8 ms·

LibraryThing Is Now Free to All

395 points by user_235711 7y ago

raybb 7y ago
I've been using Goodreads for years and am kinda tired of the UX (in particular not being able to access private notes on mobile) but this doesn't look too much better. For those curious here's decent youtube video giving an overview of LibraryThing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuYOcRiXLcU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuYOcRiXLcU
- gman83 7y ago
  Pretty happy with Goodreads except that the search functionality sucks. Would like something like this: https://www.imdb.com/search/title/ https://www.imdb.com/search/title/ Where I can search for a novel in a certain genre from a certain publication date with a certain rating from at least x users. Nothing like that seems to exist for Goodreads.
pmcjones 7y ago
I've been a happy LibraryThing user since since 2006.
- hownottowrite 7y ago
  Me too!
- bakul 7y ago
  Ditto. [We seem to have about 10% of our listed books in common!]
- jcrben 7y ago
  Reporting in.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  Me too. (Even if I've fallen way off in week-to-week usage over the years because of the luring convenience of ebooks. I know, I feel guilty about it too.)
labratmatt 7y ago
Long live LibraryThing! Cool service and cool library people.
colordrops 7y ago
Speaking of cataloging, my children and I have been spending time identifying and cataloging the collection of minerals we've acquired over the years. I've found an amazing app, Memento Database, that has great UX, very customizable collection fields, and lots of functionality, including gsheets export and built-in cloud sync and sharing. I'm sure it works for books as well.
wgyn 7y ago
I've used LibraryThing since my senior year of high school and have always loved it. As others have noted, unlike Goodreads, LibraryThing isn't a social network. I'm an obsessive about what books I own, how to categorize them, where/when I bought them, where/when I read them. I don't care for my friends to know what I've been up to and I don't need their recommendations (at least not through the web). As an aside, I vaguely recall that at some point their memberships were pay-what-you-can. Super curious what the distribution of payments looked like.
crazygringo 7y ago
Google Trends shows that GoodReads seems to get at least 100x the popularity LibraryThing does. Both sites were founded around 15 years ago. But they're both still going. (GoodReads, of course, now being owned by Amazon.) Which seems like a pretty unusual situation to me -- can't think of too many parallels where the extreme underdog doesn't either a) just call it quits or b) keeps innovating until they get some kind of "reasonable" market share, whether that's 10% or 30% or 50% or 80%. Above all in a social network. (A big value of GoodReads for me is seeing my friend's books and activity too. As much as I'd be curious to try LibraryThing, I don't think any of my friends have even heard of it.) I'm quite curious how LibraryThing has managed to keep going despite such a tiny userbase, comparatively? I'm genuinely impressed.
- djmips 7y ago
  Maybe it's a labor of love and doesn't have shareholders who want big returns.
  - beatgammit 7y ago
    Yeah, and running something like LibraryThing would be quite inexpensive. It doesn't need a lot of updates, there would be minimal problems if a data leak happened (it's fairly open anyway AFAIK), and book cataloging is very light on resources. You could probably get away with a single developer dedicating a handful of hours in a given week, probably less, and hosting would be in the noise as well.
- imgabe 7y ago
  From what they said in the announcement they are able to get a lot of revenue from selling cataloguing software to libraries. Sounds like a different use case than GoodReads.
- karaterobot 7y ago
  They have a very small staff, and the website isn't their main source of income. A few years ago they spun off two other SaaS products for libraries, and that's what mostly pays the bills. The data from LibraryThing powers book recommendations for libraries and other metadata for a lot of libraries, and they also sell a very low-cost cataloging system targeted at small libraries. I switched to LT from GoodReads a few years ago, and really prefer it.
anvarik 7y ago
I dont get it, isn't this a service similar to Goodreads? Why was it not free? Or what they were charging for? I have never used it can someone please explain what are pros/cons compared to Goodreads?
fvt 7y ago
I had no idea this existed but seems useful. Took a quick look at the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Notable gotcha: kids under 16 (in the EU, 13 elsewhere) are prohibited from using this. (Also, it says "Au revoir mes petits choux!", and I think it's funny.)
ztarven 7y ago
Awesome. I love LibraryThing. It's one of my inspirations for creating rate.house.
longtermd 7y ago
Not working for Adidas at German exchanges :/ http://stockjump.sos.gd/?symbol=ADS1.F&currency=EUR&name=ADIDAS%20AG/S%20ADR http://stockjump.sos.gd/?symbol=ADS1.F&currency=EUR&name=ADI...
- ComputerGuru 7y ago
  Wrong thread.
Sorion 7y ago
Longtime LT user here. It is primarily a cataloging service. Catalogue your library and make it easily searchable and organizable with extensive tagging. They previously charged for logging more then 200 books in a year I believe. The real highlight of the LT service is the forums. There are forums for almost every reading genre and specialty book collecting genre. Some of the most knowledgeable people about books reside in those forums. How did LT survive? Because it and Goodreads are inherently different services. Someone else described their usage of it and the differences between them perfectly when they said that they keep track of what they have read in Goodreads and what they own in LT. Plus LT has forums as I said and Goodreads cannot compare with their commenting system and the communities created in LT.
