets are available, with the bonus that you can use your own Amazon affiliate ID to capitalize on the widget's advertising potential. Shelfari allows users to create several lists (wish lists, Top 10 lists, and currently reading lists) using drag-and-drop Ajax technology, which Listal also provides.

Squirl is a quirky newcomer to the social media playground. It's designed to catalog hobby collections, whether it be of books, DVDs, record albums, comic books, antiques, trading cards, glass sculptures, or knickknacks. You can upload your own photos, add detailed descriptions and tags, and organize items into separate collections. The intent of Squirl is to allow passionate collectors to share their collections and find other collectors with whom to share. Browsing around Squirl shows off some of its advantages and disadvantages—the pop-up boxes that show item details are slick and useful, but the site is ad-heavy and sometimes cumbersome to navigate. Because Squirl is collection-centric, records for items don't show other users' data for the same item, which is less than helpful. A new site about words, Wordie has been built with Squirl.

For librarians: Along with cataloging and sharing our personal book collections, LibraryThing and its competitors offer a variety of tools to the professional librarian and to libraries. Small nonprofits like church libraries are already making use of LibraryThing to organize their collections. For-profit institutions can develop LibraryThing collections for $50/year. Other libraries are using LibraryThing to store lists of book reviews or recommended books, for collection development purposes, or to find book recommendations for patrons. These tools hold great promise since there are linked reviews, ratings, and automated recommendations on a collection and by book basis.

Libraries are already thinking of ways to integrate LibraryThing into their OPACs and other services. Christopher Kupec of the Chelmsford Public Library, MA, is planning to include barcodes on library checkout receipts so patrons can easily add their read books to LibraryThing or other personal library catalogs. Other library mashups are on the horizon; Tim Spalding, creator of LibraryThing, recently solicited libraries that use Innovative Interfaces to work with LibraryThing to mashup their OPACs. Libraries have been experimenting with including LibraryThing recommendations and more in their OPACs already. Other libraries still are using the blog widgets or RSS feeds from these services to add new book lists and recommended reading to their library web sites (see the Shenandoah Public Library web site, www.shenandoah.lib.ia.us), and many librarian blogs use the blog widgets to advertise their personal collections.

As iPods pervade more and more of our society, so has a wave of iPod accessories, add-ons, and products designed to take advantage of its ubiquitous stranglehold on youth culture. Though much of the entrepreneurial effort has gone to designing fancy iPod cases (Prada and Gucci, no less) and iPod-compatible stereo equipment, a few clever businesses have tried to tap into another market: iPod books.

We've all heard of audiobooks for the iPod; libraries were quick to embrace iPods and other MP3 players successfully for loaning audiobooks. The new wave of iPod books, on the other hand, are primarily text-based, using the Notes capabilities built into the newest generations of iPod. As such, these books are platform-dependent—but about 60 percent of American high school students own iPods, according to a recent Piper Jaffray survey, and since college students recently voted iPods cooler than beer, it seems that companies like iPREPpress needn't worry about a lack of audience, at least for now.

iPREPpress is the earliest of the iPod book publishers. Focusing on educational materials and test prep for high school and college-age students, it has put together a lengthy list of popular and useful titles by partnering with a number of traditional print-based publishers like SparkNotes and Merriam-Webster, iPREPpress has focused primarily on reference materials and books designed primarily to help students and others look up facts or study in an easy-to-use, quick format, not books that require more comprehensive reading. A Merriam-Webster dictionary and Encyclopaedia Brittanica iPod books are good examples—short entries with occasional links to images are perfect for fact-checking on the run.

The SparkNotes series, a Cliff Notes–esque set of study guides and charts, is one of the most popular items. The 26 literature-oriented titles include many of the major titles studied in high school or entry-level college courses, including Fahrenheit 451, Romeo & Juliet, Beowulf, and The Odyssey. Because these titles are more text-intensive, iPREPpress has spiced them up with audio files and interactive quizzes, harnessing the iPod's full capabilities to help students learn. There are also several charts available on science, math, and language topics.

The iPREPpress books work on third-generation or newer iPods. With the relatively small file size of these books (the 40,000-word Merriam-Webster dictionary uses only 3.3 MB, for example) and the increasingly large amount of storage space available on most iPods, adding a few books takes up negligible space—often less than one song. Navigation is simple; each resource is indexed, and the lengthier books, like the dictionary and encyclopedias, are broken down further into chunks, so there is never a huge amount of text on a single page. To look up “canasta” in the Sports and Entertainment section of Encyclopaedia Brittanica, click on Games, then “baccarat-riddle,” and then select “canasta.” Getting to the embedded audio and image files is equally easy—just click on its highlighted link.

Each title is competitively priced from $3.95 to $9.95—often cheaper than the print equivalent. iPREPpress makes several reference texts available free via its web site, including ten important government texts (the U.S. Constitution, for one) and a series of downloadable game rules—handy for settling arguments next time you play poker or bridge.

iPREPpress is not alone in the iPod book game; McGraw-Hill has recently announced a pilot project with the University of Wisconsin–Madison's already robust iTunesU service to make handy textbook extras available to students. Many textbook companies have given online access to extras as student incentives but were finding little success in this endeavor—students simply didn't use the service. McGraw-Hill hopes that by offering iPod downloadable extras, students will make more use of the multimedia and other special materials it has to offer. The SylviusVG Visual Glossary of Human Neuroanatomy, another successful iPod textbook, is already being used by students at Georgia College & State University, Milledgeville. The SylviusVG iPod edition, like iPREPpress's iPod books, combines text with images and audio to help students learn brain anatomy and vocabulary. The SylviusVG costs $9.99. Ambitious readers can use manybooks.net to download hundreds of public domain books (generally converted from Project Gutenberg text) onto their iPods.

The iPods Notes feature makes it relatively easy to add any kind of text reference to an iPod. Already, Wikipod offers a way to download large sections of Wikipedia to your iPod—up to 1000 Notes' worth. But the Wikipedia file size is not quite so negligible as a SparkNotes book; the complete Wikipedia registers at about 1.1 GB of text and is ever growing in size. But Wikipod lets you choose just how much room you want to take up and then proceeds to download links from a Wikipedia entry. Images aren't included, which helps keep file size smaller.

If you want to add custom text to your iPod, resources are available online to help. iPodLibrary is a freeware program (Windows only) that converts all types of ebook files (PDF, TXT, HTML, LIT) into iPod Notes. The iPod eBook Creator is an online utility for creating iPod Notes files from any uploaded text file. MAKE magazine reviews these and other tools in its online article “Make ebooks for your iPod!”

For librarians: For academic and school librarians, getting familiar with iPods and iPod technology is a must—iPods are too central to student life to ignore. Imagine library guides, policies, or even just information on library hours always accessible on student iPods. It's rumored that a wide-screen iPod is in the works, meaning that the iPod could become an even more viable ebook platform.