Tag Archives: LibraryThing

The Equivoque Principle arrives on my desk: I’m pretty excited

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Eoin Purcell

So I spilled the cash for The Friday Project’s tasty looking special edition of The Equivoque Principle and boy does it look sweet. I cobbled together a few pictures into a little video:

Sorry about the naff music, I’m still learning with these slideshows and what not!
Next time I’ll get it right!

I’ll have to hold off reading it for a bit. It is not just the huge TBR Pile:

tbrlefthand.jpg

But also as Penguin have kindly reminded me that I was sent The Waves SIX MONTHS AGO and need to get my skates on! Opps!

Worried and sorry, is it really six months already!
Eoin

Time for a book buying ban & LibraryThing’s new work pages

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Eoin Purcell

Nothing too drastic for everyone else
But for me it is time to stop buying! After a tidying weekend I realised I had this TBR pile just at home:
Books overload

I liberated a new bookshelf for my massively expanded Cork Library too with the result that several TBR piles came into a single location with the below result:
More TBR books

So sadly (and with the exception of the soon to arrive pile from The Book Depository) I must hold off on book buying for now!

LibraryThing
Came out with a new works page today/last night and I have yet to decide on it. I think I like it but I am not sure. It has a few tweaks yet to come so I’ll hold judgment just yet. Good chat as always on the talk page referencing the change.

Thank you BBC4 for replaying House of Cards which is really very excellent and Rilo Kiley for this album which is great.
Eoin

Clever LibraryThing

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Eoin Purcell

Robert Jordan RIP

This is remarkably clever
LibraryThing have responded to Google’s My Library effort with this:

Google Book Search Search is a bookmarklet that searches Google Book Search for the titles in your LibraryThing library. It works not unlike the famous SETI@Home project. You set it up and searches Google Book Search slowly in the background.* You can watch, do something in another window or go out for coffee.

When it’s done you can link to and search all the books in your library that Google has scanned. You’ll find a “search this book” link on work pages, and a Google Book Search field to add to the list view in your catalog.

What it does is simply co-opt Google’s ability to display text with very little effort. It also sheds some light on what Google Book Search actually has on file already. Although many of my books are non -preview ones, a few are full access and more snippet access.

In doing this it makes the two sites partners in data sharing and books on the web. It adds value to LibraryThing and to the work Google is doing. It is a great step towards breaking down the silos of information that seem tpo be building up around books on the web.

Really pleased by the LibraryThing news, saddened by the Jordan news!
Eoin

LibraryThing’s Tag Mirror

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Eoin Purcell

Simply described as: Tag Mirror: What LibraryThing thinks eoinpurcell is interested in this is a pretty impressive feature and one that is of enormous use to just about everyone from publishers to readers.
Check out my Tag Mirror here

There is much more in Tim’s blog post here:

Tag Mirror “holds a mirror” up to your books and to you. Instead of showing what you think about your books—what a regular tag cloud shows—it shows you what others think of them, in effect using LibraryThing’s twenty-two million tags to organize and surface interesting topics from within your own collection.** As with other tag clouds, size equals importance. When you click on a tag, you get a relevancy-ranked list of books tagged that way.

Tagtastic?
Eoin

The Book Depository & BibDib

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Eoin Purcell

The Book Depository Updated
Its site today and it does look prettier and smoother to use. Which makes me happy as the Book Depository has become my bookshop of choice. One of the best things about the book depository is Mark Thwaite’s blog, Editor’s Corner. Mark writes great stuff and you should read it if you have any interest in books, publishing and technology.

Hidden in the Press Release
But alongside the announcement of the improved site was this gem:

“In the coming months, further enhancements to bookdepository.co.uk will go live. In the background, we are also working on a number of other fascinating projects. Personally, I’m tremendously excited about a huge Web 2.0 project we are building called BibDib [url still directs to the Book Depository homepage].

BibDib will be a massive online bibliographic database that contains information about all the world’s books AND all the writing about those books! It is a huge, and ambitious, project and one that the team here at The Book Depository is in a superb place to deliver.”

Mark described it as:

very, very editable and addable and Web 2.0-tastic!! Think world’s biggest bibliographic database meets wikipedia meets IMDB.com …

Now if you are not excited by that then I don’t know what will work! Looking forward very much to seeing what come of this. Perhaps a rival to LibraryThing for my attention?

Very Facebook’d and Stumble’d Upon today (Welcome Stumblers)
Eoin