- irrational 7y ago
  I own thousands of books. I think I'd rather read more books than catalog what I own ;-) Too bad this didn't exist decades ago.
  - oska 7y ago
    With a barcode scanner it shouldn't take you long to catalogue even thousands of books (disregarding the pre-barcode ones).
    - hanche 7y ago
      The barcode on paperbacks is usually UPC, not ISBN (unless it has changed in recent years). And therein lies a big problem: UPCs get recycled. I was bitten by this when I scanned a bunch of old Sci-Fi books, only to discover that totally different titles got assigned to those UPCs later.
      - stevekemp 7y ago
        By coincidence yesterday evening I decided to start scanning my books with an Android application I'd come across during random surfing. I figured if I picked a bookshelf at random and could enter all the books without a problem I'd do the whole house. As it turned out a random bookshelf had about 60% success rate. I knew that I have some books without ISBN entries, and some that have got barcodes covered in stickers, etc, but I didn't expect it to be such a hard job. I guess every decade or two I try auditing books and I never get very far. I should just pay a student to enter them into an online CRUD application and be done with it..
PeterStuer 7y ago
I registered an account in 2009 and started adding my books. Ran into the free account limit, and gave up. I'd like to take it up again, but I have long since forgotten that password and can't seem to find any way to do a password reset. Anyone that knows a way to do it your help will be greatly appreciated.
- gravitas 7y ago
  Here you go: https://www.librarything.com/lost_something.php https://www.librarything.com/lost_something.php
  - PeterStuer 7y ago
    worked like a charm. Great thx!
jively 7y ago
Been using LT for a year now for my 500+ collection, I also use TinyCat because I like to be able to search and catalogue them. There's nothing out there that compares IMO especially considering it's practically free. Really really amazing service that I hope stays alive.
wnscooke 7y ago
It is really too bad it doesn’t include the ability to read said catalogued books. That said, I wonder the catalogue could be exportable to a web-based option like omega.org, which is self hosted.
alphadevx 7y ago
LibraryThing is used by fine press book collectors to discuss the physical properties of fine editions from for example The Folio Society, Easton Press, Centipede Press etc. The forums will discuss in length for example expensive limited editions, the bindings, choices of paper etc. It really is a different audience to Goodreads, which is more focused on reviewing the content of books rather than the bindings. If you love fine books and supporting small independent publishers, LibraryThing is an amazing niche community.
dmos62 7y ago
This is awesome! I just started browsing LT, and it has the feel of Hacker News for books. I have tried multiple times to get into using Goodreads but it just didn't work out, for whatever reason.
- alecjstewart 7y ago
  I'm in the exact same boat. Goodreads has always felt...clunky to me. This is the first I've heard of LibraryThing, so I'm excited to try it out!
rodolphoarruda 7y ago
Thanks for sharing this. I just signed-up for the service right now and began cataloging my books (around 1300), a cool thing to do during my family's quarantine period.
charliepark 7y ago
I'm looking for a solution to a problem, and I don't think Library Thing is quite it (or maybe it is?), but I figure the folks in this conversation will have some suggestions on how to move forward on it. My dad has over 10,000 books. He's a retired professor, and he just … loves books. He's older, and is trying to figure out what to do with his books. Most of them aren't in great shape, so most general-purpose libraries aren't interested. The topics span just about every topic you could think of — philosophy, watercolor technique, Civil War history, chess strategy, ethics, business, fiction — so it's not like there's a topic-specific library or school that would be interested in them. He'd love to get them to people who will really find value in them, whether that's through a donation or through selling them, but he's not extremely tech-savvy, and he lives across the country from me, so my ability to help coordinate is fairly limited. I thought perhaps some sort of "catalog them, then send to Amazon to sell on the secondary market" approach might work, but that could also be a disaster. Any ideas? Have any of you handled something similar?
- aezell 7y ago
  I think your best bet is to catalog them (using LT if you like) and try to sell them as a single collection. If there are any that you identify as particular powerful, maybe sell them separately. What's going to kill you is the shipping for a single collection. Maybe offer a discount for a local sale and pick up.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  The first step does sound like "catalog them", and LibraryThing is a great tool for that (especially now with the expanded free access they just announced here). The LibraryThing iOS/Android app includes a bar code scanner to help. LibraryThing's forums are also where I'd start to ask the hard questions of what to do with the collection. Especially once it is cataloged you could get a ton of good opinions in the LT forums on which books might have value where. A lot of small and niche libraries already use LibraryThing for their operations and you might be surprised who you network with once the overall collection is cataloged.
  - charliepark 7y ago

