On a related BTBA note, here’s the display that Jeff Waxman set up at 57th Street Bookstore in Chicago:

If you’ve never been to the (57th, Newberry Library, and Seminary Co-op are all part of the same co-op), you’re missing out on one of the absolute best indie stores in the country. Really is the prototypical university/literary bookshop. Absolutely packed with great books that you’ll probably never see in another store (there is no fluff here), and has that indescribable bookstore allure. (Helps that it’s in a cave-like space within the seminary. So very cool.)

If you’re ever in Chicago, it’s definitely worth swinging by.

Each book page now has a little bar that, after clicking, will predict whether or not you’d like a particular book. How does it work?

How it works. In case you’re interested, it works completely apart from our book-to-book recommendation system, or the system that aggregates those recommendations into member-specific lists of 1,000 recommended books. Instead, “Will you like it?” works directly from the data, examining the users who have a book and how their books relate to yours.

As such, it isn’t very good at sussing out where your tastes differ from those of people who share your books. For example, my large collection of books on Greek history match me up with people who enjoy other ancient history, but I am not that interested in early Republican Rome, no matter what the algorithm thinks.

Even though it’s not perfect, this is pretty fun to play around with. (Yet another prompting that I really need to add books from my library to my LibraryThing profile . . . )

The philosophy behind the creation of this algorithm is pretty interesting as well:

I think this is yet another case of Amazon limiting the horizons of what people imagine online, particularly in the online book world. Amazon pioneered book-to-book and user-to-book reviews. The work was groundbreaking but it was also routed in commercial success. User-to-book recommendations drive customers to books they’ll like and book-to-book recommendations help them find the perfect book, as well as increase the number of items in each order. Giving people honest assessments of whether they’ll like a book is murkier. Does Amazon want to tell a customer they won’t enjoy something? And what if they’re wrong?

Meanwhile, LibraryThing succeeds by being fun and interesting, not by selling books. It gives us a rare freedom to invent features that don’t sell books, like our — what books will you hate? — and now this.

(The “Unsuggester” is awesome. I love the example at the top of the page: If you like Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, you will not like Confessions of a Shopaholic. Never has a truer non-recommendation been spoken.)

The idea is simple. Pay $25. You play Santa to a random LibraryThing member, and find them up $20 worth of books, based on their library or a short description. Someone else does the same to you. LibraryThing orders the books and pays the shipping, so no addresses are exchanged and no members are stalked!

For LT members, here’s the

In itself, maybe the WikiThing site isn’t that interesting for you, unless you’re into LibraryThing. However, there are a few user-generated pages on the wiki that are pretty cool even if you’re not into LibraryThing: , which “works to enter the libraries of famous dead people as LibraryThing catalogs”, and includes the libraries of and , among others; and the page, which links to more Literary Awards than anyone needs to know about.

A year ago we had just hit five million books on our birthday, today we’re just a few hours away from 18 million books.

We have 261,481 registered members. If we were a city, we’d be the 68th largest in the United States (Wikipedia), just above Plano, TX.

Nine libraries have signed up for LibraryThing for Libraries. Five have gone live with it. The first nine LTFL customers have uploaded over 1.75 million books.

Also included is some info about what’s available on LibraryThing:

Connection News lets you see what books your friends have recently added, rated, or reviewed.

LibraryThing integrates with ten separate book swapping sites all over the world, so you can see at a glance which books are available or wanted, and move them back and forth. Check out the Swapping FAQ.