395 points by user_235711 7y ago

I've been using Goodreads for years and am kinda tired of the UX (in particular not being able to access private notes on mobile) but this doesn't look too much better. For those curious here's decent youtube video giving an overview of LibraryThing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuYOcRiXLcU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuYOcRiXLcU

gman83 7y ago
Pretty happy with Goodreads except that the search functionality sucks. Would like something like this: https://www.imdb.com/search/title/ https://www.imdb.com/search/title/ Where I can search for a novel in a certain genre from a certain publication date with a certain rating from at least x users. Nothing like that seems to exist for Goodreads.

pmcjones 7y ago

I've been a happy LibraryThing user since since 2006.

hownottowrite 7y ago
Me too!
bakul 7y ago
Ditto. [We seem to have about 10% of our listed books in common!]
jcrben 7y ago
Reporting in.
WorldMaker 7y ago
Me too. (Even if I've fallen way off in week-to-week usage over the years because of the luring convenience of ebooks. I know, I feel guilty about it too.)

labratmatt 7y ago

Long live LibraryThing! Cool service and cool library people.

colordrops 7y ago

Speaking of cataloging, my children and I have been spending time identifying and cataloging the collection of minerals we've acquired over the years. I've found an amazing app, Memento Database, that has great UX, very customizable collection fields, and lots of functionality, including gsheets export and built-in cloud sync and sharing. I'm sure it works for books as well.

wgyn 7y ago

I've used LibraryThing since my senior year of high school and have always loved it. As others have noted, unlike Goodreads, LibraryThing isn't a social network. I'm an obsessive about what books I own, how to categorize them, where/when I bought them, where/when I read them. I don't care for my friends to know what I've been up to and I don't need their recommendations (at least not through the web). As an aside, I vaguely recall that at some point their memberships were pay-what-you-can. Super curious what the distribution of payments looked like.

crazygringo 7y ago

Google Trends shows that GoodReads seems to get at least 100x the popularity LibraryThing does. Both sites were founded around 15 years ago. But they're both still going. (GoodReads, of course, now being owned by Amazon.) Which seems like a pretty unusual situation to me -- can't think of too many parallels where the extreme underdog doesn't either a) just call it quits or b) keeps innovating until they get some kind of "reasonable" market share, whether that's 10% or 30% or 50% or 80%. Above all in a social network. (A big value of GoodReads for me is seeing my friend's books and activity too. As much as I'd be curious to try LibraryThing, I don't think any of my friends have even heard of it.) I'm quite curious how LibraryThing has managed to keep going despite such a tiny userbase, comparatively? I'm genuinely impressed.

djmips 7y ago
Maybe it's a labor of love and doesn't have shareholders who want big returns.
- beatgammit 7y ago
  Yeah, and running something like LibraryThing would be quite inexpensive. It doesn't need a lot of updates, there would be minimal problems if a data leak happened (it's fairly open anyway AFAIK), and book cataloging is very light on resources. You could probably get away with a single developer dedicating a handful of hours in a given week, probably less, and hosting would be in the noise as well.
imgabe 7y ago
From what they said in the announcement they are able to get a lot of revenue from selling cataloguing software to libraries. Sounds like a different use case than GoodReads.
karaterobot 7y ago
They have a very small staff, and the website isn't their main source of income. A few years ago they spun off two other SaaS products for libraries, and that's what mostly pays the bills. The data from LibraryThing powers book recommendations for libraries and other metadata for a lot of libraries, and they also sell a very low-cost cataloging system targeted at small libraries. I switched to LT from GoodReads a few years ago, and really prefer it.

anvarik 7y ago

I dont get it, isn't this a service similar to Goodreads? Why was it not free? Or what they were charging for? I have never used it can someone please explain what are pros/cons compared to Goodreads?

fvt 7y ago

I had no idea this existed but seems useful. Took a quick look at the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Notable gotcha: kids under 16 (in the EU, 13 elsewhere) are prohibited from using this. (Also, it says "Au revoir mes petits choux!", and I think it's funny.)

ztarven 7y ago

Awesome. I love LibraryThing. It's one of my inspirations for creating rate.house.

longtermd 7y ago

Not working for Adidas at German exchanges :/ http://stockjump.sos.gd/?symbol=ADS1.F&currency=EUR&name=ADIDAS%20AG/S%20ADR http://stockjump.sos.gd/?symbol=ADS1.F&currency=EUR&name=ADI...

ComputerGuru 7y ago
Wrong thread.

Sorion 7y ago

Longtime LT user here. It is primarily a cataloging service. Catalogue your library and make it easily searchable and organizable with extensive tagging. They previously charged for logging more then 200 books in a year I believe. The real highlight of the LT service is the forums. There are forums for almost every reading genre and specialty book collecting genre. Some of the most knowledgeable people about books reside in those forums. How did LT survive? Because it and Goodreads are inherently different services. Someone else described their usage of it and the differences between them perfectly when they said that they keep track of what they have read in Goodreads and what they own in LT. Plus LT has forums as I said and Goodreads cannot compare with their commenting system and the communities created in LT.

irrational 7y ago
I own thousands of books. I think I'd rather read more books than catalog what I own ;-) Too bad this didn't exist decades ago.
- oska 7y ago
  With a barcode scanner it shouldn't take you long to catalogue even thousands of books (disregarding the pre-barcode ones).
  - hanche 7y ago
    The barcode on paperbacks is usually UPC, not ISBN (unless it has changed in recent years). And therein lies a big problem: UPCs get recycled. I was bitten by this when I scanned a bunch of old Sci-Fi books, only to discover that totally different titles got assigned to those UPCs later.
    - stevekemp 7y ago
      By coincidence yesterday evening I decided to start scanning my books with an Android application I'd come across during random surfing. I figured if I picked a bookshelf at random and could enter all the books without a problem I'd do the whole house. As it turned out a random bookshelf had about 60% success rate. I knew that I have some books without ISBN entries, and some that have got barcodes covered in stickers, etc, but I didn't expect it to be such a hard job. I guess every decade or two I try auditing books and I never get very far. I should just pay a student to enter them into an online CRUD application and be done with it..

PeterStuer 7y ago

I registered an account in 2009 and started adding my books. Ran into the free account limit, and gave up. I'd like to take it up again, but I have long since forgotten that password and can't seem to find any way to do a password reset. Anyone that knows a way to do it your help will be greatly appreciated.

gravitas 7y ago
Here you go: https://www.librarything.com/lost_something.php https://www.librarything.com/lost_something.php
- PeterStuer 7y ago
  worked like a charm. Great thx!

jively 7y ago

Been using LT for a year now for my 500+ collection, I also use TinyCat because I like to be able to search and catalogue them. There's nothing out there that compares IMO especially considering it's practically free. Really really amazing service that I hope stays alive.

wnscooke 7y ago

It is really too bad it doesn’t include the ability to read said catalogued books. That said, I wonder the catalogue could be exportable to a web-based option like omega.org, which is self hosted.

alphadevx 7y ago

LibraryThing is used by fine press book collectors to discuss the physical properties of fine editions from for example The Folio Society, Easton Press, Centipede Press etc. The forums will discuss in length for example expensive limited editions, the bindings, choices of paper etc. It really is a different audience to Goodreads, which is more focused on reviewing the content of books rather than the bindings. If you love fine books and supporting small independent publishers, LibraryThing is an amazing niche community.

dmos62 7y ago

This is awesome! I just started browsing LT, and it has the feel of Hacker News for books. I have tried multiple times to get into using Goodreads but it just didn't work out, for whatever reason.

alecjstewart 7y ago
I'm in the exact same boat. Goodreads has always felt...clunky to me. This is the first I've heard of LibraryThing, so I'm excited to try it out!

rodolphoarruda 7y ago

Thanks for sharing this. I just signed-up for the service right now and began cataloging my books (around 1300), a cool thing to do during my family's quarantine period.

charliepark 7y ago

I'm looking for a solution to a problem, and I don't think Library Thing is quite it (or maybe it is?), but I figure the folks in this conversation will have some suggestions on how to move forward on it. My dad has over 10,000 books. He's a retired professor, and he just … loves books. He's older, and is trying to figure out what to do with his books. Most of them aren't in great shape, so most general-purpose libraries aren't interested. The topics span just about every topic you could think of — philosophy, watercolor technique, Civil War history, chess strategy, ethics, business, fiction — so it's not like there's a topic-specific library or school that would be interested in them. He'd love to get them to people who will really find value in them, whether that's through a donation or through selling them, but he's not extremely tech-savvy, and he lives across the country from me, so my ability to help coordinate is fairly limited. I thought perhaps some sort of "catalog them, then send to Amazon to sell on the secondary market" approach might work, but that could also be a disaster. Any ideas? Have any of you handled something similar?

aezell 7y ago
I think your best bet is to catalog them (using LT if you like) and try to sell them as a single collection. If there are any that you identify as particular powerful, maybe sell them separately. What's going to kill you is the shipping for a single collection. Maybe offer a discount for a local sale and pick up.
WorldMaker 7y ago
The first step does sound like "catalog them", and LibraryThing is a great tool for that (especially now with the expanded free access they just announced here). The LibraryThing iOS/Android app includes a bar code scanner to help. LibraryThing's forums are also where I'd start to ask the hard questions of what to do with the collection. Especially once it is cataloged you could get a ton of good opinions in the LT forums on which books might have value where. A lot of small and niche libraries already use LibraryThing for their operations and you might be surprised who you network with once the overall collection is cataloged.
- charliepark 7y ago